Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum Outside Savannah, Georgia, July 2010

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November 24, 2023

Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum in Savannah, GA, Entrance

Concluding a week of aerospace museum posts (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, NASM Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, 1929 Ford Tri-Motor Model 4-AT Visit to SSI, and Deutsches Museum in Munich), here is one featuring photos of a visit my folks and I made to the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum just outside of Savannah, Georgia in July 2010.

The Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum honors the Eighth Air Force which has its beginnings in World War II. It earned its “MIghty” moniker due to its overwhelming personnel and equipment capability, logistical prowess, and power application on the air battlefield.

At the time of our visit, it featured a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress in the process of restoration (I believe this has been completed now), Consolidated B-24 Liberator (nose), Boeing B-47 Stratojet, McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II, Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17, Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 (Cockpit), McDonnell ADM-20 Quail Decoy Cruise Missile, and other WWII related exhibits for British, Japan, and Nazi Germany.

It’s on the latter one of the Axis powers mentioned–Nazi Germany–that I want to give a word of caution. I have included at the bottom of this post images of the Swastika and Nazi Germany uniforms. Like the museum including these in its exhibits, I include these images as a reminder that Nazism is evil and we cannot let that evil return to the world in whatever form it might take. I believe that there we cannot be freedom of speech maximalists in our modern world where there technology has created an extremely imbalanced marketplace of ideas and lopsided means of discourse. If we don’t draw a line in the sand about certain evils, it seems certain that we’re destined to fall prey to the paradox of tolerance. I believed the breakdown of discourse and the ease of manipulating people during the early phases of social media already presented a clear and present danger. Knowing what I know now about generative artificial intelligence (AI)’s capability to do the work of manipulation at a far greater scale and for less money than what was achieved previously, recognizing so-called free speech maximalist owners of a certain social media platform isn’t all about free speech at all and seems to support Nazi ideology, and fearing how our democracy seems weakened and fractured from the assaults culminating in the Jan. 6 insurrection makes me beyond concerned about a return of the Nazi specter–but instead of forming elsewhere, it could manifest here.