World of museums / Le monde des musées

Abstract

The point of this brief article is to propose a better interpretative method on the subject of the bomber command controversy at the Canadian War Museum (CWM). My own interest was piqued mainly by a score of emails on the British Columbia Museums Association “listserve” late this summer, wherein many of our region’s museologists hotly debated both the morality of such warfare and a museum’s proper position in the face of heavy outside pressure to remove or revise offending displays. Additionally, I flew in such aircraft as a RCAF navigator during the 1950s and 1960s before embarking upon another career as a museum history curator, so I feel pulled several ways in an issue that has become deep-felt for me: what is more important to portray, the authentic voices of aircrew veterans or scholarly historical perspectives? Plainly, each has its place, and taken overall, even the newly revised CWM exhibits, when seen, give more weight to the former. The museum took a huge shortcut in portraying a dynamite subject.