The Zionist invocation of the bombing of Dresden has been on my mind. They use it to justify the Gaza massacre because, the 'argument' goes: Britain did bad things to Germany in WW2, including killing thousands of civilians in cities like Dresden, but that was necessary to stop Hitler & the Nazis. Now Israel needs to do the same to destroy Hamas, with thousands of Palestinian citizens either unfortunate collateral damage, or even justified targets themselves because of assumed support for Hamas. There is an attempt to guilt trip here, along with the hugely inappropriate comparison - one of the Zionists even used the phrase 'Oh, so your hands are clean' to a reporter. The purpose of this, I think, is to garner support for their genocidal campaign by putting western audiences in the same boat as them, and with the brutal colonial pasts of western countries this has some power, and is somewhat hard to counter.
One way would be to point to the Blitz as a counter analogy, as the 'area bombing' of Germany was justified in part because of the indiscriminate bombing by the Luftwaffe of British cities like Coventry and London. This is useful because it invokes a cultural memory of having been the victims of urban bombardment, which would lead to an empathic reaction towards civilians in Gaza.
But I think a deeper, more pertinent response would be to look at the uses of 'area bombing' prior to WW2. Surprisingly enough this can be done through the career of one man: Arthur 'Bomber' Harris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Harris And where did he develop the tactic? Iraq, India and... Palestine.
'In April 1920 Squadron Leader Harris was jointly appointed station commander of RAF Digby and commander of No. 3 Flying Training School RAF. He later served in different capacities in India, Mesopotamia and Persia. He said of his service in India that he first became involved in bombing during the usual annual North West Frontier tribesmen trouble.[19] His squadron was equipped with poorly-maintained Bristol F.2 Fighter aircraft.[20] In Mesopotamia he commanded a Vickers Vernon squadron. Harris later wrote of his time there that "We cut a hole in the nose and rigged up our own bomb racks and I turned those machines into the heaviest and best bombers in the command."[21] Harris also contributed to the development of bombing techniques by promoting the deployment of delay-action bombs, which were subsequently utilised by RAF Iraq Command during their suppression of various Middle Eastern revolts (such as the Iraqi revolt of 1920, the Adwan Rebellion, the Ahmed Barzani revolt and the Mahmud Barzanji revolts). Harris once remarked that "the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand."[22]
[...]
In 1936 Harris commented on the Palestinian Arab revolt that "one 250 lb. or 500 lb. bomb in each village that speaks out of turn" would satisfactorily solve the problem.'
This would pave the way for his later attitudes towards German civilians and the justification for visiting mass death on them for explicitly terrorist aims, which even the imperialist mass murderer Winston Churchill found distasteful (probably because it was aimed at white Europeans):
'Harris was just one of an influential group of high-ranking Allied air commanders who continued to believe that massive and sustained area bombing alone would force Germany to surrender. On a number of occasions he wrote to his superiors claiming the war would be over in a matter of months, first in August 1943 following the tremendous success of the Battle of Hamburg (codenamed Operation Gomorrah), when he assured the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, that his force would be able "to produce in Germany by April 1st 1944 a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable" and then again in January 1944.[45] Winston Churchill continued to regard the area bombing strategy with distaste and official public statements maintained that Bomber Command was attacking only specific industrial and economic targets, with any civilian casualties or property damage being unintentional but unavoidable. In October 1943, emboldened by his success in Hamburg and increasingly irritated with Churchill's hesitance to endorse his tactics wholeheartedly, Harris urged the government to be honest with the public regarding the purpose of the bombing campaign,
"The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive ... should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany ... the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories."[46][47][48]
[...]
