The most tasteless and insensitive museum exhibit ever.

[Agathon]

How stupid is this?

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/com...55E663,00.html

[Brundlefly]

Yeah that is rather insensitive, but I think this one might be more tastless and insensitive.

Hitler praying

[Agathon]

All they needed to do was make some mention of the civilian victims - but there is nothing. The US is supposed to be a friend of Japan.

[Jac de Molay]

Weapons of war have always been glamorized. Heck, that's the History Channel's bread and butter.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Jac de Molay
Weapons of war have always been glamorized. Heck, that's the History Channel's bread and butter.

I agree and while that may be disturbing, it's not such a big deal. This is like the Brits displaying a Lancaster and noting that it was used over Dresden without further comment, or the Japanese showing off an artillery piece that was used at Nangking.

Hiroshima is the supreme horror of the modern age, to soften it in any way is akin to denying the holocaust - whatever one thinks of the rightness of the attack.

[Skanky Burns]

I would like to see it.

But they should at least attempt to tell the full story.

[Tripledoc]

Originally posted by bfg9000
Yeah that is rather insensitive, but I think this one might be more tastless and insensitive.

Hitler praying

What exactly is tasteless and insensitive here?

[SlowwHand]

How so, Agathon?
There are memorial museums for holocaust victims and all else.
What about the U.S.S. Arizona?

[MrFun]

Museums that are REALLY tasteless -- those that put on display the "Lost Cause" as being historically accurate.

[SlowwHand]

You never stop, do you?

[Kropotkin]

I'm not at all disturbed by the exihibit itself, some of the visitors seems to be quite tasteless and insensitive in my humble opinion. ****ing moron, like any (with the possible existance of a few exceptions) of the civilians victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had anything to do with Perl Harbor or the Nanjing massacre. Why is it so damn hard for some people to tell the difference between individual civilians and the acts of governments and armies? ****ing ****ers I say.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
You never stop, do you?

That's right, because I am UNSTOPPABLE!

[SlowwHand]

Kropotkin, you act like the Japanese were blameless.
All good. Outstanding world citizens.
"The Bomb" was a bad deal, but they weren't blameless.

[MrFun]

Japan likes to play up on its victim-of-nuclear-bombings to try to get the world to forget about Japan's own horrendous war crimes.

[Kropotkin]

Oh here we go again. No, I'm not at all claiming that the japanese were blameless. Good of you to completely miss the explicit point of the post.

[Brundlefly]

Originally posted by Tripledoc


What exactly is tasteless and insensitive here?

Hitler never showed any remorse for his actions. So he must be praying for the chance to kill 6 million more Jews. Even if he's not praying about that, does he deserve whatever forgiveness he's asking from you? The idea that he would deserve that forgiveness is tasteless and insensitive.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Kropotkin
Oh here we go again. No, I'm not at all claiming that the japanese were blameless. Good of you to completely miss the explicit point of the post.

Actually, I disagree that the nuclear bombings of Japan were necessary, and I argue that we dropped them two big babies as part of the beginning of the Cold War -- we did not want the Soviet Union to get Japan before we did.

BUT, I also know that Japan wants the world to forget about its horrendous war crimes.

[Tripledoc]

Originally posted by Kropotkin
I'm not at all disturbed by the exihibit itself, some of the visitors seems to be quite tasteless and insensitive in my humble opinion. ****ing moron, like any (with the possible existance of a few exceptions) of the civilians victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had anything to do with Perl Harbor or the Nanjing massacre. Why is it so damn hard for some people to tell the difference between individual civilians and the acts of governments and armies? ****ing ****ers I say.

Yes but you forget that at the time Americans were very racist towards the Japanese. For instance they thought that the Japanese because of their slanted eyes, could not fly airplanes properly. Also the Japanese Americans were put into concentration camps because they were more succesful than white Americans. So at that time all Japanese were simply 'Japs' or 'Gooks', and the average American citizen could not distinguish between a military 'gook' and a civilian 'gook'. Just like today is difficult for the average American to distinguish between the terrorist 'raghead' and the civilian 'raghead'.

Of course in turn the Japanese were very racist towards the Chinese, who they believed were inheriently dirty.

So in short while its is easy for almost all civilized nations today to distinguish and not be racist it was perhaps not as easy then.

[Tripledoc]

Originally posted by bfg9000


Hitler never showed any remorse for his actions. So he must be praying for the chance to kill 6 million more Jews. Even if he's not praying about that, does he deserve whatever forgiveness he's asking from you? The idea that he would deserve that forgiveness is tasteless and insensitive.

