Author Topic: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]  (Read 161290 times)

cassandra and sara's daddy

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #200 on: January 18, 2009, 11:05:51 PM »
you should see the funny looks here if you point out that begin had a price on his head   or that isreal made arafat one of the richest folks in the world
It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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MicroBalrog

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #201 on: January 18, 2009, 11:07:34 PM »
you should see the funny looks here if you point out that begin had a price on his head   or that isreal made arafat one of the richest folks in the world

I'll raise you a better one: Shimon Peres was accused of being a Lavon Affair co-conspirator.

An unindicted conspirator, as some would say if he were a Muslim.
Destroy The Enemy in Hand-to-Hand Combat.

"...tradition and custom becomes intertwined and are a strong coercion which directs the society upon fixed lines, and strangles liberty. " ~ William Graham Sumner

cassandra and sara's daddy

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #202 on: January 18, 2009, 11:18:29 PM »
i don't know if this is a raise or not  but we interred some chinese in ww2   they all look alike. i'd have really been steamed about that  they fought the japanese longer than we vdid and paid the price
It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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De Selby

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #203 on: January 19, 2009, 02:37:40 AM »
The firebombing of Tokyo is similarly debatable.  I believe you'd have to establish that Tokyo had no military value to Imperial Japan, nor any significant war-production capacity.  Otherwise it seems plain that Tokyo could be justified as a legitimate target for military operations.

Suicide bombing a pizza joint or sending rockets at the elementary school in micro's hometown are not in any way comparable.

It's tough to see how this is anything other than a blatant contradiction-you just said that deliberately killing civilians is indefensible.

But now you're saying that it's defensible as long as killing the civilians will also in some way diminish the military capacity of the state via decimating its production?  Why does that make deliberate killing of civilians okay?

Basically, your argument arrives at the paradoxical conclusion that if Hamas could make a suicide bomb powerful enough to destroy the factories in Ashkelon upon detonation in a cafe, that would be "debateable", but as long as Hamas can only kill civilians in one cafe....why that's clearly indefensible.

 
"Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death."

cassandra and sara's daddy

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #204 on: January 19, 2009, 02:47:06 AM »
it do seem peculiar   and i'm a great admirer of israel for the most part  just try not to be delusional about it.  and i firmly believe they would deaL with us harshly if it served them. the liberty and various spying for example.  that freighter full of yellow cake as another  http://books.google.com/books?id=FQp-3X9X2XQC&pg=PA78&lpg=PA78&dq=israel+frieghter+of+yellow+cake&source=bl&ots=VshLGVgrT4&sig=A5y-TNqcejukCjnhEXi5ZeEAE64&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result

though i understand we helped with that one
It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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Headless Thompson Gunner

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #205 on: January 19, 2009, 03:19:08 AM »
It's tough to see how this is anything other than a blatant contradiction-you just said that deliberately killing civilians is indefensible.

But now you're saying that it's defensible as long as killing the civilians will also in some way diminish the military capacity of the state via decimating its production?  Why does that make deliberate killing of civilians okay?

Basically, your argument arrives at the paradoxical conclusion that if Hamas could make a suicide bomb powerful enough to destroy the factories in Ashkelon upon detonation in a cafe, that would be "debateable", but as long as Hamas can only kill civilians in one cafe....why that's clearly indefensible.
 
Are you pretending to be dumb, playing devil's advocate or somesuch?  Or do you sincerely not understand?

Attacking enemy industrial facilities and infrastructure is not the same as trying to murder as many innocent civilians as you can.  There is nothing contradictory about accepting the former and condemning the latter.  

De Selby

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #206 on: January 19, 2009, 06:07:28 AM »
Are you pretending to be dumb, playing devil's advocate or somesuch?  Or do you sincerely not understand?

Attacking enemy industrial facilities and infrastructure is not the same as trying to murder as many innocent civilians as you can.  There is nothing contradictory about accepting the former and condemning the latter.  