In his postwar memoirs Harris wrote, "In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method".[66] His wartime views were expressed in an internal secret memo to the Air Ministry after the Dresden raid in February 1945
"I ... assume that the view under consideration is something like this: no doubt in the past we were justified in attacking German cities. But to do so was always repugnant and now that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from proceeding with these attacks. This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier."[66][67]
So perhaps the best response would be to go one better with the guilt trip (while not accepting that ordinary citizens are responsible for the acts of their governments & militaries): - Yes, the British did bad things to Germans in WW2. They were responding in kind to prior German aggression, but they had also used this tactic in a similar way on the very people you are now targeting with even greater firepower. It was barbaric and inhuman when Hitler did it, it was barbaric and inhuman when Bomber Harris did it, and it's barbaric and inhuman when you're doing it. There's no acceptable justification for dropping high explosives on civilians. It's terrorism.
The first intifada: when Palestine rose against the British
Historian John Newsinger looks back at when Palestinians fought against British Empire and Zionist settlers
On 7 September 1938, British troops descended on the village of al-Bassa in Palestine. They came to punish the villagers for an attack on a British lorry that had been blown up a few days earlier. The villagers were rounded up and their homes were destroyed.
Some of them were shot out of hand and others were publicly beaten, flogged, in front of their families and neighbours. The collective punishment culminated with some fifty villagers being packed onto a bus, which was then blown up. This was how the British crushed the great Palestinian revolt.
The Palestinians’ first intifada—“uprising”—had begun with the call for a general strike and boycott on 20 April 1936. This protest was driven from below, forced on a reluctant Palestinian leadership that quickly tried to take control of the movement.
It was a militant protest against both British rule and against the British sponsored Zionist settlement in the country. When the British had occupied Palestine at the end of the First World War, they had set about implementing the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which had promised the country to the Zionist movement. The intention was to create a Zionist colony that would be dependent on and loyal to the British Empire, bolstering the British position throughout the Middle East.
This is, of course, much the same role that Israel is expected to play for the US today. As far as the British were concerned, one consequence of this plan was that the Palestinians could not be allowed any vestige of self-determination, even that conceded to Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East. The Palestinians would never agree to their own removal, their replacement by Zionist settlers, so they were to be denied any voice in the colony’s affairs. From the very beginning Zionist settlement met with resistance.
On top of that, throughout the 1920s hardly any European Jews wanted to settle in Palestine. This began to change with the rise of the Nazis in Germany and far right, antisemitic movements elsewhere. It is vital to remember that support for the Zionist movement was given a tremendous boost by the virulence of European antisemitism. And not just of antisemitism in Germany, Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe.
The effective closure of the British and US borders to Jewish refugees fleeing persecution, which was to eventually culminate in mass murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust, inevitably strengthened the Zionists. Many Jews felt they had nowhere else to turn. The figures speak for themselves. In 1931 just over 4,000 Jewish settlers arrived in Palestine. By 1933 the number had risen to over 33,000, to more than 45,000 the following year and to over 66,000 in 1935. It was this that provoked full-scale rebellion.
The general strike lasted from April until October 1936 with increasing levels of violence. Many towns and cities were effectively taken over by the strikers, with barricades erected and snipers firing on troops and police. Troops were sent in to “restore order”.
In June 1936, the British re-occupied Jaffa. The Palestinian inhabitants were punished when the British demolished much of the old city.
The British dynamited over 230 buildings, destroying homes and livelihoods, giving people no time to salvage their possessions. Thousands were left homeless and destitute. As one British officer put it, “That will fucking well teach them.” He was put under arrest for “using obscene language whilst on active service”. Standards had to be maintained! By the time the general strike was called off, over a thousand Palestinians had been killed.
In any other colony, the scale of the resistance would have forced the British to make concessions to the “native” population. In Palestine, however, the commitment to the Zionists severely limited the British room for manoeuvre. Indeed, in the course of the struggle, the British had actually come to rely more and more on Zionist support. They were increasingly involved in helping the British military effort. And at the same time the Histadrut union federation was helping break the general strike, providing scabs to replace striking Palestinians.
