Posted on 02/13/2013 9:04:00 AM PST by Kid Shelleen
It's the 68th anniversary of the Dresden bombing. In Britain, we don't think about it as much as, perhaps, we should. The bare facts. More than 1,200 RAF and USAAF bombers attacked the city between the 13th and 15th of February 1945, in four raids. They dropped 3,900 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs, killing between 22,000 and 25,000 people, almost all civilians. The city's anti-aircraft defences had all been moved to defend the industrial works of the Ruhr valley. The details are chilling.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
Unfortunately for you, you’re the stupid one!
The comments I made regarding whose fault the war was were about the FIRST World War!!!!!
You knew Kurt Vonnegutt? That’s cool muawiyah. Remember Ice nine - the creative horror in Cat’s Cradle? It was one of my childhood nightmares... Vonnegutt had one creative mind....
Great story. Did they tell you much about it? What did they see... Can you share a little more?
As a guy who was on the ground there, two things stand out. 1] After the Bulge, we advanced through Germany without an attack from their airforce. 2] Their trucks were propelled by a tank burning something other than oil. I don't know what the better alternatives were [except an atomic bomb] but the bombing worked out OK.
This is my new answer to these kinds of requests that I feel bad:
I was not alive when this happened. I am sure it was horrible. I cannot apologize for this any more than I can sympathize for those in Carthage, or Alexandria, the Somme, Pearl Harbor, Nanking, Sherman’s March to the Sea or the horrors of Andersonville.
I can hold an opinion on the war in Iraq, or the guy that cut me off yesterday.
I can study the past and use it to form an course of action when faced with similar circumstances in my life.
I simply cannot work up a whole lot of outrage about stuff that happened years, decades, or centuries before I was born.
Yes, that is what war is all about. In reality there is no such thing as a innocent civilian. Collateral damage is a misnomer. Anything that weakens the enemy's will to fight is OK, the no-no is the enemy becomes stronger in their will to fight. Something that Rumsfeld mentioned.
He and I watched that awful 60s flick, "The Battle of the Bulge", together. Afterwards, I asked what he thought. He said, "It was a fine movie." (it wasn't, but he'd not speak ill of such a thing) ...."but no one in it looked cold enough."
From then on, that's how I measure a war flick - by how cold, wet, tired, and generally miserable the actors in it look. BoB probably got it close to right. "Saving Private Ryan" likely did pretty well, too, and there are a few others.
But, if you watch war movies in general, I never cease to be amazed at how well-groomed and clean the characters look. Maybe they get a smudge of dirt or two on their faces, for effect, but that's all. :-)
I find that the Russians actually did the best war movies, that is the ones that didn’t get too heavy into Commie propaganda, like “Brest Fortress.”
I don't know any women who would live in dirt for weeks at a time. Maybe it's not your grandpa's army any more but it's not for parades either. Dirt is what the infantry is all about.
I'll see what youtube / netflix has to offer.
One is of his unit's encampment during the Bulge - a bunch of pup tents, mostly buried in snow. The other is of Grandpa and his XO, grinning for the camera, with snow up to their waists.
I'm not sure which would be more miserable to live in, mud or snow. Probably by that point, it didn't much matter to them.
Not a risk to the public? So I guess the people he initially murdered, the people he held hostage, and the cops he shot last night, killing one were collateral damage, and not because he was a risk to anyone.
"and that the arson was going “as planned” strongly indicate that there was no intent to risk taking him alive)"
How many other cops/civilian lives would you be willing to risk to "take him alive?"
"Me? I would have been inclined to fill the place with CS teargas, or some related non-lethal agent..."
Sure, providing you could get close enough to make sure you were able to penetrate the cabin without him shooting you. The guy was armed, and waiting to pick off as many cops as he could. And your comment about CS teargas being non-lethal is not true. Toxicity levels vary, depending on the size of the area you are using it in, and it can be lethal if used on people who suffer from asthma, chronic obstructive disease, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease, or individuals taking neuroleptic drugs. Also, you don't call in the military (National Guard) to perform the job of the police.
"I trust the courts and the legal system to render justice."