I think perhaps your frustration is the result of not carrying through the argument you made.  It's certainly not easy to claim that destroying whole cities is "debateable", but to still agree with the European/American legal tradition that smaller scale killing of civilians is wrong.

You clearly did not respond to the substance of the point, which was that both acts involve intentionally killing civilians.  Just because you call destroying an entire city "attacking enemy infrastructure" does not make it any less clear that the act involves intentional killing of civilians.

You're just using different words to leave out the intentional killing part, and then concluding that the difference is obvious.  I don't believe it's necessary to play dumb to notice that the reasoning isn't terribly solid there.

Note that when this issue was considered in the war crimes efforts after WWII, it wasn't like the allies just said "hey, it wasn't killing civilians when we bombed all those cities."  They most certainly did not-they offered as a defense to the Japanese and Germans the fact that the Allies had used the same tactics in war crimes trials.  They did not conclude that German carpet bombing was somehow not a war crime; they simply refused to convict the Germans of crimes that the Allies had also committed, noting that it would be blatantly hypocritical.




"Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death."

cassandra and sara's daddy

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #207 on: January 19, 2009, 08:11:06 AM »
and in ww2 one part of germany got hit very lightly  coincidentally its the part ikes family was from


heres some more goodness the term "dehousing" is so clean
On 14 February 1942, Directive No. 22 was issued to bomber command. Bombing was to be "focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers." Factories were no longer targets.[citation needed]

In February 1942, the British abandoned attempts at strategic precision bombing and with the issuing of the area bombing directive to the RAF, put most of their strategic bombing efforts into night time area bombardment and the "dehousing" of the German workforce. This strategy remained in place until the last month of the war in Europe,
The United States Government entered the war intending to use strategic daylight precision bombing, which was used with mixed success in Europe and never officially abandoned as a policy. But the weather over Germany, particularly in the winter months, often caused primary targets to be obscured by cloud, in such instances the USAAF's secondary targets were often located in city centres and bombed using imprecise bombing methods such as H2X radar. For example on 15 February 1945 the centre of Dresden was bombed using H2X because the primary target, the synthetic oil plant near Leipzig, was obscured by cloud.[8] When the USAAF anticipated cloudy conditions over the target they frequently used a mix of high explosive and incendiaries bombs that were closer to the RAF city busting mix than that usually used for precision attacks.[9] Over Japan, because of the jetstream, strategic precision bombing proved to be impractical and the United States abandoned the policy in favour of a policy of area bombardment.

In World War II, strategic aerial bombardment claimed the lives of over 160,000 Allied airmen in the European theatre,[10] 60,595 British civilians and between 305,000 and 600,000 German civilians, [11][12] while American precision bombing, fire bombing and atomic bombing in Japan killed between 330,000 and 500,000 Japanese civilians.[13
It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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cassandra and sara's daddy

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #208 on: January 19, 2009, 08:23:56 AM »
http://www.rense.com/general19/flame.htm
The WWII Dresden Holocaust -
'A Single Column Of Flame'
2-6-2


"You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
 
On the evening of February 13, 1945, an orgy of genocide and barbarism began against a defenseless German city, one of the greatest cultural centers of northern Europe. Within less than 14 hours not only was it reduced to flaming ruins, but an estimated one-third of its inhabitants, possibly as many as a half a million, had perished in what was the worst single event massacre of all time.
 
___
 
Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquillity amid desolation. Famous as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest of the country.

In fact, little had been done to provide the ancient city of artists and craftsmen with anti-aircraft defenses. One squadron of planes had been stationed in Dresden for awhile, but the Luftwaffe decided to move the aircraft to another area where they would be of use. A gentlemen's agreement seemed to prevail, designating Dresden an "open city."

February 13/14 1945: Holocaust over Dresden, known as the Florence of the North. Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600.000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for "suggestions how to blaze 600.000 refugees". He wasn't interested how to target military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700.000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the centre of the city reached 1600 o centigrade. More than 260.000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city can't be traced. Approximately 500.000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were slaughtered in one night.

On Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army 60 miles away had swollen the city's population to well over a million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet atrocities. Little did those refugees retreating from the Red terror imagine that they were about to die in a horror worse than anything Stalin could devise.

Normally, a carnival atmosphere prevailed in Dresden on Shrove Tuesday. In 1945, however, the outlook was rather dismal. Houses everywhere overflowed with refugees, and thousands were forced to camp out in the streets shivering in the bitter cold.

However, the people felt relatively safe; and although the mood was grim, the circus played to a full house that night as thousands came to forget for a moment the horrors of war. Bands of little girls paraded about in carnival dress in an effort to bolster warning spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted.

No one realized that in less than 24 hours those same innocent children would die screaming in Churchill's firestorms. But, of course, no one could know that then. The Russians, to be sure, were savages, but at least the Americans and British were "honorable."

So, when those first alarms signaled the start of 14 hours of hell, Dresden's people streamed dutifully into their shelters. But they did so without much enthusiasm, believing the alarms to be false, since their city had never been threatened from the air. Many would never come out alive, for that "great democratic statesman," Winston Churchill--in collusion with that other "great democratic statesman," Franklin Delano Roosevelt--had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing.

What where Churchill's motives? They appear to have been political, rather than military. Historians unanimously agree that Dresden had no military value. What industry it did have produced only cigarettes and china.

But the Yalta Conference was coming up, in which the Soviets and their Western allies would sit down like ghouls to carve up the shattered corpse of Europe. Churchill wanted a trump card--a devastating "thunderclap of Anglo-American annihilation"--with which to "impress" Stalin.

That card, however, was never played at Yalta, because bad weather delayed the originally scheduled raid. Yet Churchill insisted that the raid be carried out--to "disrupt and confuse" the German civilian population behind the lines.

Dresden's citizens barely had time to reach their shelters. The first bomb fell at 10:09 p.m. The attack lasted 24 minutes, leaving the inner city a raging sea of fire. "Precision saturation bombing" had created the desired firestorm.
 
A firestorm is caused when hundreds of smaller fires join in one vast conflagration. Huge masses of air are sucked in to feed the inferno, causing an artificial tornado. Those persons unlucky enough to be caught in the rush of wind are hurled down entire streets into the flames. Those who seek refuge underground often suffocate as oxygen is pulled from the air to feed the blaze, or they perish in a blast of white heat--heat intense enough to melt human flesh.
 
One eyewitness who survived told of seeing "young women carrying babies running up and down the streets, their dresses and hair on fire, screaming until they fell down, or the collapsing buildings fell on top of them."

There was a three-hour pause between the first and second raids. The lull had been calculated to lure civilians from their shelters into the open again. To escape the flames, tens of thousands of civilians had crowded into the Grosser Garten, a magnificent park nearly one and a half miles square.

The second raid came at 1:22 a.m. with no warning. Twice as many bombers returned with a massive load of incendiary bombs. The second wave was designed to spread the raging firestorm into the Grosser Garten.

It was a complete "success." Within a few minutes a sheet of flame ripped across the grass, uprooting trees and littering the branches of others with everything from bicycles to human limbs. For days afterward, they remained bizarrely strewn about as grim reminders of Allied sadism.

At the start of the second air assault, many were still huddled in tunnels and cellars, waiting for the fires of the first attack to die down. At 1:30 a.m. an ominous rumble reached the ears of the commander of a Labor Service convoy sent into the city on a rescue mission. He described it this way:

"The detonation shook the cellar walls. The sound of the explosions mingled with a new, stranger sound which seemed to come closer and closer, the sound of a thundering waterfall; it was the sound of the mighty tornado howling in the inner city."
 
MELTING HUMAN FLESH
 
Others hiding below ground died. But they died painlessly--they simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness. As the heat intensified, they either disintegrated into cinders or melted into a thick liquid--often three or four feet deep in spots.

