class-struggle-anarchism:

sashabarad:

class-struggle-anarchism:

mildred–pierce:

class-struggle-anarchism:

Atlee also personally authorised the firebombing of Dresden during the war, a horrific crime against humanity

Aye and without him Hitler would’ve conquered Europe and the UK would be in an even worst state so fuck off

Nah, you fuck off – it was February 1945. Hitler was in his bunker waiting for the end. The Russians were in Germany racing to Berlin. The war was done.

We dropped 4000 tons of explosives on a civilian town with no military significance. 35,000 people burned to death in a matter of hours – old people, children – they say they didn’t find kids under three because they’d been completely vaporised

Bomber Harris’ own men called him ‘the butcher’ – it was just another mass murder of civilians on behalf of the British state, one in a long, long history

@class-struggle-anarchism, I think I agree with you on the principle, but I’ll just recommend you to be careful with the expression “crime against humanity”. Actually, as you certainly know, both the events of the massacre of Dresden and the expression of “Crime against humanity” are politically charged in Germany as elsewhere.

The problem being that most historians agree (and I do agree) that Dresden firebombing was a horrific war crime.

But the problem with the concept of “crime against humanity” is that it was designed as a specific war crime targeting a specific group with the intend of erasing them by systematic killing for their ethnic/religious/political particularity. In other words, a genocide, to which it was then extended to the slave trade and colonisation in the Western history that actually both included genocides.

The problem also being that this concept is now reclaimed by neo-nazis to qualify specifically the Dresden massacre as a “white genocide”, in the way that it was intended to “genocide the aryan race” by bombing Dresden, which well, I guess you’ll agree, is as fucked up as it seems.

I mean, just because the Allies commited this horrific war crime and mass murder, doesn’t mean it was intended to systematically erase and genocide germans the way nazis tried to genocide the jews, for instance.

So I would just recommand to be extremely careful with the terminology.

Especially because it’s not an old book debate, it’s actually a hot topic :

http://www.dw.com/en/neo-nazis-rally-in-dresden-ahead-of-war-anniversary/a-37514776

Yes I totally take your point, I was thinking of the term as just like ‘a huge and grave crime against many people’ but you’re right, it’s not right in this context, should have used a different term

And yeah, the fact that the bombing was then used to establish a narrative of German victimhood by nazi scum worldwide is another negative consequence of the whole thing.

Although I agree with being careful not to give ammunition to nazi scum, I do think it is worth mentioning that ‘crimes against humanity’ is a much broader category than genocide.

War crimes, murder, massacres, dehumanization, genocide, ethnic cleansing, deportations, unethical human experimentation, extrajudicial punishments including summary executions, use of WMDs, state terrorism or state sponsoring of terrorism, death squads, kidnappings and forced disappearances, military use of children, unjust imprisonment, enslavement, cannibalism, torture, rape, political repression, racial discrimination, religious persecution, and other human rights abuses may reach the threshold of crimes against humanity if they are part of a widespread or systematic practice.

There does not have to be genocidal intent for something to be a crime against humanity.

The allied bombing campaign against nazi Germany involved a series of bombardements with the specific aim of causing maximum civilian casualties, to ‘break the will of the people’. Strategists and scientists worked out how to target city centres and how to make sure the fire spread so quickly that people did not have time to flee and burned so hot that shelters would not protect the population.

There is some pretty good ground to call these ‘massacres’ and ‘crimes against humanities’. That does not in any way negate acts of genocide –
the enormous and to this day unique in their scale acts of genocide – committed in Nazi Germany. Both can be acknowledged simultaneously.

Each of the major ‘allies’ and most of the smaller allies that were fighting the Germans were engaged in crimes against humanity on their own. From American medical experiments on soldiers of color to horrific practices in British camps in their colonies, to the numerous crimes against humanity by the Soviet Union under Stalin. And more.

None of these were isolated incidents. In the 20th century, long running developments in ‘western’ culture climaxed into a large number of unspeakable acts, of which the Holocaust was the most horrific of all. We can recognize that, in fact we MUST recogize that. If we treat the Holocaust as an isolated crime instead of part of a larger process we’ll inevitably fail to acknowledge and combat its root causes. If we re-imagine the 2nd World War as a ‘good guys vs fascists’ story, we become incapable of seeing modern fascism as a product of a wider violently white supremacist colonialist antisemitic xenophobic society and we risk labelling people ‘good guys’ merely for fighting fascists and failing to stop them from enacting their own crimes against humanity.