Even so the British set up a commission to try and find a settlement that could prevent a return to conflict. The Peel Commission in July 1937 recommended the partition of the country with the Zionists receiving some 40 percent of the land. This would have placed a large Palestinian subject population under Zionist rule, awaiting expulsion as more settlers arrived. Expelling the Palestinians was certainly the Zionist leadership’s intention. Not only that, the territorial settlement was only provisional as far as the Zionists were concerned. As soon as they were strong enough they would take more Arab land, driving out the population. The Palestinians rejected the proposals, setting the scene for the second phase of the revolt.
The revolt shifted to the countryside where through the winter of 1937 and into 1938 the rebels proceeded to take control, driving the British out. With the countryside in their hands, the rebels began moving into the towns and cities. By October 1938, they had control of Jaffa, Gaza, Bethlehem, Ramallah and the Old City of Jerusalem. This was a massive popular movement with local committees taking control of much of the country and ruling in the interests, not of the Palestinian rich, but of the ordinary people.
The commander-in-chief of British forces, General Haining, in November 1938 reported that there was “a very deep-seated rebellious spirit throughout the whole Arab population”. Indeed so popular and widespread was the rebel movement, that it was “not untrue to say that every Arab in the country is a potential enemy of the government”. Certainly the troops and police seemed to operate on that assumption. Every Palestinian was an enemy.
The British poured reinforcements into the country and set about the brutal repression of the Palestinian national liberation movement. Villages were destroyed, collective punishments were imposed, livestock was confiscated, people were publicly flogged and there were mass arrests and internments.
According to one account over half a million people were arrested and detained—some for years, some more than once—during this phase of the repression. The scale of this is brought home by the fact that this amounts to more than the entire Palestinian male population at this time. It is worth remembering that this would not have been a pleasant experience, but would have been accompanied by violence and abuse. And, many people were summarily executed, that is “shot while trying to escape”.
Even when houses were not actually demolished, the troops were positively encouraged to wreck Palestinian homes when searching them. They smashed the furniture, fouled their foodstuffs, and roughed them up. And there were occasions when houses were demolished with the families still inside.
The use of torture was widespread and routine—although, to be fair, this was the case in every colony where the British confronted resistance. One British officer described how on one raid, the police beat one prisoner on the feet and applied a lighted cigarette to the testicles of another. And they beat a third until “his eyes were closed, blood was flowing and a number of teeth were spewed out onto the floor”. Rather naively, the officer complained that these were surely the methods of the Nazi Gestapo but was told that it was “the only language these Arabs understand”.
And prisoners, both men and women were raped. Indeed as part of the pacification offensive, special torture centres were set up by top cop Charles Tegart, brought in from India to supervise the operation. Water-boarding, electric shocks, the removal of finger nails and the use of boiling oil were all part of the British interrogation armoury. This dimension of British colonial rule is, of course, usually removed from the historical record, forgotten, denied.
What made all this possible was racism. The Palestinians were not only the enemy—they were also an inferior subject people as far as the British occupiers were concerned. Many soldiers and police behaved brutally towards the Palestinians as a matter of routine. Palestinians were deliberately run over by military and police vehicles that never bothered to stop. And some troops entertained themselves by hitting passersby with their rifle butts as they drove past them, inflicting terrible injuries for a laugh. This is not Palestinian propaganda, but is testified to by British sources. And there were occasions when troops and police just rioted, beating up Palestinians in the street, wrecking homes, shops and cafes, shooting anyone who resisted. This was how Britain ruled Palestine at this time.
Once again, “order” was restored in the towns and cities and then the process of pacifying the countryside got underway. Here the RAF airforce played an important role, bombing and machine gunning suspected rebel bands and punishing villages loyal to the revolt. The RAF commander in Palestine, Arthur Harris, advocated bombing “each village that speaks out of turn”. It is worth remembering that in the early 1920s in Iraq, the RAF was bombing villages for non-payment of taxes.
