Dresden Before the War
Dresden After the Firebombing
The firebombing of the city of Dresden on February 13-14, 1945 was one of the most horrific crimes ordered by “Bomber Harris,” aka British Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. This day should remind us that crimes can also be committed by those fighting on the right side.
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By far.
On the other hand, the American state, with its unelected president, venal Supreme Court, silent Congress, gutted Bill of Rights and compliant media leads our attention to the slaughter of thousands of children by Air Force cluster bombs. It appears that the influence of Leo Strauss belies justifications given by the world’s leading apologists for an oil war masquerading as an endless crusade against “terrorism.” This suggests that the unstated purpose of this war can be regarded as the end of any possibility of social justice in a reactionary state. Presumably, a minority of warmongers and apologists brings about the seizure of the Iraqi Oil Ministry.
One should indeed remember the victims of Dresden. But one should also remember how it came to Dresden.
“Viertens:
Die EnglÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?¤nder behaupten, das deutsche Volk wehrt sich gegen die totalen KriegsmaÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?¸nahmen der Regierung. Es will nicht den totalen Krieg, sondern die Kapitulation. Ich frage euch: Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg? Wollt ihr ihn, wenn nÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?¶tig, totaler und radikaler, als wir ihn uns heute überhaupt noch vorstellen kÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?¶nnen?”
J. Goebbels, Sport-Palast Rede, Feb 18th, 1943
…and the crowd answered ‘Yes’!
NV
NV, can you please translate that for those of us who don’t speak German?
“It appears that the influence of Leo Strauss belies justifications given by the world’s leading apologists for an oil war masquerading as an endless crusade against “terrorism.””
Poor Leo Strauss, always being dragged to this kind of discussion…
“The English maintain that the German people are resisting the government’s total war measures. They do not want total war, but capitulation! (Shouts: Never! Never! Never!)
I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?”
That’s Goebbels, working the crowd into a froth. Try FoxNews if you want a recreation, they do it daily. Full text of speech here: http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goeb36.htm
Yipes, that’s definitely Goebbels at his “best.”
James Woudhuysen provides an interesting take on the bombing of Dresden in his article “Dresden: Don’t apologise-understand” posted at: http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA8B9.htm
It always amuses me how easily supposedly decent and “moral” people use the barbarism of others as an excuse to commit unspeakable acts. It’s as if they were just itching for an excuse to murder and plunder.
Another LewRockwell moron. Just what the world didn’t need.
Reagardless, I don’t consider this a crime, unless you expect me to consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki a crime, which I don’t. If German people didn’t believe in the Nazi regime, they would’ve resisted. Silence = consent and sanction.
“If German people didn’t believe in the Nazi regime, they would’ve resisted. Silence = consent and sanction.”
Isn’t that a rather collectivist assertion?
I appreciate the weight of Nathalie Vogel’s remarks. But I don’t think that the endorsement of total war by the criminal regime that ruled Germany — or the enthusiastic support of mass rallies — justifies the incineration of a civilian population, even if a substantial percentage of that population enthusiastically endorsed the crimes of their state. Since Dresden had virtually no military significance, little in the way of military industry, and no major troop basings, it was a campaign of terror, aimed at the civilian population, and therefore immoral and illegal.
The point of warfare, when it is necessary at all, should not be to destroy the enemy, but to defeat them. The bombing of Dresden did not contribute to that defeat, but did destroy thousands of people needlessly. The deaths of innocents as “collateral damage” is hard enough to justify in a just war, although it can be done. (That is recognized even in cases of domestic police actions to catch violent criminals. When shots are fired, they don’t always hit the guilty, but sometimes miss or go through walls and hit the innocent. Yet we don’t insist that police who are chasing kidnappers or serial killers never discharge their weapons.)
Ayn Randian has suggested that those who live under evil regimes should die because they have not overthrown them. I have never understood that logic. It seems remarkably anti-individualistic and indifferent to the plight of innocents.
TGP notes:
“Ayn Randian has suggested that those who live under evil regimes should die because they have not overthrown them. I have never understood that logic. It seems remarkably anti-individualistic and indifferent to the plight of innocents.”
Even more interesting is the total lack of any interest by Objectivists to apply the internal logic of that viewpoint to Americans. Would fire-bombing by the British of NYC have been an acceptable response in 1850 to American slavery?
Obviously Ayn Randian hasn’t kept up on historical thought on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I’d recommend “Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb” by Ronald Takaki, as well as the seminal work by Gar Alperovitz, “Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation With Soviet Power” But, then, I’ve never met an Objectivist who holds the views mentioned by Mr. Palmer above who also has any interest in reading any history…it does so tend to complicate things.
