http://www.sightings.com/general8/dresden.htm
Churchill And The Slaughter
Of Dresden...Double Standards
By Taki Theodorakis
From NY Press
2-28-1
At the Ditchley Park conference during World War II, Winston Churchill called
for a "balance of virtue" in Europe rather than a balance of power. Soon
after that, with Germany about to collapse in February 1945, with East and
West Germany already occupied by the Allied armies and the Russians, he
mercilessly ordered an air bombardment of Dresden - the Venice of the North -
which was packed with old men, women and children. To paraphrase an old
Winnie speech, some virtue. There were no factories, no army depots, no
communication centers, nothing but cathedrals, museums and monuments in
Dresden, but 135,000 civilians had to be incinerated in one night alone
because of an Englishman,s pathological hatred of the Germans. I once asked
Churchill,s grandson and namesake, an old friend of mine, about Dresden. "Now
look here, old boy," he answered rather aggressively - but always smiling,
like the English tend to do when they,re about to lift your wallet - "What
about your Germans, they weren,t exactly nice guys, were they?" Young Winston
missed the point. Hitler may not have been the most compassionate of men, but
Churchill was the one wearing the white hat. He was supposed to fight clean.
Or was it perhaps normal that Churchill had anthrax bacteria cultivated
specifically to drop over German territory? Again, very late in the war. I
suppose megalomaniac criminals like Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot never
spared a single thought for the millions and millions of people who were
murdered as they strove to achieve world revolution and world domination. But
Churchill? Air Marshal Arthur ("Bomber") Harris, who devised the system of
bombing civilian targets, is regarded in some circles - and not just in
Germany - as little better than a mass murderer. During World War II the
major protagonists used bombing in very different ways. The "nicest,"
ironically, were the Luftwaffe, which preferred tactical bombing in
conjunction with ground forces (Blitzkrieg). The Americans were almost as
"nice." The U.S. Army Air Corps believed in strategic bombing, but condemned
terror attacks on unarmed civilians, opting instead for the precision bombing
of military and industrial targets. Not so the Brits. They were convinced
that wars could be won only by eroding enemy morale - which meant attacking
the civilian population. (Let us not also forget that our British cousins
were the first to use deadly concentration camps, against Afrikaners during
the Boer War.) Let,s face it. Bombers, when deployed strategically, are
fundamentally a terror weapon. The trouble is that bombing has never
destroyed civilian morale in any meaningful way; if anything it unites the
victims against their enemies. Some 600,000 unarmed German civilians died
from bombing alone, but the German troops continued to gallantly fight until
the very bitter end. The opposite side of the argument was that the Germans
had it coming to them, and that they could have surrendered to stop the
bombing. That,s a foolish argument. A civilian did not exactly have a choice
in Germany back then. And then there is the ludicrous Daniel Goldhagen theory
that all Germans were "willing executioners" and deserved everything they
got. Which brings me to the point I wish to make: America,s most enduring
contribution to history is that, unlike other great powers, it did not
routinely use force to impose its will. (Okay, a little bit in Cuba, and a
little bit in Mexico, and a little bit in the Philippines, and what,s an
Indian or two...) But suddenly, with the coming to power of the Draft Dodger,
the cruise missile and strategic bombing became Uncle Sam,s favorite
diplomatic maneuver. We know that tiny Central American countries have gone
to war over a soccer match, but launching missiles to divert opinion over a
blowjob is 100 times more ridiculous. The Balkans are still suffering
terribly from NATO,s bombing, an act that was as immoral as it was
opportunistic on the part of the preening war criminal Madeleine Albright and
her gang. (She needed a legacy.) It was reported in September 1999 that
levels of radiation in Macedonia had increased 800 percent, and last year
mothers in Bosnia were giving birth to children with leukemia. Both the
Clinton and Blair gangs at first refused to acknowledge that depleted
uranium-tipped rounds were used, butas everyone knowsthe last time Clinton
and Blair told the truth was very, very long ago, when they were still in
diapers, if then. The sole purpose and justification for using depleted
uranium in weapons is that shells are capable of penetrating heavily armored
tanks. Some 31,000 such rounds were fired from NATO aircraft in Kosovo; the
total number of Yugoslav tank losses was 13. Which means that the huge
majority of rounds either missed or were fired indiscriminately. Dresden
lives. The politicians who order such shootings do not have the slightest
interest in military realities, just tv coverage in the nightly news. The
long-term contamination of the region is not their concern. Last week my
colleague Scott McConnell sure got it right. (When was the last time he got
it wrong?) World domination through force of arms isn,t supposed to be the
American way. George Bush was right to fight for Kuwait. Clinton was wrong to
murder hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through sanctions. Playing the
biggest boy on the block will see Uncle Sam end up the way of the Russian
bear. President Bush needs to reshape sanctions on Iraq. Colin Powell, a
decent man, understands the limitations of bombing. Saddam Hussein is
probably more popular today than he was 10 years ago. there must be another
way, and the new regime in Washington has to see this before it's too late.
