The most depressing thing about this thread is that it highlights the fact that many people seem to think that the best way to deal with unpleasant events in history is to mythologise and make them sacred and untouchable, and then to try to force other people to comply with their personal views.
First of all, Tat has presented this event as a recreation of the A-bomb raids, which is factually incorrect. Tat even says in his post on the forum "I haven't read all posts in this thread..." but that ignorance hasn't stopped him from going off on an irrelevant tangent over something that isn't even happening. Harsh words? Yes indeed, but I have no patience or sympathy for anyone who wants to force their will on other people, especially when they've got their facts wrong, or simply choose to misrepresent them. It's bad enough that politicians get away with it. In any case though, even if the raid was to be an enactment of one of the A-bomb raids, is forbidding people to do it the best way to deal with the issue? Should enactments of unpalatable events in history made into thought-crimes? There's certainly no real crime being committed here, is there? The fact is, events like the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually occurred, along with numerous other raids where the majority of casualties were civilian, such as the firebombing of Tokyo (which is believed to have actually killed more people than either of the A-bomb raids), Dresden and Hamburg, together with the raids on Coventry & Sheffield, not forgetting to mention the Blitz on London or the attacks on the Ruhr Dams. So no, mythologising these unpalatable events is not the best way to come to terms with them. To understand how such terrible events came to occur requires that the events be inspected down to their finest details and it's only when you completely understand what happened that you stand a chance of ensuring that it doesn't happen again. Saying that people should treat these events as something sacred and that re-enacting them or studying them is somehow offensive just ensures ignorance, which is no way to tackle the future. This issue really has nothing to do with FlightGear. FlightGear is all about flight, and to a large degree about the development of flight, both in the past and for the future, and the fact is that much of the development in flight has its origins in the military. Just as we can't truly understand the past that has brought us to the present without correctly understanding _all_ of the past, FlightGear cannot properly deal with the subject of flight if it tries to ignore the military factor. If there's really a problem, it's actually more to do with people who can't differentiate between understanding something and advocating it, and this can already be shown to have fostered ignorance. For example, as pointed out in the forum thread, the Swastika has been made illegal in several countries and this has lead to the widely held belief that the Swastika symbol relates purely to the Nazi regime. It does, in fact, date from the Neolithic period and was originally thought of as a symbol of good luck. Making the Swastika illegal has certainly not achieved the aim of stopping its use by the right-wing movements that were targeted by the law but instead has just resulted in the widespread ignorance of its real place in history, along with making it impossible to make historically accurate representations of anything that carried the symbol (unless it is for scholarly use). What has been advanced by achieving this? Yes, I am very annoyed at all this. It is precisely this type of neurotic denial of reality that has lead to many of the world's problems today. Pandering to this neurosis is not going to make things any better and it will only be by _really_ understanding things and coming to terms with them that we will stand any chance of preventing them from occurring again. LeeE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry® Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9-12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconf _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
