Group slams Enola Gay exhibition

[Troll Basher]

Group slams Enola Gay exhibition

WASHINGTON (Kyodo) The Smithsonian Institution has received a petition criticizing its plans to exhibit the Enola Gay without mentioning Japanese casualties.
The petition is from almost 200 scholars, writers and others. The Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in World War II.

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum plans to put the completely reassembled Enola Gay on public display Dec. 15 when its new facility opens near Washington Dulles International Airport. It will announce its response to the petition Friday, an official said Thursday.

The petition urges the museum to change the way of exhibiting the B-29 Superfortress, saying it is inappropriate to display the bomber only in celebration of American technology without mentioning the consequences of the bombing, including the number of casualties.

Those who signed the petition included Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Joseph Rotblat, novelist Kurt Vonnegut and historian Howard Zinn. In 1994, the museum was planning an Enola Gay exhibit that would focus largely on the destruction and suffering caused by the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and on the historical aftermath, including the Cold War.

But in the face of a storm of protests from World War II veteran groups and politicians over the alleged excessive emphasis on the Japanese victims, the planned exhibition was scrapped in January 1995. Later, the fuselage of the Enola Gay and other items were put on display in an exhibit that made no reference to the damage caused by the bombing.

The Japan Times: Nov. 8, 2003
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[Jock Armstrong]

Unfortunately the tone of many Japanese has changed from "lets not let it happen again" to "us poor innocent Japanese were sitting there minding our own business and then the rotten Americans just upped and niked us". This is partly because many in govt and big business are still the same racist, right wing fascists who started the gong show in the thirties or their protoges, partly because the education depts handling of the war is so vague as to be utterly useless. in some prefectures there's a ten year hole throuigh the '30s to 1946. I'm not anti Japanese but some of 'em need a nitro enema..............:rolleyes::mad:

[Kimpatsu]

Hating the Japanese right wing, which is demonstrably racist, doesn't make you anti-Japanese, Jock; if anything, it makes you more of a Japanese patriot than they are.
There is a lot of whining in Japan about how badly they suffered from starvation and encirclement during WWII, culminating in being nuked twice by those beastly Americans, but never is the fact that the Japanese started it mentioned. Pearl Harbor is never referenced; the prevailing undercurrent in teaching WWII in Japanese schools is that president Truman woke up one day and said, "I'm bored. What shall we do? I know! Let's go nuke Japan!"
And then they wonder why we protest...
Basically, the Powers That Be feel (though they're too diplomatic to admit it) that Japan is superior, and the Japanese are the Master Race, so it just wasn't fair or right of America to nuke them. And the only reason why these Japanese PWB can't coordinate their efforts with the European far right is because the Europeans are white, and the Japanese are yellow, and there can only be one master race. Go figure...