If Suicide Bombers Are Not Rational, Then Neither Were WWII Firebombers
One purpose of denying rationality to suicide bombers — the subject of last night's ABCNews' Nightline — is to repress any tendency by survivors (i.e., Westerners who have not died in a suicide bombing) to wonder whether governments who act in their name could have acted differently. For if suicide bombers are simply nonrational predators, like wild beasts, then clearly there is nothing anyone can do or omit to do to dissuade the bombers from their course of action.
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If those responsible for the bombing of London on July 7, killing almost 60 people, are "just murderers," irrational animals who need to be put down like rabid dogs, then let us at least be consistent and regard with the same condescending disgust those who were responsible for the bombing of Dresden 60 years ago this past February. Quoted in a Winnie Churchill apologetics site, Dr. Chris Harmon, who wrote on the Allies' "area bombing" in a book entitled most conveniently for this column, Are We Beasts?, suggests that Churchill went along reluntantly with his head of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Harris, who
"had none of Churchill's moral qualms about the strategic bombing campaign, or if he did, he hid them well. He created a list of some fifty major target cities, usually selected for their size, war production, or critical location on transportation routes. Harris was grimly working through the list, complaining when the Combined Chiefs 'distracted' him with special targets related to ground campaigns or special interests like oil or U-boat pens.
"Dresden was on another list at Bomber Command - a short list of early 1945 targets that should be flattened to aid the Russian offensive. Churchill had frequently pressed Harris to use his bombers to aid the Russians, but they never talked about Dresden particularly, to my knowledge. It was one of several towns at the right time and place whose bombing would help the Red Army's advance in that sector. Also, John Colville's memoirs record, there had been a report that Axis armor was moving through the town. In short, Dresden was not a vengeance target, but a military one, and one more 'built up area' that was to be destroyed like the others in Germany."
Now isn't that Western rational thinking at its noblest? Someone's memoirs may have recorded that there had been an unconfirmed report of Axis armor moving through Dresden. Ergo, the children enjoying the carnival and circus that had come to town, and as many as a quarter million of their noncombatant neighbors — far surpassing the death toll of Hiroshima, whose 60th anniversary approaches — should be offered as a holocaust before the god of Allied military victory.
Dresden's railroad yards, by the way, were unscathed by any of the 600,000 incendiary bombs that rained for fourteen hours upon this city of cigarettes and china. The updated 2005 edition of the first (1963) book on this war crime, David Irving's Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden is available here.
Dresden was not "payback" for Coventry, where German bombs killed a total of 340 British noncombtants. Even Churchill at his most plastered would not equate these departures from "just war," probably the War's most tragic casualty. No, this was just one item on Bomber Harris' to-do list in the effort to aid, of all things, the advance of Stalin's armies, which would inaugurate the entrenchment of Communism in Eastern Europe for nearly fifty years. (I wonder how many Londoners give a thought to the statue that was erected in 1992 in his honor just off Trafalgar Square.) No, "payback" more aptly describes that German bombing itself.
You see, the German bombing of Coventry was rational retaliation for the exceedingly rational British strategy of beating WWI-induced aversion to war out of Britons by provoking Germany to bomb British cities.
Shades of Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor!
Let's listen to the boasting — published before the war's end! — of a most educated, rational British gentleman, J. M. Spaight, CB, CBE, Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry, from his 1944 book, Bombing Vindicated, which in its entirety may be downloaded in .pdf format here:
"Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets. Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones. Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany. There was a reasonable possibility that our capital and industrial centres would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany. We began to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland. Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11th, 1940, the publicity it deserves." [Boldface mine.--AF]
If today's terrorists are "just murderers," then so were yesterday's. If yesterday's acted immorally but rationally, then so do today's. When for decades the IRA acted immorally they nevertheless acted rationally, and today they act both morally and rationally by renouncing the initiation of force in their efforts to end British occupation of Northern Ireland. Only human beings, not wild beasts, can be so morally and intellectually converted.
The U.S.-led "counterinsurgency" in Iraq and global "war against terror" are supported by a bodyguard of lying propaganda about rational motivations, "ours" and "theirs" (i.e, "we" have them, "they" don't). Lives depend on how soon we penetrate the veil, rather than wrapping it around our heads like a blindfold.
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Posted by Anthony Flood on
Saturday July 30, 2005 at 12:57pm