“Even more interesting is the total lack of any interest by Objectivists to apply the internal logic of that viewpoint to Americans.”
I was just thinking about that.
“If American people didn’t believe in the [insert your favorite description here] regime, they would’ve resisted. Silence = consent and sanction”
It seems like a line of thought Al Qaeda would happily endorse…
How can we say that “collateral damage” is hard to justify? It’s either justifiable or it is not. I say that it is in the battle to defeat totalitarian regimes.
It’s not collectivist, it’s putting responsibility where it belongs. How many libertarians have I heard say “People get the government they deserve”? If the Nazi regime was evil, and the people deserved that government, should we not then destroy the very citizens who are de facto enabling that government?
Using that logic, Goebbels wasn’t really all that guilty, was he? He just did the propaganda work and was the idea-man. But we recognize that he enabled evil, as did the German citizens for failing to properly resist. A moral, widespread resistance can’t fail, because the government that does the evil requires the sancion of citizens.
Final question: if there had been one German tank in Dresden, could we do it then? What if their factories contributed to the war effort? Can we not destroy these because of collateral damage?
P.S., As a history student, you can stow that “Objectivists are so uneducated about history”. I’ve heard that garbage before, and it’s just not true. Check out Peikoff’s “Ominous Paralells” for a very intelligent take on history and issues germane to this discussion.
“Ayn Randian” (the rabid, foam-flecked Lindsay Perigo, I suspect) offers us Leonard Peikoff’s half-educated screed on the “Ominous Parallels” as an example of how knowledgeable Objectivists are about history. What a laugh riot! ROTFLMAO!
“Silence = consent and sanction”
I think this sentence is full of prejudice.
It labels people in advance as being something that they aren’t necessarily.
Generalization is wrong, it leaves so many casulties behind – such as brave, intelligent people who end up being labeled as supporters of regimes that they actually fought against.
I would also like to add – it doesn’t mean that there is a silence just because Ayn Randian can’t hear the voices of liberty.
Jeff
You should know better, Linz would never compliment Peikoff in such a fashion. And did you actually read “Ominous Paralells”, or are you prejudicially dismissing it because it comes from Peikoff? Individualistic, indeed. Oh, and Foam-flecked? We would BOTH be caught in Communist Summer Camp before using prepubescent idiocies like “ROTFLMAO”. Gain some maturity and debating points, and get back to me. I do find it funny, however, that I am being berated for painting all German people with the guilty brush, but no one seems to be bothered with the collectivist “Objectivists know nothing about history” ad hominem. I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning!
Maybe someone will answer to me how responsible Goebbels was for the Nazis, and whether his ardent support meant that he should die, even if he never killed a single person. And how does that translate to Dresden? How much material, supplies and public support do you have to supply to an evil regime before you’re guilty?
Still frothing at the mouth but well past puberty (whatever that may have to do with intellectual matters), “Ayn Randian,” still afraid to post under his or her own name, wonders whether I’ve read Peikoff’s idiotic book. Oh, yes. Oh, yes indeed. Back when it first came out. At that time, I began writing an essay review in which I hoped to expose the many absurdities that lie within its pages. But I gave it up and never finished the piece, since, as far as I could tell, nobody but Objectivists was taking it seriously anyway. And there’s no point in trying to talk to Objectivists about such things; Chris Sciabarra and one or two others excepted, they’re impervious to reason.
I suppose the main problem with The Ominous Parallels is that it was written and published during Ayn Rand’s lifetime, which meant it had to win her approval before it could see print. And her own knowledge of history left much to be desired, as the warmed-over, half-understood Jacob Burckhardt she served up under the title “For the New Intellectual” eloquently attests.
How does one consider the bombing of Dresden, not to mention of Hiroshima, if one believes that such an action massively shortens a war and leads to far fewer casualties overall? It’s hard to imagine anything as horrible as living in a city which is firebombed or nuked, but then it’s hard to imagine supporting Hitler or Tojo….
Rossputin makes an excellent point, what if the bombing of Dresden shortens the war by breaking the will of the enemy, saving countless German lives and, needless to say, American soldiers?
Do you think the Nazis really cared about what happened to its own citizens?
Rossputin (not to be confused with me) says:
“It’s hard to imagine anything as horrible as living in a city which is firebombed or nuked, but then it’s hard to imagine supporting Hitler or Tojo….
Just as it’s hard to imagine supporting FDR or Truman, but then nuking large masses of innocent individuals is quite easy when the supplicant masses so readily make excuses…
The idea that bombing Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaka in any way shortened the war or saved American lives is ludicrous, but don’t take my word for it: read what Eisenhower and the chief Allied Commanders of the Pacific said about it at the time, quoting in the references I gave earlier.