I'm glad you can trust the courts to do the right thing, because there's a whole lot of murder victims and their families out there who would disagree with you.
I agree. A classic example of being hoist by one's own petard. The Nazi's own racial ideology of the Slavs as untermenschen (which doesn't even make any sense, as the Slavs are just as Aryan as the Teutons) was very largely what defeated them in the end.
Imagine 5M men deducted from the Red Army and added to the Wehrmacht side.
That last sentence is a big crap sandwich. Reading biographical accounts given by those who fought on the German side gives a pretty clear picture of just how poor their supply situation was.
The lack of numbers does not equivocate to merely making an assumption.
There are facts which are still easily interpreted without audited inventory spreadsheets and bar graphs available.
Schizophrenia ran in his line ~ as everyone knows, but not all the Vonneguts were schizophrenic. Kurt went to Shortridge (the smart guys' highschool in Indianapolis) but for a wide variety of reasons he and one of my uncles who attend Tech were buddies ~ even after the war and after Kurt became famous ~ probably through the artsy-fartsy crowd. Both had been ground combat types in Europe ~ my uncle was a ranger and Kurt was taken prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge. Had two uncles by marriage in that battle, and several cousins ~ one of them died there.
Accordingly, as the dutiful son, nephew and cousin of brave warriors I always kept a mental tally on who was who in terms of their relationship to warfare ~ Kurt as a writer was way up there in my teenage mind, and later, as i came to understand the costs of combat more, i could finally understand some of what he wrote about AND where his pacifist inclinations came from. No wonder he left the Midwest or the NYC crowd, but there you have it.
BTW, I grew up in an area that was in the cusp of both Irvington and Brightwood ~ rather poles apart when it came to intellectuals, engineers, movers and shakers and hard working railroadmen, and at times, criminals and cops. A cousin was actually John Dillinger's wife for a time ~ his father lived across the alley from my grandparents.
"War is not a contest with gloves. It is resorted to only when laws (which are rules) have failed."
(Major George S. Patton, Jr., from The Effect of Weapons on War, Cavalry Journal, November 1930, concerning the use of poison gas in war)
"Death, destruction, disease, horror. That's what war is all about, Anan. That's what makes it a thing to be avoided. You've made it neat and painless. So neat and painless, you've had no reason to stop it. And you've had it for five hundred years."
(Captain James T. Kirk, from the Star Trek episode A Taste of Armageddon, explaining his justification for turning a sanitized computer war that had led to the deaths of three million people a year and had lasted for 500 years into a real shooting war.)
Leftists have been pushing the idea of proportional war and Robert McNamara advocates the idea in the movie The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from The Life Of Robert S. Mcnamara. That movie is worth watching, even if he some of the conclusions he advocates are wrong (transcript here), and has a segment on Curtis LeMay's firebombings in Japan that nicely illustrates that Japan suffered the equivalent of dozens of Dresdens before Hiroshima.
The problem with proportional war is that it makes war safer for agressors because they can assume the retaliation with be proportional to their agression, which makes war more thinkable and a rational option rather than unthinkable and an irrational option, which means that (like so many things advocated by leftists), the "cure" means more of what they are trying to prevent, not less. If you want war to be unthinkable, you need to make it brutal and disproportional, not sanitary and proprortional. Dresdens and Hiroshimas are terrible but the horror of modern warfare during WW2 is a big part of why the Cold War remained cold rather than turning hot. The dangers comes from low information voters who forget history and thus may be cursed to repeat it.
I also highly recommend the essay Thank God for the Atomic Bomb (which you can find here) by Paul Fussell, the source that made me aware of the Patton quote above.
Again, if we had maintained strict neutrality Hitler would have been stationed farther forward in WWI and he’d taken a direct hit by a French artillery shell.
Looking ahead a couple of wars will allow you to determine if you should participate in a current one. WWI was the wrong war for the United States
BTW, don’t put words in my mouth. It’s impolite.
Roosevelt also later sold Korea down the river ~ and boy did we end up paying for that bit of progressive stupidity. That simply encouraged the fascists to take over Japan openly.
Seriously, no Conservative or Republican can look back at Teddy favorably. He betrayed America.
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