Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Monday, February 13, 2006
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions
Daniel Webster sez: “Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.”
(Thanks, RMJ)
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I found this at: http://www.bradblog.com:
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61 years ago today in Dresden:
On February 13-14, 1945, Allied bombers laid siege to the German city of Dresden. To read something I wrote about that “good war” atrocity, please click here. For more about the actual bombing, please click more at the end of this post.
The bombing of Dresden, of course, was the dramatic climax in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Speaking of novels, Noam Chomsky sez: “It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” That goes double for novels published by Mainstay Press. Founded in 2005 by three radical authors—Tony Christini, Mike Palecek and Andre Vltchek—Mainstay is off and running with six books already released and several more forthcoming. Recently, I asked Tony Christini a few questions via e-mail.
To read the full interview, please click here.
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Thanks...
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On February 13-14, 1945, Allied bombers laid siege to the German town of Dresden—once known as “Florence on the Elbe.” With the Russians advancing rapidly towards Berlin, tens of thousands of German civilians fled into Dresden, believing it to be safe from attack. As a result, the city’s population swelled from its usual 600,000 to at least one million.
Following up a smaller raid on Hamburg in July 1943 that killed at least 48,000 civilians, Winston Churchill enlisted the aid of British scientists to cook up “a new kind of weather.” The goal was not only maximum destruction and loss of life, but also to show their communist allies what a capitalist war machine could do...in case Stalin had any crazy ideas.
An internal Royal Air Force memo described the anti-communist plans as such: “Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester, is also [by] far the largest unbombed built-up area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter, with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter… but to house the administrative services displaced from other areas… The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most...and to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
There was never any doubt on the part of the Allies exactly who they would be bombing at Dresden. Brian S. Blades, a flight engineer in a Lancaster of 460 (Australian) Squadron, wrote that during briefings, he heard phrases like “Virgin target,” and “Intelligence reports thousands of refugees streaming into the city from other bombed areas.”
Beside the stream of refugees, Dresden was also known for its china and its Baroque and Rococo architecture. Its galleries housed works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Botticelli.
On the evening of February 13, none of this would matter.
Using the Dresden soccer stadium as a reference point, over 2000 British Lancasters and American Flying Fortresses dropped loads of gasoline bombs every 50 square yards out from this marker. The enormous flame that resulted was eight square miles wide, shooting smoke three miles high. For the next eighteen hours, regular bombs were dropped on top of this strange brew. Twenty-five minutes after the bombing, winds reaching 150 miles-per-hour sucked everything into the heart of the storm. Because the air became superheated and rushed upward, the fire lost most of its oxygen, creating tornadoes of flame that can suck the air right out of human lungs.
Seventy percent of the Dresden dead either suffocated or died from poison gases that turned their bodies green and red. The intense heat melted some bodies into the pavement like bubblegum, or shrunk them into three-foot long charred carcasses. Clean-up crews wore rubber boots to wade through the “human soup” found in nearby caves. In other cases, the superheated air propelled victims skyward only to come down in tiny pieces as far as fifteen miles outside Dresden.
“The flames ate everything organic, everything that would burn,” wrote journalist Phillip Knightley. “People died by the thousands, cooked, incinerated, or suffocated. Then American planes came the next day to machine-gun survivors as they struggled to the banks of the Elbe.”
The Allied firebombing did more than shock and awe. The bombing campaign murdered more than 100,000 people—mostly civilians—but the exact number may never be known due to the high number of refugees in the area.
In his wartime memoirs, Sir Winston Churchill seemed unable to work up much emotion in recalling the Dresden assault. He wrote: “We made a heavy raid in the latter month on Dresden, then a centre of communication of Germany’s Eastern Front.”
We’re still a few years away from Dubya’s inevitable post-White House book deal. The final chapters of this epoch might still be ours to write.
Copyright © 2005-2007 Mickey Z.
