On Nov 16, 2009, at 7:55 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
> Even with Hitler you can say rhetorically that he was a 'mass
> murderer' but what you really mean is that his government's policies
> amounted to mass murder.
>
> Churchill's aerial bombardment of Germany had no strategic purpose
> other than to give the British air force a fantasy target as a
> substitute for themilitary objectives that their retreat from Europe
> denied them...
This is true for Churchill's first bombing raid on German civilians in 1940, which gave Hitler his pretext for the Blitz. But the Churchill/ Roosevelt/Stalin massive assault on the German civil population came after the war had been strategically decided at Stalingrad and El Alemain, and it had a strategic *political* purpose. Allied strategy's central objective, adumbrated at Munich and formulated in the Unconditional Surrender doctrine, was to ward off their nightmare scenario: that the collapse of the Hitler regime would mean a repetition of the 1917-1919 European proletarian revolutions unless the Nazis could be seamlessly replaced by Anglo/US/Russian occupation forces. The campaign of mass murder was to have a double effect, decimating and terrifying the proletarians in the cities while stimulating fanatical loyalty to the Hitler regime among their sons and brothers in the Nazi armies. It was completely successful, though for one moment (July 20 1944) it trembled on the edge of failure.
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