Shortly after 10:30 on the morning of February 14, the last raid swept over the city. American bombers pounded the rubble that had been Dresden for a steady 38 minutes. But this attack was not nearly as heavy as the first two.

However, what distinguished this raid was the cold-blooded ruthlessness with which it was carried out. U.S. Mustangs appeared low over the city, strafing anything that moved, including a column of rescue vehicles rushing to the city to evacuate survivors. One assault was aimed at the banks of the Elbe River, where refugees had huddled during the horrible night.

In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a hospital town. During the previous night's massacre, heroic nurses had dragged thousands of crippled patients to the Elbe. The low-flying Mustangs machine-gunned those helpless patients, as well as thousands of old men, women and children who had escaped the city.

When the last plane left the sky, Dresden was a scorched ruin, its blackened streets filled with corpses. The city was spared no horror. A flock of vultures escaped from the zoo and fattened on the carnage. Rats swarmed over the piles of corpses.

A Swiss citizen described his visit to Dresden two weeks after the raid: "I could see torn-off arms and legs, mutilated torsos and heads which had been wrenched from their bodies and rolled away. In places the corpses were still lying so densely that I had to clear a path through them in order not to tread on arms and legs."
 
 
****************
 
Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden when it was bombed in 1945, and wrote a famous anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse Five, in 1969.
 
In February 1945, Vonnegut was witness to another pretty good imitation of Mt Vesuvius; the firebombing by Allied forces of Dresden, the town in eastern Germany, during the last months of the Second World War. More than 600,000 incen-diary bombs later, the city looked more like the surface of the moon. Returning home to India-napolis after the war, Vonnegut began writing short stories for magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post, and, seven years later, published his first novel, Player Piano. ...
 
 
Finally, in 1969, he tackled the subject of war, recounting his experiences as a POW in Dresden, forced to dig corpses from the rubble. The resulting novel was Slaughterhouse Five. Banned in several US states - and branded a "tool of the devil" in North Dakota - it carried the snappy alternative title: "The Children's Crusade: A Duly Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, a fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much) who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany - the Florence of the Elbe - a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale: this is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizopfrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamodre, where the flying saucers come from, Peace." ....
 
In December 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the German army and became a prisoner of war. In Slaughterhouse Five, he describes how he narrowly escaped death a few months later in the firebombing of Dresden. "Yes, by your people [the English], may I say," he insists. "You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I'm fond of your people, on occasion, but I was just thinking about 'Bomber Harris, who believed in attacks on civilian populations to make them give up. A hell of a lot of Royal Air Force guys were ashamed of what Harris had made them do. And that's really sportsmanship and, of course, the Brits are famous for being good sports," he concedes.
 
The Independent, London, 20 December 2001, p. 19
 
***************
 
The death toll was staggering. The full extent of the Dresden Holocaust can be more readily grasped if one considers that well over 250,000 -- possibly as many as a half a million -- persons died within a 14-hour period, whereas estimates of those who died at Hiroshima range from 90,000 to 140,000.*

Allied apologists for the massacre have often "twinned" Dresden with the English city of Coventry. But the 380 killed in Coventry during the entire war cannot begin to compare with over 1,000 times that number who were slaughtered in 14 hours at Dresden. Moreover, Coventry was a munitions center, a legitimate military target. Dresden, on the other hand, produced only china--and cups and saucers can hardly be considered military hardware!

It is interesting to further compare the respective damage to London and Dresden, especially when we recall all the Hollywood schmaltz about the "London blitz." In one night, 1,600 acres of land were destroyed in the Dresden massacre. London escaped with damage to only 600 acres during the entire war.

In one ironic note, Dresden's only conceivable military target -- its railroad yards -- was ignored by Allied bombers. They were too busy concentrating on helpless old men, women and children.