It is intellectually amusing, to say the least, for Objectivists to justify war-mongering that, intellectually, can only be justified by a puritanistic streak of morality that must be forcibly ablied to all.
Ayn Randian: “What if the bombing of Dresedn shorten the war,…saving ..l.German and American lives?” Yes, what if contrary to any known evidence, killing tens of thousands of innocent people, an order of magnitude greater than 9/11, led to a few less casualties amoung those who volunteered to fight? What then? Asshole.
A number of interesting questions have been posed above.
Let’s start with Ayn Randian’s statement that,
“How can we say that ‘collateral damage’ is hard to justify? It’s either justifiable or it is not. I say that it is in the battle to defeat totalitarian regimes.”
It’s hard to justify in two ways. First, there is (or should be) a presumption against killing innocent people. (I’d be willing to defend a presumption against killing in general; one would have to show guilt or some other good reason, such as self-defense, to justify killing, rather than not-killing.) So in order to justify taking a life, or even imposing serious risk of loss of life, one would have to undertake the effort to justify it. And that’s “hard.” Second, there are hard decisions to make even if one has taken the effort to justify the use of force that may inflict harm on innocents. For example, if one could reduce the risk of harm to innocents, but only by increasing the risk of harm to oneself, how would one weigh a reduction of risk of harm to innocents against an increase of risk of harm to oneself? (Note that police make such decisions, as well, when they decide whether to resort to deadly force, whether to undertake a car chase that would pose a danger to pedestrians or other drivers, and so on.) All of those are “hard” problems. One may decide that risk to innocents is justified, or one may not, but the fact that one has decided does not mean that such risk (or certainly) is not “hard to justify.”
Ayn Randian asks further,
“Final question: if there had been one German tank in Dresden, could we do it then? What if their factories contributed to the war effort? Can we not destroy these because of collateral damage?”
Let’s think about that a bit further. What if there had been one German tank in Europe, could we nuke Europe? What if factories in Europe contributed to the war effort? Could we nuke Europe then and not worry about any collateral damage? I hope that Ayn Randian would agree that the answer to those questions would surely have to be “no.” If “no” is a possible answer, and there is a presumption against harming innocents, then “yes” has to be justified, i.e., the burden of proof is on the one who says “yes,” and burdens are by definition “hard” to carry.
I think that Jasna’s point is a very important one: “I would also like to add – it doesn’t mean that there is a silence just because Ayn Randian can’t hear the voices of liberty.” There were and are opposition movements in tyrannical states. They don’t deserve to live under tyranny. Indeed, I doubt that Ayn Randian actually thinks that people “deserve” to be deprived of their rights, treated like beasts, raped, murdered, or tortured to death. If that were true, then any attempt to liberate them, or for them to liberate themselves, would be itself an injustice, because they “deserved” their terrible state. That can’t be right.
Rossputin’s question is also of central importance:
“How does one consider the bombing of Dresden, not to mention of Hiroshima, if one believes that such an action massively shortens a war and leads to far fewer casualties overall? It’s hard to imagine anything as horrible as living in a city which is firebombed or nuked, but then it’s hard to imagine supporting Hitler or Tojo….”
It’s a good question. It would, even so, require evidence and posing the question recognizes, rather than eliminates, the presumption against harming innocents. Moreover, there is no evidence that the bombing of Dresden shortened the war or saved the lives of any Allied soldiers. As a general rule, the targeting of civilians yields even greater resistance and induces the other side to even greater exertions. (Some of the evidence is gathered in Caleb Carr’s “The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians” (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375760741/qid=1108446672/sr=2-3/ref=pd_ka_b_2_3/002-9009488-1406435 .)
The deliberate targeting of civilians is criminal. If attacking military targets poses risks to noncombatants, one may be justified in doing so, but the deliberate targeting of noncombatants is unacceptable, immoral, and illegal. One could, of course, create various hypotheticals, in which one specifies that one “knows” that killing off 1,000 children will bring the whole war to an end, and thereby spare 600,000 lives, but the hypothetical conditions are not, in fact, characteristic of the world in which wartime decisions are made.
I used the occasion of the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, not to raise old issues about the war (or to echo charges of the kind made by the skinhead and nationalist trash who demonstrated today in Dresden), but to suggest that even those who believe that a military action is justified should be aware of the possibility of crimes committed on behalf of their cause. In the classical tradition of “just war” thinking, “ius ad bellum” refers to the justice of the war, while “ius in bello” refers to the justice of conduct in war. Giving an affirmative answer to the question of whether a war satisfies the first criterion is no guarantee that the second will also be satisfied. I believe that the war on al Qaeda meets the criteria of ius ad bellum, but that does not discharge the U.S. government or the military from abiding by the principles of ius in bello and vigorously enforcing those rules when they are violated.