Remorselessly, the revolt was ground down. And every step of the way, the British were assisted by the Zionists who provided thousands of police volunteers and established the Special Night Squads, Zionist death squads, that carried out raids and assassinations. The Zionist far right—the “Revisionists”, predecessor of today’s Likud Party—made their own contribution. They carried out indiscriminate bombings in Palestinian markets, killing dozens of men, women and children in the course of 1938.
By 1939, the intifada was defeated by overwhelming force and brutal repression that left some 5,000 Palestinians dead. On top of those killed by the troops and police, another 112 were hanged, among them one rebel in his 80s. This defeat was of immense historic significance. The Zionist settlers were considerably strengthened while the Palestinians were left weakened, disarmed, and demoralised. It was a vital precondition, indeed preparation, for the Nakba of 1948 when around 800,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed to found Israel.
One thing that is astonishing is how little opposition to this repression there was in Britain. While there was a massive movement in support of the Spanish Republic, there was hardly a voice raised against the brutality of British rule in Palestine. Indeed, most of the left actually supported the repression, condemning the revolt as “fascist inspired”. The Labour Party was wholly committed to the Zionist cause. It had supported the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and this support continued throughout the revolt. Indeed, one Labour MP in October 1938 actually called for “the exemplary destruction of the Arab town of Jaffa”.
The spectacle of the chain-gangs would not only cowe the Palestinians. It would also intimidate Baghdad, Alexandria and Beirut which ‘would fear a like fate’. This Labour MP recommended that Britain had to “if necessary behave in the same way” as the “Hitlers”. He inevitably ended up in the House of Lords.
One of the Labour Party’s leaders, Herbert Morrison praised the Zionists as “first class colonisers”. He condemned the revolt as the work of “the agents of Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini”, and urged that the Zionists be allowed to extend their settlements into Jordan. Later, as home secretary during the Second World War, Morrison was to be a strong opponent of letting Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust into Britain.
It is worth remembering that in the 1945 general election the Labour Party actually campaigned in support of a Zionist state with the Palestinian population removed. And once in office, Clement Attlee’s Labour government continued to bar Jewish refugees, Holocaust survivors, from coming into Britain. That was even while it notoriously allowed the settlement of a surrendered 8,000 strong Ukrainian SS division. Those on the left who supported the Palestinians during the 1930s intifada were inevitably accused of antisemitism.
But what of the village of al-Bassa? In May 1948 it was destroyed once again, but this time by the Israelis. Israeli troops levelled the village, executed a number of villagers and expelled the rest of the population, who fled into Lebanon, refugees without a homeland.
John Newsinger is author of The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire available from Bookmarks BookshopTell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
(note the support for the massacres from UK 'socialists' in contrast to Spain...
...the comparison of Arabs to fascists, and the accusation that those who stood up for Palestinians were antisemitic. Plus ca change...)Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Re: (note the support for the massacres from UK 'socialists' in contrast to Spain...
The current Labour Party is now run by people who are really just as ghastly as the leaders they had all those years ago. As far as foreign policy goes, we liv in a one-party state, with virtually no real oppostion allowed.
I remember that years ago one of my lecturers, an American, told me that he thought, as the resources ran out and the West lost control of markets, NATO would become increasingly aggressive and expand out from Europe, its mandate, and the B52s would be bombing everywhere.
Re: (note the support for the massacres from UK 'socialists' in contrast to Spain...
'the B52s would be bombing everywhere' - wouldn't surprise me at all, at least until they run out of bombs. Or fuel. And they still have the nuclear option - far more dangerous than Russia or China IMO. Perhaps only Israel is more of a threat.Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Re: (note the support for the massacres from UK 'socialists' in contrast to Spain...
My uncle, on the German side of the family, came from a suberb of Dresden. He was shot down on a bombing raid over London.