If ever there was a war crime, then certainly the Dresden Holocaust ranks as the most sordid one of all time. Yet there are no movies made today condemning this fiendish slaughter; nor did any Allied airman--or Sir Winston--sit in the dock at Nuremberg. In fact, the Dresden airmen were actually awarded medals for their role in this mass murder. But, of course, they could not have been tried, because there were "only following orders."

This is not to say that the mountains of corpses left in Dresden were ignored by the Nuremberg Tribunal. In one final irony, the prosecution presented photographs of the Dresden dead as "evidence" of alleged National Socialist atrocities against Jewish concentration-camp inmates!

Churchill, the monster who ordered the Dresden slaughter, was knighted, and the rest is history. The cold-blooded sadism of the massacre, however, is brushed aside by his biographers, who still cannot bring themselves to tell how the desire of one madman to "impress" another one let to the mass murder of up to a half million men, women and children. 

It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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agricola

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #209 on: January 19, 2009, 10:02:04 AM »
There are a lot of problems with that article - the death toll was nowhere near a quarter of a million, and Dresden was producing military equipment and was a transportation hub.  The rest of the problems are adequately dealt with by this quote from Harris:

Quote
...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. The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.

It is also worth pointing out that, of course, Germany was engaged in a war that it had started, that had cost upwards of fifty million lives, was still at that time engaged in serious attempts to industrially murder whole swathes of society that it didnt like and which was still fighting.  Dresden was justified.  They would have been justified nuking it.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2009, 10:07:46 AM by agricola »
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cassandra and sara's daddy

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #210 on: January 19, 2009, 12:23:07 PM »
what military equipment?  and in a most holy miracle in a raid spanning 14 hours with more than 500 k individual fire bomblets the rail yard was spared. pure luck that?
It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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Headless Thompson Gunner

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #211 on: January 19, 2009, 12:55:47 PM »
I think perhaps your frustration is the result of not carrying through the argument you made.  It's certainly not easy to claim that destroying whole cities is "debateable", but to still agree with the European/American legal tradition that smaller scale killing of civilians is wrong.

You clearly did not respond to the substance of the point, which was that both acts involve intentionally killing civilians.  Just because you call destroying an entire city "attacking enemy infrastructure" does not make it any less clear that the act involves intentional killing of civilians.

You're just using different words to leave out the intentional killing part, and then concluding that the difference is obvious.  I don't believe it's necessary to play dumb to notice that the reasoning isn't terribly solid there.

Note that when this issue was considered in the war crimes efforts after WWII, it wasn't like the allies just said "hey, it wasn't killing civilians when we bombed all those cities."  They most certainly did not-they offered as a defense to the Japanese and Germans the fact that the Allies had used the same tactics in war crimes trials.  They did not conclude that German carpet bombing was somehow not a war crime; they simply refused to convict the Germans of crimes that the Allies had also committed, noting that it would be blatantly hypocritical.

You might have a point if allied bombers had anywhere near the accuracy of a Hamas suicide bomber, and if they had used that accuracy to kill as many civilians as they possibly could while avoiding military targets.

The allies couldn't pick and choose which building to destroy, or even which city block.  They surely wanted such accuracy, and they went to great lengths to try to acquire it.  If they had succeeded, there is no doubt that they would have used the accuracy to target military facilities and leave the civilians alone.  It goes back to the quote from the allied bombing campaign commander, "For lack of a scalpel we had to use a bludgeon." 

Suicide bombers have that scalpel.  They can pick and choose where they want to explode themselves.  If they use their discrimination to deliberately seek out civilians and ignore the military targets, then they're simply engaging in murder.  Such actions are indefensible even in wartime.  If instead they tried to use their suicide bombs to attack military targets, then I'd be much more willing to accept it. 

Terrorists like Hamas aren't interested in attacking military targets, they seek to murder civilians.  They aren't trying to wage a war, they're trying to commit mass murder.  It would be a genocidei f they could carry it off successfully.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2009, 05:01:00 PM by Headless Thompson Gunner »

Headless Thompson Gunner

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #212 on: January 19, 2009, 01:04:53 PM »

Here's something to consider:  after WWII was won in each theater, the allies went to tremendous lengths to provide aide and to rebuild the very people they had just defeated.  The implications are clear.  Destroying the enemy population was never a goal.

Can anyone imagine Hamas trying to aide Israeli civilians and rebuild Israeli infrastructure after a similarly devastating war? 

No?

Why not? 

cassandra and sara's daddy

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #213 on: January 19, 2009, 01:10:49 PM »
"If they had succeeded, there is no doubt that they would have used the accuracy to target military facilities and leave the civilians alone"


then how would you rationalize the use of the term "unhousing the population"?

or dropping over 500 k bomblets on a city? and accidentally detroying it


Can anyone imagine Hamas trying to aide Israeli civilians and rebuild Israeli infrastructure after a similarly devastating war?  

No?

Why not?  


er   because there is no way they could muster the detructive force to do the devastation?  and if they won and took the territory they would rebuild  for obvious reasons
It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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cassandra and sara's daddy

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #214 on: January 19, 2009, 01:13:27 PM »
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1180527966693&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

All civilians living in Gaza are collectively guilty for Kassam attacks on Sderot, former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu has written in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.


Former Sephardi chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu.
Photo: Courtesy

Slideshow: Pictures of the week Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.

The letter, published in Olam Katan [Small World], a weekly pamphlet to be distributed in synagogues nationwide this Friday, cited the biblical story of the Shechem massacre (Genesis 34) and Maimonides' commentary (Laws of Kings 9, 14) on the story as proof texts for his legal decision.

According to Jewish war ethics, wrote Eliyahu, an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals. In Gaza, the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets.

The former chief rabbi also said it was forbidden to risk the lives of Jews in Sderot or the lives of IDF soldiers for fear of injuring or killing Palestinian noncombatants living in Gaza.

Eliyahu could not be reached for an interview. However, Eliyahu's son, Shmuel Eliyahu, who is chief rabbi of Safed, said his father opposed a ground troop incursion into Gaza that would endanger IDF soldiers. Rather, he advocated carpet bombing the general area from which the Kassams were launched, regardless of the price in Palestinian life.

"If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand," said Shmuel Eliyahu. "And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."

In the letter, Eliyahu quoted from Psalms. "I will pursue my enemies and apprehend them and I will not desist until I have eradicated them."

Eliyahu wrote that "This is a message to all leaders of the Jewish people not to be compassionate with those who shoot [rockets] at civilians in their houses."
It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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cassandra and sara's daddy

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #215 on: January 19, 2009, 01:18:22 PM »
http://www.rawa.org/s-kill2.htm

a bit more current us bombing work

Carpet bombing 'kills 150 civilians' in frontline town

THE INDEPENDENT, London, November 19, 2001
By Justin Huggler in Cheshma-ye Bangi




 

 An Afghan man lifts the head of a child who along with 11 other civilians died during US air raids in Kabul on October 28, 2001, witnesses said a man and his seven children were killed when a bomb crashed through their home. (AP photo)
More photos
 
A catastrophic error by carpet-bombing US Air Force warplanes was blamed yesterday for the deaths of about 150 unarmed Afghan civilians in a densely populated frontline town caught up in the battle for the Taliban redoubt of Kunduz.

Terrified refugees fleeing the town of Khanabad yesterday told The Independent that American planes had bombed the area a few miles from Kunduz daily since Thursday, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the buildings they were bombing were civilian homes. All day yesterday, huge plumes of smoke rose from the hills on the front lines near the Taliban's last northern stronghold as B-52 bombers continued to drop their loads of bombs.

"I saw 20 dead children on the streets," said Zumeray, one of the refugees.

"Forty people were killed yesterday alone. I saw it with my own eyes. Some of them were burned by the bombs, others were crushed by the walls and roofs of their houses when they collapsed from the blast."

