This diary grew out of a short discussion that took place in a photo diary about a military museum in Ohio, when the topic of altering or censoring historical realities that some today find "offensive" came up. (Specifically the discussion involved nazi war relics and the reluctance of some museums to display them.) Coincidentally, I had just had another discussion about that same subject a few days before in the US Air Force Museum in Dayton, concerning one of the World War Two aircraft on display there.
The B-24 Liberator World War II bomber "Strawberry Bitch".
What should we do with history that we find offensive or disturbing today?
The first time that I really thought about that question was years ago, when I was downloading some fan-made add-ons for Microsoft's computer game "Combat Flight Simulator". I happened to notice an add-on file titled "AddSwastikas", and clicking on it, found the description indicating that this file would add the historically-accurate but missing swastika emblems to the tail fins of the German aircraft used in the game. It struck me that (1) I had never even noticed that the swastika insignia were missing, and (2) it was odd that they would have been taken out. I don't know whether Microsoft decided to censor out the swastika emblems because they were offensive to many people, or just because displaying Nazi emblems is illegal in some European countries including Germany (the computer game "Wolfenstein 3d", in which the player character shoots Nazis, ran into some trouble in Europe for its use of Nazi flags and music in the game's scenery) and they didn't want to run into hassles by selling the game overseas.
Then, earlier this week, the question came up again while I was taking one of the guided tours at the US Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton OH. (BTW, all of the Nazi World War Two aircraft in the Air Force Museum, as well as at the Smithsonian and the Naval Aviation Museum, have the historically-accurate swastika on the tail fin.)
Our guide had stopped us in front of a B-24 Liberator bomber, one of the most widely-used American aircraft of World War Two. Like virtually every Army Air Corps plane in the war, this particular B-24 had been decorated by her crew with "nose art" which featured their name for the plane. In this case, the name was "Strawberry Bitch", and the nose art depicted a reclining woman in a short skimpy blue dress. Then the tour guide remarked that this plane had been restored to its exact World War Two configuration ...with just one exception....
When the plane first went on display, the museum got a barrage of angry letters from people. Some of them complained about the airplane's name, finding it offensive. But by far the larger number of complaints came because in the original nose art, as it flew during the war and as it was first displayed at the museum, the reclining female figure was nude. The staff was bombarded with gripes that it was "lewd" and "pornographic".
So the staff had to decide what to do...... and the argument raged. The basic question, as the guide put it, was "how much do we want to change history?" The simple historical fact was that this is what the plane looked like when it flew in the war, and some bluntly argued that the museum had no right to change it, to whatever degree. What was, was, whether people like it or not. Others argued that we live in the world we live in, and that the museum had to keep the visitors happy since the very existence of the institution depended on the goodwill of the public.
In the end, the museum staff decided to allow the name of the airplane to stay, but altered the nose art female figure by painting a blue dress over top of it.
My view on the matter? Fuck the prudes. History is history, and we have no right to alter it to suit our own tastes.
What do you think?