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Kittyhawk ruined?


ted hughes
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To be fair, its their relic and they can do with it what they like - certainly without having to suffer the cultural imperialism of the Daily Wail.

The Desert War is part of Egyptian history too, and if there are minor inaccuracies in the paint job, then its not going to make the blindest bit of difference to the overarching story that its being used to tell to the many thousands of visitors to their museum.

Deliberately faked information, revisionist history, the dynamiting of Buddhist statues - these are things to get hot under the collar about.

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Many a people where capable of creating great works of art/buildings/cultures/learning/science etc long before the "English" arrived on the scene. We helped rediscover it, not create it. Civilised or was it European wealth, pretty much like Greek/Roman/Byzantine/Portugese/Spanish/French etc etc wealth before us. Hadrians wall ? of course we used the stone to pen herds the Romans had "Civilised" us and shown stone was better, we still mostly lived in wattle n daub though apart from the few wealthy/civilised ones. History ? I love it, carefully how you read it though and bare in mind it's usually the victors writing it. Kittyhawk restoration don't raise my passion much, sorry.

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Dear Mr Hughes,

I really tend to agree with the opinions of multiple forumites like Colin, Dave, Nev, Jonathan & John.

I’m afraid I’m not “civilized” enough to understand your theory of ”primary & secondary sources”, but what I do know is that whatever was stolen from foreign territories were just ‘conqueror’s trophies’…

It is your full right to just be ‘vindictive’ right at the start of your OP, but what about spending your valuable time and energy at the build of a nice ‘uncontroversial’ airplane model? …

Now Don’s advice about “not forgetting our blood pressure pills’ seems really sensible too.

Cheers

Chris

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I am a little bit concerned the article posted by Cuban8 states

"A team from Essex-based Kennet were given permission to salvage the aircraft and secure it in a shipping container which was then taken to a site at El Alamein"

So if its in a contained in El Alamein is the hideous looking monstrosity the SAME aitframe or a different one? After all it wouldn't be the first time the Mail were economical with the truth

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When I was a young child and far too young to have yet learnt any proper history, our local war museum had a glassed-in diorama of two British soldiers (full size manakins) in a WW1 trench, complete with mud, rats, rifles, helmets and frightening gas-masked faces, and with the backdrop painted to represent no-mans land with huge pockmarks, bits of barbed wire and stunted trees, a dirty yellow sky. That display utterly terrified me - to the extent that I can still picture it in all its full and ghastly detail some five decades later.

I completely understand Ted's point about primary and secondary sources, but sometimes we need to think about the bigger picture, which is the story these sorts of artifacts are being used to tell, rather than their bare technical accuracies. How is this 'restored' fighter being presented by the Egyptians to their citizens? As a weapon used by the key free and democratic countries at the time to help kick the army of a vicious death-cult out of North Africa? Or miscast as a generalised symbol of 'Western Imperialism and subjugation' of Egyptians prior to their independence?

I'm almost completely sure its the former, but perhaps the Mail can send one of its lazy journalists over to find out... although how this will help sell more stair-lifts I don't know!?

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Good point John. Shouldn’t we drop it now chaps? This episode is very similar to the one in which B24 “Lady be Good” was lost in the Libyan desert, almost certainly as a result of simple human error. Young men serving their country were condemned to a lingering, desperately lonely and most certainly despairing death, as clearly was Copping. The overwhelming concern here should be care for his memory and the finding of the P40 has at least given us the opportunity to understand what happened to this poor man and think of him with solemn respect. The continuing existence of the plane, wherever it is and however it’s painted, is his memorial. The rest is nothing and we should leave it there, I think.

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Posted by ted hughes on 07/01/2018 10:54:54:

I concede, and go with the weight of opinion.

It's like arguing about Brexit, we all "know" we will be better off out of the EU, the only people who say we will be worse off are "experts".

And what do they know, hey?

What a pathetic cop-out.

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