The relentless US pounding appears to have persuaded the Taliban forces to surrender, provided the Northern Alliance fighters pledge not to kill the mostly Arab and Pakistani fighters among them. The Taliban offer was conditional on UN representatives monitoring the surrender, they said.

The still-unverified reports of the killing of civilians by US bombers may further complicate attempts to flush out Taliban and al-Qa'ida fighters. The Taliban have also remained in control in their southern stronghold, Kandahar, while US jets continued to pound them from the skies. The bombing raids over the past two days were described as among the heaviest in 43 days of war.

Khanabad lies 10 miles from Kunduz, one of only two major population centres in Afghanistan still under Taliban control. The refugees said they had endured three days of bombing before the Taliban ordered them out of their homes and told them they were free to cross the front line.

About 40,000 people live in Khanabad. The refugees said all but a few, who stayed behind to guard the houses, fled yesterday. "There was no one in Khanabad to see what happened," said Farhod, 20, who was travelling with his parents and his younger brothers and sisters. "There are a lot of dead people there."

Zumeray had walked across the front line with his mother, his sister and her children, after abandoning three months' worth of food in Khanabad. The children had no shoes; they had been walking for seven hours and their feet were raw.

He spoke of seeing pieces of burned black bodies strewn around where the bombs had landed. "When the bombs hit, there was fire everywhere," he said. The first bombs came on Thursday, he said, and the first house hit belonged to a man called Agha Padar.

"It was God who brought this on Khanabad," said Farhod. "The people there have had to suffer so much. We had so many problems when the Taliban came, and now this.

"This is the work of the Taliban," said Zumeray, insisting that he was not angry with the Americans. "The Taliban were so cruel, and God brought the Americans to help us."

The refugees' faces were full of fear. They walked all day, a steady stream of families fleeing their homes. Some had newborn babies in their arms. They all told the same story. As they spoke, B-52s circled lazily overhead and the huge explosions of the bombs echoed in the mountains. The children grew nervous at the sound.

While most support the attacks on the Taliban, one man shouted angrily that the Americans were wrong to kill civilians





Bombings kill 1,000 around Kunduz: Report AFP

HINDUSTAN TIMES, November 19, 2001

(Islamabad, November 19) More than 1,000 people were killed by US airstrikes around the Taliban-held city of Kunduz over the weekend, a newspaper here reported on Monday, quoting a militia commander.

The commander, Mulla Fazil, told the daily Dawn by satellite phone that heavy pounding from the air had killed some 800 people in the Kunduz area in northern Afghanistan and 250 in nearby Khanabad district.

Fazil gave the air attacks as the chief reason for a decision by the Taliban to surrender Kunduz if the handover to the victorious Northern Alliance forces could be conducted under UN supervision.

With thousands of Taliban troops backed by hardcore Chechen, Arab and Pakistani loyalists making a stand at Kunduz, US-52 bombers and fighters have intensified their attacks in recent days






did we kill more civilians there than taliban? 
It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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agricola

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #216 on: January 19, 2009, 03:54:53 PM »
what military equipment?  and in a most holy miracle in a raid spanning 14 hours with more than 500 k individual fire bomblets the rail yard was spared. pure luck that?

It was not spared, the USAAF had several raids - and would have several more after the raid you are on about - bombing the marshalling yards.  During nighttime, even at that stage of the war, aiming for anything smaller than a city (especially inland) was asking a great deal of most of Bomber Command. 

I suggest you read the report into the attack which explains in the required amount of detail why it was not a war crime:

http://www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/PopTopics/dresden.htm

As for the comparison between the Dresden raid and Hamas, its a senseless one for the reasons already described. 
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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #217 on: January 19, 2009, 04:03:07 PM »
the last wave of that raid was at 10:30 am  how dark is it in germany at that time of day? 
It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #218 on: January 19, 2009, 04:10:13 PM »
the last wave of that raid was at 10:30 am  how dark is it in germany at that time of day? 