He never returned to Germany to live permanently. He remained in England and married. It was all gone. The old life. It was now under Russian/Communist contol. The entire family move West. There they received compensation from the state for the confiscation of their factory.
And nowdays, Jurgen Klopp is a hero in Liverpool with his face looking down from murals painted on the walls of houses.
Re: (note the support for the massacres from UK 'socialists' in contrast to Spain...
It's perhaps worth mentioning that it was the RAF that started the aerial war with Germany by attacking Berlin, which led to a German response.
Churchill, I imagine, was determined to provoke a German retaliatory response, which would undermine those of his rivals who were inclined to accept the generous German peace terms, rather than bankrupting the Empire in an attempt to fight an unwinnable war on the European mainland.
Interesting points and tragic story, thanks DTJ (nm)
A German bomber crew got lost and dumped their bombs, inadvertently hitting outer London, at the latter end of the Battle of Britain. Bomber Command was sent to retaliate.
Both sides had a tacit bombing truce before 10 May 1940 and imposed strict limits on bombing targets. The Germans did it because they were husbanding resources for Fall Gelb, the French because they were at the lowest ebb in their bomber rearmament and were greatly outnumbered and the British because their self-defending bomber formations had been shot out of the sky by German fighters, guided by radar.
Converting bombers for night bombing took time. The British had neglected to fit armour or self-sealing fuel tanks to their aircraft and they quickly turned into barbecues when hit. Mysteriously, French and German front line aircraft had both as a matter of course.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Re: (note the support for the massacres from UK 'socialists' in contrast to Spain...
A German bomber crew got lost and dumped their bombs, inadvertently hitting outer London, at the latter end of the Battle of Britain. Bomber Command was sent to retaliate.
Ta for that snippet. Perhaps this was one of the bombs that hit my neighbourhood, basically 100 odd yards from me hoose (I wasn't there). I am still suffering from the usage of those inferior materials post-war to rebuild my current abode (eyes roll).
Somewhat off-topic, I went looking for a source for the Harris quote about 'one 250 lb. or 500 lb. bomb in each village that speaks out of turn' in response to the 1st Palestinian intifada, and tracked it down to this 1988 article in the LRB by dissident tory Ian Gilmour with his son Andrew:
Not much extra context provided apart from an odd celebration of Harris' 'consistency'. Would have to find it in the book he was reviewing, 'Britain's Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century' by Charles Townshend. But worth reading the article if only for the extensive critique of the book, 'Terrorism: How the West can win' edited by one... Benjamin Netanyahu. He thoroughly demolishes Bibi's then contention that fighting terrorism represents a struggle 'between the forces of civilisation and the forces of barbarism’, and it's rather satisfying to read. Sample:
'The rest of the book, which is edited and partly written by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN and the brother of the hero of Entebbe, is, however, very different. Apart from the editor’s obtrusive commentaries, this consists of lectures given at the Jonathan Institute in Washington by George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Arthur Goldberg, Moshe Arens, Eugene Rostow, Paul Johnson, Senator Cranston and many others with similar views. The blurb describes the book as a polemic, which it is, and ‘a comprehensive reasoned analysis’, which it is not. The thesis is that terrorism is an anti-Western phenomenon and the battle against it part of the struggle ‘between the forces of civilisation and the forces of barbarism’. ‘The two main antagonists of democracy in the post-war world,’ Mr Netanyahu tells us, are ‘Communist totalitarianism and Islamic radicalism’, and between them they have ‘inspired virtually all of contemporary terrorism’. That will be news to the people of Northern Ireland, who will be keen to know whether the IRA are totalitarian Communists or radical Muslims. According to Mr Netanyahu, terrorism does not stem from social misery and frustration. There are no ‘root causes’ of terrorism other than ‘the political ambitions and designs of expansionist states and the groups that serve them’. ‘One man’s terrorist’ is emphatically not ‘another man’s freedom fighter’. Terrorism, moreover, when successful, has ‘always ended in totalitarianism’. That should interest the Israelis and the Cypriots, who pride themselves on their democracy. Terrorism, Mr Netanyahu goes on, is ‘uniquely pervasive in the Middle East’, because of Islamic fundamentalism and Arab nationalism. It does not in any way result from the West’s or anybody else’s treatment of the Arabs. ‘The root cause of terrorism lies not in grievances but in a disposition towards unbridled violence,’ which in turn is caused by the belief that ‘certain ideological and religious goals justify, indeed demand, the shedding of all moral inhibitions.’ After all this, it is no surprise to learn that ‘the West will not be able to stem the tide of international terrorism without facing squarely this alliance in terror’ between the Communists and Muslims. In short, the West must line up behind Israel and against the Palestinians.