Ayn Randian also asked a question that I overlooked:
“Maybe someone will answer to me how responsible Goebbels was for the Nazis, and whether his ardent support meant that he should die, even if he never killed a single person. And how does that translate to Dresden? How much material, supplies and public support do you have to supply to an evil regime before you’re guilty?”
Of course Goebbels was guilty for having organized mass murder. The person who orders the act is, if anything, more guilty than the person who pulls the trigger. To generate responsibilty (in Aristotle’s terms, to be susceptible to “praise and blame”) actions have to be described in terms of intentions, and not merely in terms of physics. In regards to the question of how much material one would have had to have supplied, it can’t be “any amount” at all. Were that true, the waiter who served food to a killer, who therefore lived long enough to kill his next victim, would be as guilty as the killer, and would deserve to die. Or Ayn Randian himself or herself would would be responsible for all of the crimes of the his or her government (and there surely are some), on the grounds that he or she has paid taxes. Again, that seems quite implausible. (By that logic, Ayn Rand, who lived in the USSR, was responsible for the crimes of that regime, certainly while she lived there and probably even after she had escaped, for if you’re guilty of murder and deserve to die, how does moving to another country absolve you of that guilt?)
Ayn Randian’s questions, when pursued consistently, show that the issues are not so easily resolved in the manner he or she believes to be self-evident.
It seems like there are people who publicly praise the killing of civilians, like Ann Coulter.
Going through the FIRE website( http://www.thefire.org/index.php/torch/#5324 ), there was a story about her with a reminder to her words after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.”
You can find the whole article here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/coulter/coulter091301.shtml
Best regards,
Jasna
I just read a very strange sentence:
“”If German people didn’t believe in the Nazi regime, they would’ve resisted. Silence = consent and sanction.””
It is very simple and easy, to say words like these in a comfortable chair. According to law, “silence” is never a “declaration of consent”.
Probably those who say quotations like the above, do not know very much about the Nazi period. To show you only the Tip of the Iceberg:
Radio and Press had been 100% controlled by the NSDAP Goverment. TV didn’t exist yet, and in radio you heard a lot of lies.
People knew that very well. So secretly at night, they were listening to a “Feindsender”, the Ennemy’s Stations: Mostly London and Moswow.
But: If you were caught listening them, you would be dead the very same day. Just one remark in public like “it will be impossible to win this war” would be “Wehrkraftzersetzung”, sorry i dont know how to translate this. = destruction of the ability to fight? ( yes i know, some german words are long. But you what you dont it, that in English you need a much longer phrase for the same thing).
Anyway: i am curious, how many “good” Americans, French, English etc. would risk their lives by the slip of an unreflected remark, by listening to the wrong radio station, or maybe even by hiding a jewish neighbour? How many of the “Good Allies” would have risked the instant Death penalty for hiding a person that they hardly know? Not many, i guess.
I stem from a family mixed jewish-christian (i refuse to say “jewish-german”, as the Germans Jews saw themselves as “German” of course – what else?).
And my Ancestors were betrayed in Amsterdam by the Allies – and saved by a German, who not only risked his life, but also gave his life for a jewish woman: My Grandmother.
I am sorry to have destroyed all your stereotypes that you see in American Black-and White Movies from the 50ies.
I have been to Dresden myself. Everytime i go there it is depressing, and certain Areas i cannot enter without getting feelings of suicide.
In the inner city, you find few places that are older than, say, 50 years. A Heritage of Mankind, a 1000 years old, one jewel of European Culture had been wiped out in one night. If America had fought the Nazis, that would have been a good thing. Only, targeting One Million Civilians – Mothers, Children, Babies – who have nothing to do with the war , whilst leaving the Military sites completely untouched, doesn’t make sense. Punishing the Innocent for something they have not done does not make sense – even less so, when you have a look at who were employed by the NASA shortly after the War. Yes – the Rocket that brought the first people to the Moon was constructed by the very same man who constructed the V2 for Adolph Hitler: The direct predecessor of the Apollo Rocket was Hitler’s deadly weapon. But this is only one tiny part of the hidden truth. Many of the top-ranking Nazis were put secretly back into government by the American Forces in Germany in the 50ies. One was working directly together with the then Chancellor, Adenauer: Heinz Globke. Globke became State Sectretary, with full consent of England and America in the 50ies. But do you know, who Globke was? He was one of the Creators of the “Nürnberger Rassengesetze” in the 1930ies – the Race Law.
Whilst the Innocent in Dresden had been murdered, the real Crooks were rewarded. Sorry, this makes me sick.
regards,
Peter