Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/16/spruce-up-the-ol-gaming-den.html
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Exploded views of the famous WWII B-24 Bomber Enola Gay and an Auburn Boattail Speedster
came to alert the same correction.
Enola Gay (dropped first atomic bomb) was a B29 Superfortress
B24 shown in poster known as Liberator was 4 engine twin tail heavy bomber (actually could carry more than the better well known B17 Flying Fortress)
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Great. Next, let’s get an exploded view of some gas chambers…
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Yes! We can put it on the wall next to the false equivalency diagram.
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Does the poster have this same error? It clearly shows a B-24; does it also say that’s the Enola Gay?
I was interested in looking through these for spacecraft for the kids’ rooms, but I’m not so interested if they contain a lot of blatant errors.
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200,000 civilians killed - a difference of magnitude, but not in type, of war crime.
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Nope. Not cheering for atom bombs at all, but the US was telling themselves they were avoiding an extended invasion with millions killed in action. The Nazis were not saying that to themselves when they gassed millions. You can call it a war crime, but not the same. Nope.
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…and 25,000 civilians were killed at Dresden, and somewhere between 75,000 and 200,000 were killed in the firebombing of Tokyo. The systematic, state-sponsored annihilation of the Jewish people as part of a multi-year coordinated effort that spanned the conquered nations of Europe is not morally equivalent to the use of two nuclear weapons at the end of a long, brutal, and unchosen campaign. It’s a facile comparison.
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Are these like the modern equivalent of those “LASER PRINT” art of Tigers, Waterfalls and The Space Shuttle people used to sell out of their trunks at parking lots in the 80’s?
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You can disagree, but calling it a “facile comparison” doesn’t bolster your position, it just makes you look like a person who prefers to attack the person, not the argument.
Yep.
War is hell. Considering how brutal the Japanese were in China and to POWs it is hard to too sympathetic.
I know NOW we tend to want to separate war from the civilians but that wasn’t the case for most of human history. Where does one get the means to wage war? The food, the weapons, the people? Civilians. Not saying it is right to target civilians, but we are just now at an age where we have the luxury of trying to NOT target them.
And both targets had some military value, and leaflets were dropped to tell people to leave. And the number of people killed in a traditional invasion would have been much greater (Japan was mobilizing its citizens to fight the invaders.) While I guess I can see how one would still disagree with the conclusion to drop them, I would think one would at least acknowledge the reasons they were.
One other point I think is important is the world saw the devastation. AND since Japan lacked many stone buildings, NOTHING was left at ground zero, making it all the more starkly horrible. But I wonder if that didn’t happen - it WOULD have possibly happened somewhere else. Korea, maybe? Maybe Eastern Europe? Would nations have been more willing to do a strike back then because the horror and damage would have been hypothetical up to that point?
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I attacked the comparison. Which is, in fact, facile: that is, it’s superficial, and it ignores the complexities of the issue, a few of which I tossed out there, and you ignored…apparently preferring instead to comment on the kind of person I appear to be.
You can carry on with this, if you like. I’ll be doing other things elsewhere.
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