On this day in history:
6/8/19 15:11![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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talkpoliticsThe long and squalid legacy of Guilo Douhet reached the first of its two apexes.
Since I'm going to wager and mean nothing by it because I like easy money, just not....that easy....that other than me next to nobody here has ever heard of the man, here's a link to his thesis.
Put simply, he believed that a sufficient amount of civilians butchered by airplanes would render war on the ground obsolete, cities in ashes, and thus make war very swift, very destructive, and a blend of the cumulative effects of a protracted war in twenty minutes. This thesis is the underlying principle of all strategic air campaigns, and it is that which met its apex in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after a fashion.
https://www.classicsofstrategy.com/2015/09/the-command-of-the-air-by-giulio-douhet-19211927.html
Now, it must be said to be fair that the elements of the atomic bomb that came to overshadow things are as much the posthumous effect of the thermonuclear weaponry of the later Cold War. The weapons of 1945 that cast the terrible shadow of practical application of nuclear theory were relatively puny. The Castle Bravo and Tsar Bomb tests were the ones that were true civilization-enders. And beyond that, the Second World War offered plenty of more mundane horrors.
In 1942, to keep a campaign that was failing for a variety of reasons active, the later infamous (and scapegoated in standard 'wanted beef but complained that the cow was butchered' MO) Air Marshal Arthur Harris ordered a thousand bomber raid on the ancient city of Cologne, the first raid to include mass use of incendiaries. The result was a firestorm that baked people alive and left shriveled blackened flash-fried corpses in the streets, reducing the city to a skeleton of itself.
Was it a better death to die from a fleet of conventional bombs that burned the oxygen out of the air and choked people to death accordingly than to die from disintegration by an atomic bomb before people even knew what hit them? Is a conventional bomb producing burned charred corpses any less of a death than the nuclear bomb that does the same thing? Not sure the people of Cologne would have agreed. And of course in 1942 as Cologne burned in a firestorm, 250,000 Chinese were massacred by the IJA in a temper tantrum in what was its standard operating procedure and the six murder factories were devouring Jewish lives by the millions, Moloch gaining his offerings in his standard endless porcine fashion, lives squandered without end for nothing.
Did the Japanese who massacred Chinese and the Germans who gleefully sent Jews literally up in smoke damn women and children in Cologne with the women deliberately blind and the children as innocent as anyone gets in war? In the eyes of posterity, not as much as this used to be the case. It seems, in part, in the era where "Punch Nazis" is a moral condition that the decisions that actually did win the Second World War are now increasingly morally worse than Hitler's murder factories and the Tamerlane with rifles approach of the Imperial Japanese Army. Not that this is any great secret when the global antiwar movement vanished for the eight years of the Obama era to suddenly discover the exact things it ignored then were now global threats of nuclear war under Trump.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/bombed-outcologne-m.html
And of course, past that, in Japan itself every city but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were left in ruins by Cologne-style raids by sheer fleets of B-29s. The most lethal single raid of the war was not done by one plane with one bomb, but these mundane fleets leveling Tokyo in Operation Meetinghouse. If Japan ignored more death from a conventional fleet, why would a single bomb, or two bombs, wrecking two cities be seen as anything but concentrating the fleet into a smaller package with the same results and the same Moloch-glutting approach without so much as a wink of protest from the gangs of murderers in Tokyo?
https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/deadliest-air-raid-history-180954512/
That said there is an undeniable sense that science and technology went from being abstractions whose results are felt at one or several removes to being visceral when Hiroshima and Nagasaki burned and the wanton slaughter of the Second World War reached an ultimate point. In a war full of cities burning from above and from the slower, more thorough deaths of armies like in Berlin and Budapest and Manila where two armies chewed the cities up and left piles of civilian corpses heedless of the cost, there is that fundamental gap. The United States remains the only state in reality to deploy nuclear weapons in war. It did so in just enough of a fashion that by the time the Castle Bravos and Tsar Bombs came around it was not possible to see the civilization-busters as anything but what they are.
https://www.amazon.com/Hiroshima-John-Hersey/dp/0679721037
War, as General William Tecumseh Sherman put it well, is cruelty and you cannot refine it. The European powers of the present collectively owe their geopolitical wealth to being the first powers to bring modernity in fire and sword and pyramids of skulls and calling it civilization. Much of their resentment of the United States is that the Leopold IIs of the present can't stack ten million Congolese for rubber and instead it's the United States' thirst for jewels that does this now. That it's not General Townshend leveling Baghdad and dropping poison gas from the skies but US Central Command occupying Iraq in a venture of hubris that will be the death of the empire it tried, so foolishly, to bolster.
It very much is Russia leveling hospitals and deliberately taking a wrecking ball to Syria, but then Arab lives are only worth something if they can be used as a club to shame a USA that knows no shame, they have no political value for the world in any other context. Well, maybe if they're used on an even more shameless Israel that under Irgun is decaying into an ever more gruesome parody of the worst traits of the Right Wing Sabras. Russia, of course, can only do this by the Sword of Damocles of giving its future to China, and the Chinese thus master the largest state in Europe and the only one to live up from the beginning for want of a choice to the diversity that the Europe of Robespierre, Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler lies to itself is any more desired than it is to the America of Thurmond, Jefferson Davis, and David Duke.
At one remove, Japan paid the price for embarking on a total war with a force that was an unstoppable force that piledrove it, and a horrifying price it was indeed.
At another, the winds that are moving from whistling past the tombstone of Western civilization to being a howling gale of apocalyptic fury began at Hiroshima, and the doomsday clock continues to tick, each tick a cackling howling of daemonic fury, the blood of innocents calling from the ground for vengeance.
Fate is a cruel thing, and where it casts its gaze, nothing in truth prospers save in horror and then only in the short term.
Since I'm going to wager and mean nothing by it because I like easy money, just not....that easy....that other than me next to nobody here has ever heard of the man, here's a link to his thesis.
Put simply, he believed that a sufficient amount of civilians butchered by airplanes would render war on the ground obsolete, cities in ashes, and thus make war very swift, very destructive, and a blend of the cumulative effects of a protracted war in twenty minutes. This thesis is the underlying principle of all strategic air campaigns, and it is that which met its apex in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after a fashion.
https://www.classicsofstrategy.com/2015/09/the-command-of-the-air-by-giulio-douhet-19211927.html
Now, it must be said to be fair that the elements of the atomic bomb that came to overshadow things are as much the posthumous effect of the thermonuclear weaponry of the later Cold War. The weapons of 1945 that cast the terrible shadow of practical application of nuclear theory were relatively puny. The Castle Bravo and Tsar Bomb tests were the ones that were true civilization-enders. And beyond that, the Second World War offered plenty of more mundane horrors.
In 1942, to keep a campaign that was failing for a variety of reasons active, the later infamous (and scapegoated in standard 'wanted beef but complained that the cow was butchered' MO) Air Marshal Arthur Harris ordered a thousand bomber raid on the ancient city of Cologne, the first raid to include mass use of incendiaries. The result was a firestorm that baked people alive and left shriveled blackened flash-fried corpses in the streets, reducing the city to a skeleton of itself.
Was it a better death to die from a fleet of conventional bombs that burned the oxygen out of the air and choked people to death accordingly than to die from disintegration by an atomic bomb before people even knew what hit them? Is a conventional bomb producing burned charred corpses any less of a death than the nuclear bomb that does the same thing? Not sure the people of Cologne would have agreed. And of course in 1942 as Cologne burned in a firestorm, 250,000 Chinese were massacred by the IJA in a temper tantrum in what was its standard operating procedure and the six murder factories were devouring Jewish lives by the millions, Moloch gaining his offerings in his standard endless porcine fashion, lives squandered without end for nothing.
Did the Japanese who massacred Chinese and the Germans who gleefully sent Jews literally up in smoke damn women and children in Cologne with the women deliberately blind and the children as innocent as anyone gets in war? In the eyes of posterity, not as much as this used to be the case. It seems, in part, in the era where "Punch Nazis" is a moral condition that the decisions that actually did win the Second World War are now increasingly morally worse than Hitler's murder factories and the Tamerlane with rifles approach of the Imperial Japanese Army. Not that this is any great secret when the global antiwar movement vanished for the eight years of the Obama era to suddenly discover the exact things it ignored then were now global threats of nuclear war under Trump.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/bombed-outcologne-m.html
And of course, past that, in Japan itself every city but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were left in ruins by Cologne-style raids by sheer fleets of B-29s. The most lethal single raid of the war was not done by one plane with one bomb, but these mundane fleets leveling Tokyo in Operation Meetinghouse. If Japan ignored more death from a conventional fleet, why would a single bomb, or two bombs, wrecking two cities be seen as anything but concentrating the fleet into a smaller package with the same results and the same Moloch-glutting approach without so much as a wink of protest from the gangs of murderers in Tokyo?
https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/deadliest-air-raid-history-180954512/
That said there is an undeniable sense that science and technology went from being abstractions whose results are felt at one or several removes to being visceral when Hiroshima and Nagasaki burned and the wanton slaughter of the Second World War reached an ultimate point. In a war full of cities burning from above and from the slower, more thorough deaths of armies like in Berlin and Budapest and Manila where two armies chewed the cities up and left piles of civilian corpses heedless of the cost, there is that fundamental gap. The United States remains the only state in reality to deploy nuclear weapons in war. It did so in just enough of a fashion that by the time the Castle Bravos and Tsar Bombs came around it was not possible to see the civilization-busters as anything but what they are.
https://www.amazon.com/Hiroshima-John-Hersey/dp/0679721037
War, as General William Tecumseh Sherman put it well, is cruelty and you cannot refine it. The European powers of the present collectively owe their geopolitical wealth to being the first powers to bring modernity in fire and sword and pyramids of skulls and calling it civilization. Much of their resentment of the United States is that the Leopold IIs of the present can't stack ten million Congolese for rubber and instead it's the United States' thirst for jewels that does this now. That it's not General Townshend leveling Baghdad and dropping poison gas from the skies but US Central Command occupying Iraq in a venture of hubris that will be the death of the empire it tried, so foolishly, to bolster.
It very much is Russia leveling hospitals and deliberately taking a wrecking ball to Syria, but then Arab lives are only worth something if they can be used as a club to shame a USA that knows no shame, they have no political value for the world in any other context. Well, maybe if they're used on an even more shameless Israel that under Irgun is decaying into an ever more gruesome parody of the worst traits of the Right Wing Sabras. Russia, of course, can only do this by the Sword of Damocles of giving its future to China, and the Chinese thus master the largest state in Europe and the only one to live up from the beginning for want of a choice to the diversity that the Europe of Robespierre, Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler lies to itself is any more desired than it is to the America of Thurmond, Jefferson Davis, and David Duke.
At one remove, Japan paid the price for embarking on a total war with a force that was an unstoppable force that piledrove it, and a horrifying price it was indeed.
At another, the winds that are moving from whistling past the tombstone of Western civilization to being a howling gale of apocalyptic fury began at Hiroshima, and the doomsday clock continues to tick, each tick a cackling howling of daemonic fury, the blood of innocents calling from the ground for vengeance.
Fate is a cruel thing, and where it casts its gaze, nothing in truth prospers save in horror and then only in the short term.
(no subject)
Date: 8/8/19 00:05 (UTC)Maybe a one-button-war ender doesn't boost the economy enough? Then again, didn't we build enough to blow the earth up 9 times? Unless that isn't true - never really tried to verify it - either way, anything over half a planet seems a bit much to me.