I would like to see a source for that - Wikipedia says the second (of two) waves of the (RAF) Main Force bombed between 01:21 and 01:45. 

The raid you call "the last wave" was in fact the start of the USAAF raid, which was so accurately aimed at civilians that 60 bombers bombed Prague, others bombed Pilsen, and the rest (who bombed from then until some time after midday) either aimed for the marshalling yards or bombed blind on H2X.

Not taking the piss here, but you do know that for most of WW2 the USAAF bombed during the day, and the RAF bombed at night?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II#The_night_of_13.2F14_February
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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #219 on: January 19, 2009, 04:34:50 PM »
The night raid by the RAF Bomber Command was intended to devastate the city area itself and thereby choke communications within the city and disrupt the normal civilian life upon which the larger communications activities and the manufacturing enterprises of the city depended   and thats from the piece you linked to. written by the folks who dropped the bombs and written in reply to the "communists expoiting the raid" pardon my skepticism
It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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agricola

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #220 on: January 19, 2009, 04:41:37 PM »
The night raid by the RAF Bomber Command was intended to devastate the city area itself and thereby choke communications within the city and disrupt the normal civilian life upon which the larger communications activities and the manufacturing enterprises of the city depended   and thats from the piece you linked to. written by the folks who dropped the bombs and written in reply to the "communists expoiting the raid" pardon my skepticism

They aimed for the city because that was the smallest thing they were able to reliably hit

You arent being skeptical, you are just being wrong.
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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #221 on: January 19, 2009, 04:57:55 PM »
i will comment that its remarkable that there is a need to explain reduce and mitigate the german casualtys. there is no such drive with casualtys in japan . why is that?  and indeed thats a rhetorical question

all they could hit?the fire was visible from 500 miles from 60 on the ground the pathfinders in second wave just dropped markers on the side of the conflagration the smoke went to 15000 feet
It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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agricola

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #222 on: January 19, 2009, 05:11:35 PM »
i will comment that its remarkable that there is a need to explain reduce and mitigate the german casualtys. there is no such drive with casualtys in japan . why is that?  and indeed thats a rhetorical question

all they could hit?the fire was visible from 500 miles from 60 on the ground the pathfinders in second wave just dropped markers on the side of the conflagration the smoke went to 15000 feet

I dont know where you get the idea that there is no need to explain/reduce/mitigate Japanese casualties due to strategic bombing in WW2 - certainly I can remember more than a few discussions on the subject here and elsewhere, and as for "all they could hit" - thats the point, the Pathfinders dropped, the fire started, and everyone else just aimed for the fire.  Thats what happened in London in 1940, in Hamburg in 1943 and at Dresden and Pforzheim in 1945. 
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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #223 on: January 19, 2009, 06:10:20 PM »
you know i don't have a problem with the tactic  all the pc bs trying to justify it is disingenous at best. at least sherman was honest about it. war is about hurting the other guy  real bad. doing that usually gets fewer on your side dead. trying to put lipstick on that dead pig is more shameful than the killing
It is much more powerful to seek Truth for one's self.  Seeing and hearing that others seem to have found it can be a motivation.  With me, I was drawn because of much error and bad judgment on my part. Confronting one's own errors and bad judgment is a very life altering situation.  Confronting the errors and bad judgment of others is usually hypocrisy.


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agricola

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Re: This was uncomfortably close [A rocket fell a block away from me]
« Reply #224 on: January 19, 2009, 06:23:06 PM »
you know i don't have a problem with the tactic  all the pc bs trying to justify it is disingenous at best. at least sherman was honest about it. war is about hurting the other guy  real bad. doing that usually gets fewer on your side dead. trying to put lipstick on that dead pig is more shameful than the killing

Its not "pc bs".  There will be a time when that kind of attack is justified, and necessary.  Dresden was both of those things.   Hell, there will be a time when what the IDF has done to Gaza would be justified, its just this was not one of those times.
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