The most tasteless and insensitive museum exhibit ever.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by atawa
But then again never have the Americans for locking up Japanese Americans in concentration camps

We paid compensation to the victims. What that has to do with the thread I don't know though.

[atawa]

Btw, how would Americans feel if some museum in the ME displayed the original flightsimulator used in training the people that flew into the WTC?

I'm sure that country would receive economic sanctions at least, more likely an invasion with the crew now in charge

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Winston
The most tasteless and insensitive museum exhibit ever?

I guess that would be V.I. Lenin's mummified corpse on permanent display in a glass coffin for ahistoric lefties to worship.

But maybe that's just me.

Lefties don't worship it because Lenin wanted to be buried next to his mother.

[atawa]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
We paid compensation to the victims. What that has to do with the thread I don't know though.

Did you read the thread?

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Spiffor

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...

... from the linked article:

The text mentions the technological prowess of the aircraft and how it "found its niche on the other side of the globe".

"On August 6, 1945, this Martin-built B-29-45-MO dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat on Hiroshima, Japan."

In this day and age, does anyone not know what a nuclear weapon does?

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by atawa
The Japanese have, almost 60 years after the war, not ONCE apologised for their atrocity's during the war. (China/Korea, Birma RR, East Indian prisoncamps with mass rape etc.)

But then again never have the Americans for locking up Japanese Americans in concentration camps and carpetbombing whole German and Japanese city's. (Not to mention the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki)

Both have a bad trackrecord imo.

IIRC, we actually did apologise

[Drake Tungsten]

Wow, I can't believe Japanese people went all the way to America to protest a museum exhibit. Very out of character; almost Korean, in fact.

Anyway, I don't see anything tasteless or insensitive about this exhibit.

[Patroklos]

Of course the Auschwitz museum doesn't mention what a technological marvel gas chambers are becasue,

1) they are not technological mavels

2) The Auschwitz museum is a holocoaust museum, so thay deal with the Holocaust and not technology. The Air and Space museum is an air and space museum, so it deals with air and space technology and not holocausts. It is not a hard concept to understand.

Now in your referance to Auschwitz, it is only related if the US opened an air technology museaum, ground zero Hiroshima, and displayed the Enola Gay without mentioning what the bombs did. I would give your bleeding heart claims credit then.

However, my local gas company doesn't have a memeoial to the Holocasue because it sells gas (for a profit no less, dispicable). Nor does the nuc power plant not too far away have a plaqe to all the Japanese who made this possible by pushing the human race so close to the abyss that we had to unlock the atom. I think I will send a letter to the local hardware store complaining about how insensitive it is to not have a 30ft marble monumnent to the Oklahoma City Federal Building next to the feertilizer section. Facists.

-Pat

[chequita guevara]

I'm actually with Q³ on this one. Until the Japanese come to terms with what they did, acknowledge it, and repent, I don't think we owe them any apology. They were the aggressors, and they were monsters on a level that made even Nazi's blanche.

The Enola Gay is an important piece of history, even as an evil thing, which it is. It dropped the first atomic weapon used in war. It let the geni out of the bottle, and for fifty years, the world trembled in fear, not knowing if that night would be their last or would the superpowers exterminate the species.

The substance of the protest was stupid, though.

[Drake Tungsten]

Q³...

edit: Cool...

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by atawa
The Japanese have, almost 60 years after the war, not ONCE apologised for their atrocity's during the war. (China/Korea, Birma RR, East Indian prisoncamps with mass rape etc.)

Actually, in 1998 Oubuchi said: "Painfully feeling its responsibility for inflicting grave suffering and damage on the people of China by invading China at one period of history, the Japanese side expresses deep remorse for this"

There's no use of the word "apology," no... but "remorse" is a pretty strong term...so it's at least a step.

[Patroklos]

Well, considering they were in China and Manchuria raising hell for 40 years, that is about as ambiguous as "Dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima." And considering that 40 years of suffering every day through rape, starvation, murder, forced labor, and genocide is far worse than any of the Hiroshima suvivors dealt with, even the ones with radiation poisoning. Hell, at least the war was over soon after that, would hate to have been a child in Korea in 1910, I would have 40 years of oppression to deal with after my mother was raped and killed in front of me. GO JAPAN!!!

Perhaps the causists here should turn their eye to that undrestatment.

-Pat

[Drake Tungsten]

Well, considering they were in China and Manchuria raising hell for 40 years

40 years?

[Boris Godunov]

The invasion of Manchuria was 1931, IIRC.

[Drake Tungsten]

I know. He must've been thinking of Korea.

