On Feb 1, 2009, at 2:21 PM, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> Ken Hanly Wrote:
>
> Surely bombing does sometimes lead to victory and demoralising of the
> opponent. Example: Nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
>
Nonsense. Victory over Japan was won decisively at Midway.
Everything after that was the end game, protracted at the cost of
millions upon millions of lives by "Unconditional Surrender," the
Anglo-American refusal to negotiate any peace terms at all. The
bombing was intentional mass murder, nothing else.
>
> Mark DeLucas wrote:
> The efficacy of violence is underrated in general.
>
> Yes, bombing does indeed often lead to victory.
>
> Curtis LeMay's incendiary bombing campaign against Japanese cities is
> a stark example. Of course, the atomic bombings dominate our thinking
> but the firestorms unleashed by LeMay's B-29's were a lesson in what
> was to come once fission weapons went online.
Nonsense. The firestorm was invented, not by LeMay but by Hermann
Göring
in the incendiary bombing of London, the last raid of the blitz. For
some unknown reason--unrelated to any shortage of bombers or bombs or
any new abilities of the RAF--Hitler ordered the blitz called off (but
why have historians been so unwilling to find out why, or even to
ask?). From then on, starting with Hamburg, Churchill and Harris made
incineration of civilian populations the Allies' preferred strategy.
>
> So yes, [genocidal] violence does work but only for accomplishing
> very narrow goals...
As I have pointed out more than once, the goal of the Allies' genocidal bombing and "Unconditional Surrender" strategy was not at all narrow but was fundamental to their war aims: the goal was to decimate the German and Japanese working classes in order to preempt the ruling classes' #1 nightmare--that WWII would be followed, like WWI, by proletarian revolution in all the defeated countries. In that regard their genocidal violence worked splendidly.
Shane Mage
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos