From Gaza to Dresden, and back: aerial bombing as collective punishment

Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza - locking 2 million people in a city, and then subjecting them to both a blockade of basic goods and then the non-stop bombing of their homes and workplaces - is virtually unprecedented in recent history.

Some parallels can be drawn between Russia's actions in Chechenya in the '90s, and also Saudi Arabia's blockade + bombing of Yemen. But at least there was some chance of escape for those Chechens and Yemenis on the ground then and there. What the Zionist regime is doing now, relentlessly bombing their open air prison, shows even more reckless disregard for human life than even Russia and Saudi Arabia at their absolute worst.

All of this is not lost on the Israeli officials, who as always, set themselves up for the sharpest of criticism with everything that they say and do. Moshe Feiglin is one of the many Israeli politicians who has dug through war crime history to bring up the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima in World War II as inspiration for what the Israeli Air Force is doing right now. That’s right, one of the worst mass murders and most hellish scenes in human history is Israel's example.

 

 

There has always been regret and controversy in Britain over the bombing of Dresden, including Winston Churchill himself saying that "the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror... the destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of allied bombing".  A statue of Arthur Harris in London is a frequent target for vandalism. Because Dresden was a mostly cultural city that had very few military targets and it was destroyed so late in the war, as Germany was already losing, it was done as a show of brute force, vengeance killing, for the Nazi blitzes on London, Coventry, etc. Feiglin says that "we need to retaliate with strong vengeance" - so revenge is definitely their m.o. Again, they're acting like other countries have at their absolute worst. And they claim to be the civilized ones.

Aerial bombing, because it's done by wealthier militaries with more advanced equipment, seems to create an illusion for a lot of people that it's how civilized countries fight wars.  The mental image conjured is of one inanimate object (fighter jet) destroying another (building), any image of human suffering is removed and any deaths are assumed to be instant and painless.

This is the opposite of the truth.  Bombing typically kills by a building exploding and collapsing on its inhabitants, so incineration, dismemberment, asphyxiation are to be expected at the bare minimum with every bomb dropped.  The pain and suffering as a result doesn't really get much worse, plus there is always environmental and infrastructure damage to factor in - it kills more than just humans - so bombing is, in a more holistic view, always an inherently disproportionate response to anything that happened on the ground.  Terms like "collateral damage" have been invented to absorb the blame for this, but it should be an obvious double standard - guns, artillery, and fighter jets are tools of mass murder, and then people get mass murdered, it is really no different, in my view, from any other mass murder.  That's what keeping a single standard is.

The USAF air raids on Germany and Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia took bombing to extreme new levels of evil that were as deliberate and as cruel as anything in history.  They are still among the biggest massacres in history.  Tactics included making the first bombing run of highly explosive bombs, to blow the roofs off of buildings, and then making further runs of fire bombing the exposed buildings.  An hour or two was placed between the fire bombing runs, to wait for the firefighters to come out, and then fire bomb it some more.  There are reports that the Zionist regime is doing this in Gaza, as it did in Lebanon in the past - bomb a building, wait for the rescue efforts, and then bomb it again.

The only way that the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, Gaza, or any other city should really ever be looked at is through empathy for the victims on the ground then and there.  Set aside any national allegiances, just for a moment, and put yourself in the “enemy's” shoes.  Because again, the scenes of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later Pyongyang, Hanoi, etc. might just be the closest that anyone has ever seen to hell being raised on this planet.  The death toll from the 48 hours of bombing beautiful, medieval Dresden may have been well into the 6 figures, it was regarded at around 135,000 for decades, not that we can ever know for sure or if it really even matters.  Because either way, reading testimonials from survivors should have the effect of replacing the disgustingly insensitive excuses of "it was justified to win the war" with nothing other than silent empathy for the victims.  One Dresden resident wrote:

"A thermal column of wind generated heat in excess of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, melting trolley windows and the asphalt in streets, the wind uprooting trees. When people crossed a street, their feet stuck in the melted asphalt; they tried to extricate themselves with their hands, only to find them stuck as well. They remained on all fours screaming. Small children lay like "fried eels" on the pavement. The firestorm sucked all the oxygen out of the city; a 15 year-old girl said that the brains of people in shelters "tumbled from their burst temples and their insides [extruded] from the soft parts under the ribs."

 

And this is what the Zionist regime wants to replicate in Gaza, or even find it acceptable that something like this should ever happen again?  Let's read one from Hiroshima survivor Sunao Tsuboi now.

“My back was incredibly painful, but I had no idea what had just happened. I assumed I had been close to a very large conventional bomb. I had no idea it was a nuclear bomb and that I’d been exposed to radiation. There was so much smoke in the air that you could barely see 100 metres ahead, but what I did see convinced me that I had entered a living hell on earth. There were people crying out for help, calling after members of their family. I saw a schoolgirl with her eye hanging out of its socket. People looked like ghosts, bleeding and trying to walk before collapsing. Some had lost limbs. There were charred bodies everywhere, including in the river. I looked down and saw a man clutching a hole in his stomach, trying to stop his organs from spilling out. The smell of burning flesh was overpowering.”

The Zionist regime has had its secret nukes pointed at the Soviet Union, various Arab countries, and God knows where else for decades now.  They have already threatened to nuke Gaza.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened after several years of world war - the Zionist regime can't even go a month into a war without threatening to microwave two million people, with the bonus of letting off radiation into their own land.  And considering Egypt warned them about the October 7 offensive, and they stood down instead, one has to ask if they're just looking for an excuse to push the button.  Parts of Gaza almost look like it already.

 

The Palestinians are used to getting bombed.  In fact, the architect the bombing of Dresden, RAF officer Arthur Harris, had spent the prior two decades mass murdering Arabs in the British colonies in the Middle East.  This "area bombing", complete and total destruction of German cities, was practiced in Iraq in the 1920s.  When the Palestinians saw the writing on the wall in 1936 and started to stand up for themselves, he called for "one 250 lb. or 500 lb. bomb in each village that speaks out of turn" because "the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand".  He was even more transparent about mass murdering innocent people, not Nazi soldiers but innocent civilians, in Germany:

"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."

What it was, obviously, was collective punishment.  The residents of Dresden, Hiroshima, etc - the women, children, elderly, disabled, etc - were given the death penalty for the SS', Luftwaffe's, and Unit 731's atrocities in the prior years.  And now, this vengeful and mass murderous school of thought is how the Zionist regime is operating in Gaza.  Hamas' offensive on October 7 is seen through the ridiculous double standard of "their mass murder was unjustified, but ours will be", and mentioned in attempts to excuse the killing of Palestinian workers and the destruction of Gazan houses, public utilities, transport, and lives.  They constantly use dehumanizing rhetoric, like calling the Palestinians "human animals", in an attempt to frame this genocide as some battle between the civilized and barbaric.  Whatever happened on October 7, since then the whole world has seen an extreme lack of humanity and civilization.  You do not get to bomb homes, refugee camps, destroy an entire city, and then claim to be the civilized ones.  My idea of civilized and humane is how Richard Knell wrote about the bombing of Dresden:

"One can say that the losses and destruction were unnecessary and do not represent a leaf of honor in the analysis of mankind.  They cannot be excused.  The best one can do so many years after the wars is to analyze and assess them, dispatch them to history, and hope and pray that they will never happen again."

Gaza included. Two wrongs will never make a right, and mass murder should never be excused.