Your point being?
Posted on 08/23/2007 12:54:32 PM PDT by lizol
Dresden vs. Auschwitz
By Aviva Lori
In February 2005, Dr. Gilad Margalit visited Dresden. The winter of 2005 was cold, but at the events marking the 60th anniversary of the Allied bombing of the city it was hot. Very hot. About 5,000 neo-Nazis descended on Dresden from all over Germany and from throughout Europe for the big demonstration on February 13, a Sunday.
It was a colorful, violent demonstration that sought to carve out territory in the streets and especially in the national consciousness. The massive physical presence of the demonstrators only heightened the growing recognition in Germany in recent years that the time has come to make it plain that the victims of World War II did not have a monopoly on suffering.
The questions of who suffered more and who is more to blame are not new questions in Germany, but they have been increasingly troubling the Germans. Responsibility and guilt feelings are no longer self-evident. Advertisement "It was a huge demonstration," Margalit recalls. "All the streams of this scene were there, from the wildest radicals - tattooed, skinhead thugs - to local members of parliament, well-dressed, pleasant-smelling people. They marched to commemorate the bombing raids on the city, which have come to symbolize the suffering of the entire German people. True, [the demonstrators] were a relatively small number out of a population of 74 million, but it took place in the light of day and with police protection. And they don't want to hear about the Holocaust."
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
The neo-Nazis are constantly trying to establish moral equivalence between the crimes committed y Germany and the alleged crimes committed against Germany. It is a cornerstone of Holocaust denial.
If you can treat Dresden and Auschwitz as acts that balance each other, then there is no Holocaust, no crime, no genocide. Just the cost of war, a war in which neither side was worse than the other.
It’s pure scheisse, of course, but that’s their case.
Among other things. Guernica was of no strategic importance. It was, pure and simple, a practice range for the Nazis. They were honing the Blitzkrieg.
It is stark reality.
We lost 20,000 Americans in a few weeks in a defensive battle fought against the Wehrmacht at the Bulge.
If Dresden had been used as intended to reinforce the Eastern front, then Western Wehrmacht forces would have dug in and the effort to penetrate them offensively would certainly have been more punishing than the Bulge.
It would have taken months and been extremely costly.
Yes it was. The Allies explicitly acknowledged and embraced the tactic of “terror” bombing (the word appears repeatedly) of civilians. One Army Air Corps general, one Frederick Anderson, rationalised the slaughter of German civilians at the time, expressing the pretty concept of terror bombing as morally edifying: terror bombing was: “not expected in itself to shorten the war ... However, it is expected that the fact that Germany was struck all over will be passed on, from father to son, thence to grandson; that a deterrent for the initiation of future wars will definitely result.”
Isn’t it funny how what goes around comes around? The Germans learned the lesson all too well — pounded into them by an America that, having long ago forgotten its services as moral instructor to the German people, has discovered a latter-day horror of terrorism. Sure enough, the Germans declined to be a part of the current adventure in Iraq — and are despised for it by the sons and grandsons of those bomber crews.
Incorrect.
One Army Air Corps general, one Frederick Anderson, rationalised the slaughter of German civilians at the time
Frederick Anderson, as a brigadier general of the Air Force, was hardly the authority on Allied military doctrine - however he chose to describe what he believed he was doing, he was following the orders of his commander whose stated purpose both privately and publicly was quite different from Anderson's statements.
Perhaps Anderson saw himself as committing crimes and perhaps he personally did - but the intent of Allied bombardment was to shorten the war and save the lives of their own troops.
The Germans learned the lesson all too well — pounded into them by an America that, having long ago forgotten its services as moral instructor to the German people, has discovered a latter-day horror of terrorism.
An eloquently stated moral equivalence between atrocities like 9/11 and legitimate military operations like the bombing of Dresden.
But you go further:
Sure enough, the Germans declined to be a part of the current adventure in Iraq — and are despised for it by the sons and grandsons of those bomber crews.
This postulates a moral equivalence between USAF WWII crews, Mohammed Atta and our currently serving forces in Iraq.
I'm going to assume that you are playing devil's advocate and are not actually as morally bankrupt as these statements imply.
The bombing of Dresden was a military necessity undertaken against a military target by commanders whose goal was to shorten a war and spare the lives of their troops.
The Iraq intervention was a military necessity undertaken against the military targets of a regime that had already engaged ina cts of war against the United States and it was undertaken with the express purpose of saving American lives by taking the battle to terrorists rather than waiting for many more atrocities on the scale of 9/11.
9/11 was an act of pure criminality undertaken by evil men who wished to murder innocent Americans solely because they didn't like the fact that the government of Saudi Arabia invited the United States to station troops in Saudi territory.
There is no equivalence between the first two undertakings and the last-named crime.
The Germans displayed great moral cowardice in following a genocidal maniac from 1933-1945. They paid the full price of that cowardice.
The Germans in 2003 exhibited great moral cowardice in choosing to appease Islamists and they will pay the full price at the hands of the people they have foolishly appeased.
If they manage to escape the full brunt of the Islamist menace gestating in their midst it will be because the United States will rescue them despite their malfeasance.
Those who say "let us do evil so that good may come" are justly condemned.
Incorrect.
I'm afraid not:
"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing material out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary provision would have to be made for the Germans themselves. I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction."
Winston Churchill, 28th March 1945 memorandum to Air Marshall Arthur "Bomber" Harris (n.b. post-Dresden raid)
I'm going to assume that you are playing devil's advocate and are not actually as morally bankrupt as these statements imply.
And deny yourself all the pleasures that moral vanity affords? Don't strain yourself.
Your point being?
The point is that the bombing of Dresden, far from being evil, was morally justified.
If I need to kill a bankrobber to prevent him from killing more hostages, I am not "doing evil so that good may come", I am doing something decidedly unpleasant but morally just.
The quote from Churchill implies that he - who was not engaged in day-to-day military planning - was under the impression that bombings were undertaken for purely psychological reasons.
He was unaware - unlike Eisenhower and George Marshall - than the Allied bombardment of Dresden involved only 16% of the bombs dropped in the air raid on Cologne, which was a city of comparable size and area.
No one today claims that the death of a confirmed 40,000 Germans in the bombing of Hamburg were an atrocity or a war crime.
Yet the 22,000 confirmed deaths at Dresden receive that label - why?
Because the people of Dresden were fed continuously with Red propaganda that Soviet troops were only benign liberators while the evil capitalist UK and US were monsters who targeted Dresden for no reason. The people of Cologne, West Berlin and Hamburg were not fed such propaganda.
In your Churchill quote, Churchill addressed Arthur Harris, the man who directed the UK bombardment (and who was Frederick Anderson's boss) - Harris' assessment of Dresden was "a mass of munitions works, an intact government center, and a key transportation center."
And deny yourself all the pleasures that moral vanity affords?
I revel in your sense or irony.
And now you directly declare a moral equivalence between the Allies and the Nazis.
That's even more repugnant than before.
My point, which you deliberately ignored:
Anderson was following legitimate orders which he apparently erroneously construed to be criminal.
In reality, those orders were not criminal and the intent of the commander giving those orders (Arthur Harris) was not criminal - his intentions were militarily and morally legitimate.
A soldier must follow legitimate orders and must disobey criminal ones.
The men in the dock at Nuremberg both issued and followed criminal orders.
The airmen at Dresden both issued and followed legitimate ones.
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