The thesis of Terrorism: How the West can win (hereinafter known as ‘Netanyahu’) thus depends on the truth of these propositions: 1. Arab terrorism is quite unprovoked and springs from a mere propensity to violence. 2. Islam is a uniquely violent religion with an especially violent history which uniquely inspires terrorism and assassination. 3. There is very little terrorism in the world that is not either Communist- or Islamically-inspired or both. 4. The West is innocent of terrorism.
An important pillar of the ideological support for the British Empire is the belief that British colonial rule was paternalistic, even kindly, and that however the French and the Germans might have behaved, when the British encountered “native” resistance or rebellion they responded with restraint. With this in mind, it is worth considering the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Osburn in his invaluable book, Must England Lose India?, published in 1930. He writes of how India was policed with:
a strictness that would not be tolerated in any European country. The half-clad natives of Lahore submit to English-made police restrictions that would drive a suburb of London into revolt. Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus do not exist in India ... it must be remembered that any Indian may be thrown into prison and remain there indefinitely without trial, and even without being informed of what he is accused! Even a Labour government to everyone’s amazement, permitted this unjust and iniquitous practice.
The police themselves were “the lineal descendants” of the Black and Tans and he recounts one European police officer boasting to him of how “after some of my punitive police have been stationed in a village for a few days the spirit of the toughest of the political agitators is broken”. His men would “help themselves to everything. Within 24 hours there will not be a virgin or four anna piece (about sixpence) left in that village.” There was “a sort of Black and Tan simplicity about this method of subduing those whose politics ... we do not approve of”. As Osburn remarks: “Bengal and Balbriggan are not as far apart as they look on the map.” [5]
The methods the British used to suppress the great Palestinian revolt, the first Intifada, against British rule and Zionist settlement in the late 1930s also provides useful testimony in this regard. Indeed, the Palestine Police, established by the British soon after they occupied the country, actually included over 600 former Black and Tans brought over from Ireland. This great popular revolt necessitated the effective reconquest of Palestine which was accomplished with considerable violence and great brutality. According to one study of British policing methods in Palestine: “Suspects arrested for interrogation were now tortured as a matter of course; bastinado, suspending suspects upside down and urinating in their nostrils, extracting fingernails and pumping water into a suspect before stamping on him, became commonplace.” [6] The important word to note here is “commonplace”; not so long ago accusations of such behaviour were always dismissed as exaggerated and even when admitted they were put down to the misconduct of the rare “bad apple”, misconduct that was put a stop to as soon as it was discovered.
