From: Avatar Polymorph (avatarpolymorph@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Aug 28 2002 - 08:40:41 MDT
RE: Winston Churchill the War Criminal?
Lee Corbin writes "A. Did Churchill realize that there was no military
objective to bombing Dresden (except possibly to instill terror)?
B. Did Churchill alone authorize the bombing?
If the answers to A and B are yes, then he ought to be considered guilty of
war crimes."
I believe that the British Air Force commander was fully aware of the
direction bombing was taking. See end of post.
It is inconceivable that bombing missions on civilian areas of Berlin, for
example, could be anything other than bombing of civilians.
The concept that bombing of defenceless civilians (i.e. civilians not
holding arms) is in fact somehow 'Instilling terror' is 1984 doublespeak.
Yes, war crimes 'instill terror'. War crimes also exact revenge. They also
kill large numbers of the enemy nation. From memory the German dead (mostly
civilians?) from Allied bombing were 200,000.
Note I have not been talking about bombing of military sites or stray bombs.
All I am saying is that bombing civilian suburbs of a city is a war crime.
ANY bombing of ANY civilian suburbs, whether Hitler in London or Churchill
in Berlin or Roosevelt in Japan.
My father's family had a member serving on the bomber runs from the UK over
Germany. But I stand by my opinion. If he was participating in bombing of
civilians, he was participating in a war crime.
Lee asks how do I figure that Truman, Kissinger and Nixon are war criminals.
For ordering the bombing of civilians.
Lee: "[The US bombing of Vietnam (1 million killed)]... is entirely false.
This is the sort of leftist lie that we need to completely expunge.
Lee: "While North Vietnamese *military* losses to American and South
Vietnamese forces are about indeed about one million, as for evil, ponder
this: "In the first two years after the fall of Saigon (1975-1977), there
were almost twice as many total *civilian* fatalities in Southeast
Asia---from the Cambodian holocaust, outright executions, horrendous
conditions in concentration camps, and failed escapes by refugees---as all
those incurred during ten years of major American involvement (1965-74)", p.
425, "Carnage and Culture", by Victor Davis Hanson. Note the contrast
between "two" years and "ten" years."
Lee: "So don't blame the Americans of being war criminals when they were in
effect attempting to *prevent* Communist atrocities. The narrations of so,
so many Vietnamese are so consistent and so convincing that even American
leftists will be persuaded if they just take the time to read them."
I shouldn't have mentioned genocide in the same comment as war crimes. It
confuses the issue. It is interlinked and interesting, however, I agree.
I really don't think you can say 'We tried to prevent a bigger genocide with
our war crimes.' Unless you think the ends justify the means.
In respect to your disagreement over bombing deaths, some figures are:
"2M Vietnam war 1960-75 all sides [i.e. combatants]
2M Vietnam civilians Vietnam Govt est."
Cambodia: deaths due to bombing 100,000
Lee: "I agree that unnecessary killing is unnecessary, and therefore wrong.
But I am also growing weary of those who appear to think that it's perfectly
all right for seventeen year old boys to die by the thousands, because "they
signed up for it" or some equally stupid reasoning. War is not a game that
makes it okay for some people to die and not others. Every single death is a
terrible tragedy, and the deaths of millions is a statistic (which shows you
the true horror in statistics) and a wise but ruthless 20th century despot
once pointed out."
This is all true. As an immortalist I am working against non-consensual
death, as Damien is and most of us. I agree all lives are equally valuable.
It is sad that they were often short in the past. I think Frank Tipler has
the right approach, which is "fix up what you can as best you can in
context" and since this universe has an underlying physical substructure,
fix it up physically if you can. As far as Churchill goes, our Anglo-Celtic
mythology to one side, the historical reality is that (unlike WWI) the vast
majority of suffering was experienced by the Russian and Soviet people,
first by Stalin (and in an ongoing fashion into the 1950s) and then by
Hitler. In the German retreat through the Soviet Union they killed 18
million people. We cannot understand what that means easily. It means whole
cities the size of San Franscisco were cordoned off and machine-gunned and
starved to death time and time and time again. Incidentally, it also means
that NO ONE in the Eastern Front of the German Army was in any way shape or
form ignorant of what was happening. Thus their uncomfortable nervous
silence on the issue and the myth of "the problem was with the Waffen SS". I
don't think so!
Lee: "While I basically agree, remember Eternal Truth No. 1: Nothing is
Simple. Bombing enemy cities in World War Two sometimes had the effect of
drawing Luftwaffe planes away from the front, and thus enabling quicker
Allied victories, and so shortening the war. All I care about is (a) winning
(b) minimizing human losses. Both are absolutely necessary when fighting
some enemies, and it should be squarely faced."
I disagree. Call me medieval but I think that troops are at risk in war and
defenceless civilians should never be targets. For example, I would never
destroy enemy cities in an atomic war simple to kill their civilians for
whatever reason. I consider this a war crime. Shortening a war through a war
crime is not acceptable to me. If blood must be shed for liberty, it must
not be the blood of defenceless, unarmed civilians.
"Re [http://www.genocidewatch.org/genocidetable.htm
Lee: "What point do you have to make about the Mayans?"
I only meant to say that the deaths of leftist bourgeoise European-descent
persons in Argentina for example attracts comment (reasonably so) but many
times as many (200,000) dead Mayans are brushed under the carpet. However,
this wasn't a comment on war crimes.
Re :[It is stunning that no one in the West noticed that so many people
were "missing" in Russia (that is, our spies) - was it reported at all in
the press?
Lee: "The reason was that Western Leftists did not want to hear about bad
things happening in the Soviet Union. It was the Worker's Paradise to them,
and they truly loved the idea of Socialism. And when one loves an idea, or a
nation, or close relatives, one is all to often not likely to listen the way
that one should."
