It’s so much easier to murder when you never see your victims. From Norman Solomon at tomdispatch.com:
Mass Killers Have Been Above It All
Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can’t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”
Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italy’s air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica.
Within weeks, Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica” was on public display, boosting global revulsion at such barbarism. When World War Two began in September 1939, the default assumption was that bombing population centers — terrorizing and killing civilians — was beyond the pale. But during the next several years, such bombing became standard operating procedure.
Dispensed from the air, systematic cruelty only escalated with time. The blitz by Germany’s Luftwaffe took more than 43,500 civilian lives in Britain. As the Allies gained the upper hand, the names of certain cities went into history for their bomb-generated firestorms and then radioactive infernos. In Germany: Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden. In Japan: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
“Between 300,000-600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by allied bombing during the Second World War, most as a result of raids intentionally targeted against civilians themselves,” according to the documentation of scholar Alex J. Bellamy. Contrary to traditional narratives, “the British and American governments were clearly intent on targeting civilians,” but “they refused to admit that this was their purpose and devised elaborate arguments to claim that they were not targeting civilians.”
And the Luftwaffe never had a four engine “heavy” as Walther Wever died in an air crash, he was the main proponent for heavy bomber.
The Dresden fire tornado is one of the all-time WAR crimes.
The David Bowie cover (Modern Lovers) song Pablo Picasso makes me LOL.
When faced with killing an enemy directly most men will avoid it, it is too personal and against the moral dictates of their conscience. It was discovered in the aftermath of WW II that most men even when faced with iminent possibility of being killed would not fire their rifles, or when they did they fired wildly hoping it would deter the others who were shooting in their direction. The enemy was no different.
When removed from direct killing, bombs being dropped from the air or artillery who could not see their victims they fired every time attempting to get a direct hit believing that they were only killing those who deserved to be killed.
The most removed from the killing are the taxpayers who believe that no matter what they are only killing those who deserve to be killed. They honor those who kill with parades, thanks and hero worship while pretending that no matter what happened ‘over there’ and to the ‘others’ they were doing the noble thing of protecting their country and obeying their leaders who would never mislead them when asking that their soldiers kill someone.
Most of the people we were shooting at in Viet Nam had no ideas or philosophical ethics about democracy or communism. They were shooting back because we were shooting them and killing their families. If we had met under different circumstances we probably could not have come up with a reason to kill them, even if there were cultural differences that seperated ‘us’ from ‘them’.
I don’t think there has ever been a war that wasn’t invented for the purpose of agrandizement of the leaders and never was for protecting the populace.
Chad