Everything he did was perfectly legal, so I don't think he is asking for forgiveness.

Maybe he is asking for mercy.

[Spiffor]

I'm much more dreaded by the comments of some Yank *******s in the article :vomit:

[Kropotkin]

Mr Fun:

Actually, I disagree that the nuclear bombings of Japan were necessary[.]

Ehh, I didn't say anything about the necessity of the bombings, you must have quoted the wrong person.

Tripledoc:

Yes but you forget that at the time Americans were very racist towards the Japanese.

Yeah well, but the 'attitudes' I'm talking about is from the other day.

[Lefty Scaevola]

Originally posted by MrFun
That's right, because I am UNSTOPPABLE!

Would you voluteer for a field test of that hypothesis? I could arrange one in Leon Valley.

[Cruddy]

Oh no, there are lots more tasteless museum exhibits than that... Napoleon's penis, for example.

My gut reaction is that EG should not be an exhibit, although there is a good argument for having it around as a warning for future generations.

I mean, your argument that "this killed a lot of civilians" could be used as an excuse to tear down Auschwitz and turn it into a shopping mall.

I can understand A-bomb survivors being furious - but I would rather wait to see the finished exhibit before condermning it.

[GhengisFarb™]

Originally posted by Agathon
How stupid is this?

It is an AIR & SPACE museum. In which they typically display Air and Space equipment. That my friend is a plane. It flies through the air. Hence, why it is displayed in an AIR & SPACE museum.

There, hopefully you have been enlightened.


I have no problem with them making a display which describes how many people died in dropping the bombs. They should also cover all the downed Allied pilots and air crews that were tortured and murdered by the Imperial Japanese forces after they had been displayed and manipulated as propoganda.

[Tripledoc]

From the article:
"They (Japan) started the war by bombing our servicemen in Pearl Harbor. They should go and stand on the deck of the Arizona," said one man referring to a US ship sunk in the raid, now a memorial.

But this is not representative of how the majority of Americans feel today. In fact there was a program on National geographic were some Japanese airmen who served in the attack on Pearl habour visited the Arizona. They met with a group of American sailors who were also at there at the time. There was no bad feelings between them, and they agreed that they had all been involved in something which was beyond their control.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Cruddy
I mean, your argument that "this killed a lot of civilians" could be used an excuse to tear down Auschwitz and turn it into a shopping mall.

The Auschwitz museum is precisely about the horrors of the holocaust, not about the technical wonders it required...

I'm pretty sure the "so what" people here would react differently than they do in this thred, if some German museum was displaying a death chamber in all its technological glory, without even mentioning it was used to genocide people...

[GhengisFarb™]

Originally posted by Tripledoc
But this is not representative of how the majority of Americans feel today. In fact there was a program on National geographic were some Japanese airmen who served in the attack on Pearl habour visited the Arizona. They met with a group of American sailors who were also at there at the time. There was no bad feelings between them, and they agreed that they had all been involved in something which was beyond their control.

Definitely, although I know some American Vets from the war in the pacific who don't have warm and fuzzy feelings towards the Japanese. But that's why I used the term "Imperial Japanese" in my previous post to differentiate between the Japanese mentality then and the modern Japanese today.

I think a lot has to do with how the Japanese reinvented themselves after WW2. Today Japan and the US have quite possibly the two most similiar governments and network of agencies there are. Their economies are also very entertwined and anything that would harm the economy of one will inveritably effect the other also.

Still, this exibit was a display of a historic plane. That's it. The Smithsonian has in its possesion many planes. They are restoring them and hope to put them on display so that people can view the planes. Hopefully this will spark interest and the viewers will look up history and discover that plane's part in it. These protests that a plane shouldn't be displayed because it dropped an atomic bomb just seem silly.

[Sava]

from reading this thread I've learned:

glamorizing the murder of civilians is good because the japanese army was bad?

but I guess America is so arrogant, ignorant, and heartless to acknowledge that dropping nukes on defenseless civilians wasn't such a bad thing...

[Vesayen]

Originally posted by Agathon
How stupid is this?

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/com...55E663,00.html

I fail to see how this is insensitive, that plain symbolized the end of world war 2 and the entering of the atomic era..... anything historically true deserves to be in a museum, just done tastefully.

[Tripledoc]

it wasn't America that dropped the Bomb. The responsibility rests with Truman. He made the call.