[molly bloom]

The point is, surely, that the 'Enola Gay' isn't simply 'an aircraft'. Its fame comes not from being a prototype or being the first jet engine equipped aeroplane, or the first biplane, or a 'Spruce Goose' white elephant, but from being used in a theatre of war to deliver an atomic bomb. If the museum makes that clear (which it seems to) I fail to see why it should have some trite blurb about the suffering of Japanese civilians. In war everyone suffers, and the atomic bomb is no different in this regard from the Burma Railway or the Japanese army cannibalizing allied prisoners.

It would be like a Byzantine exhibit ignoring military use of Greek fire. Or pretending it was a method of making kebabs.

However the Japanese have never had to confront the sheer unmitigated horror of the exploits of their politicians, emperor and armed forces in occupied Asia and during World War II.

My Singaporean friends told me of the shocked Japanese tourists bursting into tears at displays in Singapore relating to atrocities committed there during the Japanese occupation- because it had been expunged from history as taught in Japanese schools.

The equivalent would be German schholchildren seeing references to Oradour sur Glane, Lidice, Kharkov and the death camps for the first time, in trips to the Imperial War Museum in London, the Ukraine and France.

[Boris Godunov]

At least German school children get to see that stuff in Germany, though.

[notyoueither]

I think that's the point. I have to wonder if these people would have made this trip if they had been well informed of what had gone before. I'd like to think that they are aware of what their own side did, but I fear that is not the case.

[Boris Godunov]

Since the denial/whitewashing of atrocities is a feature of Japanese public school text books, I doubt it. Every Japanese person I've known here in the states has had to have their own little rude awakening as to the extent of Japanese aggression in WW2. To them, it's portrayed as an attempt to liberate Asia from Western influence...

[Drake Tungsten]

To them, it's portrayed as an attempt to liberate Asia from Western influence...

Actually, it's not really portrayed at all. The reasons behind it, at any rate.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

Quote:

The central question is whether the Japanese would have surrender with the ONLY condition that they would have retained their emperor.

Perhaps, perhaps not... but why would we take a 'conditional' surrender? Did we really want a repeat of WW1, where you still have vestiges of the old regime still around stiring up trouble (Ludendorff being a part of the early Nazi movement)?

We ended up with a conditional surrender, the same conditional surrender that was earlier possible.

The big advantage of a conditional surrender would have be to forestall a Soviet entry into the war.

The second big advantage would have been the tens of thousand of Japanese civilian lives saved.

[Patroklos]

There was a very important reason why we needed an unconditional surrender, even if we gave them the one conditon they wanted anyways. It needed to be shown that regimes like Germany's and Japan were criminal and in no position to negotiage with us. They had to admitt that theit authority, even to make peace, was nonexistant.

-Pat

[Ned]

August 6, 1945 is a day that shall live in infamy - more so than December 7, 1941. We ended that war about as badly as we could have.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by atawa
Did you read the thread?

Yes. Have you done so? You posts so far haven't shown it.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Since the denial/whitewashing of atrocities is a feature of Japanese public school text books, I doubt it. Every Japanese person I've known here in the states has had to have their own little rude awakening as to the extent of Japanese aggression in WW2. To them, it's portrayed as an attempt to liberate Asia from Western influence...

Which actually makes it worse, maybe. The protesters are survivors. They didn't learn this stuff from history books. They have never been told in any meaningful way, even while their country was occupied by people who had an interest in pointing it out.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Ned
August 6, 1945 is a day that shall live in infamy - more so than December 7, 1941. We ended that war about as badly as we could have.

You could have lost...

[Patroklos]

August 6, 1945 , The day the Japanese race lost a finger to save the body.

-Pat

[Q Classic]

15 aug. a day that shall be remembered as victory--and liberation for the numerous peoples under the jackboot of the japanese occupation. the day when koreans and chinese would finally be able to say **** you to the japanese and not be confined to a 3x3x3 box walled with nails.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Patroklos
There was a very important reason why we needed an unconditional surrender, even if we gave them the one conditon they wanted anyways. It needed to be shown that regimes like Germany's and Japan were criminal and in no position to negotiage with us. They had to admitt that theit authority, even to make peace, was nonexistant.

-Pat

Pat, well, in the end, we did accept a conditional surrender because despite all we did the Japanese STILL would not surrender unconditionally.

As to the demonstration that they were war criminals, etc., there was absolutely no talk of that at the time as a reason why we would not accept a conditional surrender of Japan. If that were so G-D important, then we should not have accepted their conditional surrender when we did but should have told them that it must be unconditional or else the A-bombs would continue to fall.

[notyoueither]

What was conditional about the Japanese surrender?