But did right-wing papers report this? Hmm.
[Re: Even with a totalitarian state, the fact that so many people are
missing in a nation of dozens of millions surely couldn't be missed?]
"The facts about the Gulag Archipelago did not become widespread in the West
until the publication of Solzhenitsyn's massive, irrefutable writings. So
by the end of the seventies, only the most die-hard leftists in the West
were still denying Soviet totalitarian mass deaths. (Even here, though, it
is incorrect to use the terms "genocide" and "murder". That's what Hitler
did to Jews and Stalin to Kulaks---most of the Soviet Union's megadeaths
after World War II were political reprisals against individuals that began
as simple imprisonment, with no definite plans for death.)"
Genocide.com includes politically or religiously motivated mass killings as
genocide. I read Solzhenitsyn in the 70s too and it was a revelation.
However, we now know Western authorities were aware that Soviet troops
returned to Stalin would be killed for having been tainted or contaminated
as German POWs. Also, before the Gulags got fully into swing, mass local
killings through arrest and shooting were in operation.
What interests me more though (as a former government adviser) is finding
out what Western intelligence agencies knew of Stalin's first mass killings,
when he was well, well, well ahead of Hitler in numbers. What did they tell
their political leaders? Did anyone take a decision not to tell the public
for reasons of political safety? It is impossible to believe that even in a
rigidly controlled society where each city block has a supervisor, there is
a huge secret police and there is no unauthorized travel that the fact that
one in twelve (or whatever) people have "disappeared" leaving their flats
and houses unoccupied has not been noticed! I mean, come on! Not in a
country that large. Not even with a really bumbling intelligence service.
Why didn't they splash it around? I mean, Charmberlain for example (I knew
his grandson). Was this all a case of doing a "Henry Kissinger"? This is
getting a long way from war crimes, but it does seem a fascinating "blind
spot" of history at first glance. At least when Pol Pot started we were told
within a few months. When Rwanda happened we found out. And Sudan. It might
sometimes be buried in the press but it is mentioned.
I do agree with Lee that "left" (Communist/Socialist) circles (not Social
Democrat) have failed to come to terms with the Genocide.com figures which
indicate that 2 of the 3 most morally and ethically incorrect forces in the
20th century were communist (the Soviet Union, Communist China and Nazi
Germany). The fact that the US is mentioned in Genocide.com is sad too. The
fact that Gorbachev (Nobel Prize notwithstanding) is a war criminal is a
fact too (bombing in Afghanistan continued as he sought peace). I would feel
a little odd shaking the hands of one of these "rational" maniacs soaked in
the blood of innocents.
====
>From the Brit.:
Allied strategic bombing was the most deadly form of economic warfare ever
devised and showed another side of the indiscriminateness of industrial war.
But in mid-1941 the British Chiefs of Staff soberly concluded that morale,
not industry, was Germany's most vulnerable point and ordered Sir Arthur
Harris of the RAF Bomber Command to concentrate on area boming of cities.
Churchill's scientific adviser Professor L.A. Lindemann of Oxford (later
Lord Cherwell) concurred in April 1942 that one-third of all Germans could
be rendered homeless in 15 months by strategic bombing of cities. The Royal
Air Force accordingly assigned its new Lancaster four-engine bombers to a
total war on German civilians. After attacks on Lübeck and the Ruhr, Harris
sent a thousand planes against Cologne on May 30-31 in an attack that
battered one-third of the city. In 1943, after an interlude of bombing
German submarine pens, the Lancasters launched the Battle of the Ruhr
totaling 18,506 sorties and the Battle of Hamburg numbering 17,021. The fire
raids in Hamburg killed 40,000 people and left a million homeless. The Royal
Air Force then hit Berlin (November 1943 to March 1944) with 20,224 sorties,
avenging many times over all the damage done by the Luftwaffe to London.
By early 1943 the U.S. 8th Air Force joined in the air campaign but eschewed
terror bombing. Its B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators conducted
daylight precision bombing of industrial targets. As a result, they suffered
heavy losses that climaxed in October 1943 over the Schweinfurt ball-bearing
plants, when the United States lost 148 bombers in a week. The Army Air
Forces suspended daylight sorties for months until the arrival of a
long-range fighter, the P-51 Mustang. Bombing then resumed and concentrated
on the German oil industry, creating a serious shortage that virtually
grounded the Luftwaffe by the time of the D-Day invasion. The effectiveness
of strategic bombing is a subject of great debate, since German war
production actually increased over the years 1942-44. German engineers
became masters at shielding equipment, restoring it to operation in a matter
of days, or even moving plants underground. Nor did the German people crack
under British devastation of their towns and homes. But the air offensive
did force the Germans to divert as many as 1,500,000 workers to the constant
task of rebuilding and established the Allied mastery of the air that
permitted the success of the Normandy landings.
---- Great firebombing raids in 1945 brought destruction to every major city except the old capital of Kyoto. ---- Arthur Harris defends the bomber offensive as a comparatively humane method of warfare. His justification for this is that it prevented the youth of Britain being slaughtered on fields like Flanders and Passchendaele like they were in World War One. Harris' rebuttal of the criticism of civilian killing is that every war had witnessed the death of civilians and that the British blockade of the First World War was estimated to have caused 800,000 deaths - mainly women and children because the German forces had to be sustained. An American estimate of deaths caused by the combined bomber offensive lay at 305,000, which is considerably less over a far longer period of time than the British blockage of World War One ---- the March 10, 1945 fire raid on Tokyo were over 100,000 were killed by B-29s bombing from 0100 to 0400 a.m. The heat, smoke and firestorm were absolutely terrifying. 500,000 dead Japanese civilians WWII. ---- _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
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