On the contrary, as Matthew Hughes has argued, during the “pacification” of Palestine “punitive actions and destructive and brutal reprisals ... were central to British military repression after 1936 and constituted the core experience of Palestinians during the revolt ... destruction and vandalism were certainly a systematic, systemic part of British counter-insurgency operations”. Houses were demolished, whole villages were flattened, usually blown up, and sometimes the troops forced the Palestinians to destroy their own homes. The worst example of this policy occurred in Jaffa in June 1936 when over 200 houses were demolished, leaving some 6,000 people – men, women and children – homeless and destitute. In the words of one British officer: “That will fucking well teach them.” And when it came to conducting searches, the troops were ordered to wreck the houses they searched. Hughes reports one officer being ordered to carry out a search operation in Safad again because his men had left the houses “perfectly intact”. A senior officer showed them how to do it by wrecking the interior of one house with a pick handle after which the men went to work: “You’d never seen such devastation.” Hughes provides a grim catalogue of torture, murder and destruction. He recounts the beating to death of 12 Palestinian prisoners at Silwan in reprisal for the killing of two British soldiers, and how at al-Bassa some 20 Palestinians were packed onto a bus which the driver was then forced to drive over a mine, killing them all. And so on. He also elaborates on the methods of torture that the British made use of: “Prisoners were sodomised and boiling oil was used on them, as were intoxicants (morphine, cocaine and heroin). There was also electric shocks ... and mock executions.” [7] Both at the time and still today it was widely believed that this was not how British troops and police ever behave. But methods such as these were standard with the severity dependent on the scale of the resistance and the ethnicity of the resisters. What is really astonishing is the success with which this conduct was covered up at the time and the extent to which, even today, it remains largely unacknowledged.'
(Worth reading in full for the other examples discussed, Malaya, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq, and possible future wars)Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Dovetail thinks that bourgeois liberalism is above such things....
The RAFs fetish for strategic bombing was born closer to home. After the Great War the RAF tried to supplant the army an navy as inefficient and obsolete means of state power because they affected the periphery when the RAF flew over it to the sources of military power and destroyed them. The Raff claimed that this was a way out of the industrial warfare of the US Civil War and the First World War of extravagant firepower and the extraordinary human staying power of industrial states with populations in the tens and hundred millions.
The RAF studied the effects of bombing in England, France and Germany and extrapolated the results to show that the psychological effect of bombing multiplied the destructive effect tenfold. The trouble was, that they relied on anecdotal evidence and overdid the extrapolations from a narrow base of information. The Raffs role in colonial repression between the wars was used to emphasise the cheapness in (British) lives of mass killing from a distance against people who had no means of retaliation.
Using Dresden as a pretext for the extermination of Palestinians is a tu quoque argument which is an excuse, not a reason. See
The Rise of the Bomber: RAF-Army Planning 1919 to Munich 1938 by Greg Baughen (2015) Fonthill Media 978-1781554937
The RAF and Tribal Control: Airpower and Irregular Warfare between the World Wars by Richard D. Newton (2019) University Press of Kansas 978-0700628711
and
Air Power and Colonial Control (Studies in Imperialism) by David Omissi (1990) Manchester University Press 978-0719029608
for the gory details.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Thanks for that Keith, thought you might have something pertinent to share...
'the psychological effect of bombing multiplied the destructive effect tenfold' - so, as with the Harris quote about bombing raids used to spread 'fear' and cause 'disruption of civilised life', there was an understanding from the outset that it was fundamentally a terrorist tactic?
I think I read that they also discounted evidence that was already available about the rallying effect the Blitz had on public support for the war effort. Wasn't there a whole thing of bombs destined for German cities being painted with 'for Coventry' or similar slogans? There's a utilitarian argument to make that attempting to eradicate 'terrorism' by bombing or other violent means only creates more terrorists in the future, and therefore it's counter-productive. But then that assumes that Israelis actually care about stopping Hamas, rather than using their resistance as an excuse to do what they intended to do all along.
The RAS used forms of words which varied from naked terrorism (Trenchard) to various mealy-mouthed sophistries. Despite air power always being an indiscriminate weapon, because of its inherent inaccuracy the RAF emphasised accuracy because of the obvious concomitant of bombing factories in the Ruhr which had workers' neighbourhoods next door. Not because of humane instincts about foreign plebs but because of the fear of retaliation.
In practice dropping sticks of smaller bombs instead of one big one made it abundantly clear that bombing from the air was imprecise. The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021