Flak again fired at Enola Gay, WWII exhibit
When Smithsonian Institution officials unveiled a home for the World War II bomber Enola Gay in August, they had hoped to avoid the kind of controversy that had plagued efforts to exhibit the airplane that carried the first atomic bomb.
Scholars, writers and activists have signed a petition criticizing the exhibit for labeling Enola Gay as 'the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time' without mentioning that it dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
'You wouldn't display a slave ship solely as a model of technological advancement,' said David Nasaw, a cultural historian at the City University of New York Graduate Center and one of 100 petition signers. 'It would be offensive not to put it in context.'
The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced that the US was henceforth the supreme armed power in the world. The attack of September 11 announced that this power was no longer guaranteed invulnerability on its home ground. The two events mark the beginning and end of a certain historical period. The attack on Hiroshima paved the way for September 11 and its aftermath.
[Previous story: Hiroshima bomber goes on show, without pesky "human' details..]
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