queeranarchism:

class-struggle-anarchism:

After it was founded in 1918, the brave RAF got straight to work, indiscriminately bombing and machine gunning civilian protesters from the air in India

The fight against fascism in WW2 was a relatively brief period in the RAF’s 100 year history, and they even managed a few war crimes during that. The RAF’s day job, the thing they’ve spent the best part of the last 100 years doing with no end in sight, is dropping bombs on the middle east in the service of British imperialism.

“The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape”.

 – Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris

‘A few war crimes’ doesn’t really do the RAF during WW2 justice either. During WW2 ‘Bomber Harris’ department did one thing only: figuring out how best to create a ‘fire storm’ capable of destroying entire cities in a very short time. Their department no interest in targetting soldiers, military bases or even factories. Their targets were city centres and the goal was maximum civilian casualties. Fire storms burned so hot and intense that they sucked all the oxigen out the air for miles and miles around, literally sucking the air out of the lungs of people far from the flames. The bombing of Hamburg resulted in 46.000 dead. The bombing of Dresden 25.000 dead.

And mass murderer Harris has a fucking statue in Britain now.

lajosh: it was Germany who wanted the total war. and given the Holocaust happening in the meantime I’m very happy that Germany got defeated in the fastest way possible. the biggest mistake was all the apeasement beforehand.

the only bad thing that came from this is this stupid victimhood and the notion that ‘the Germans’ were also liberated from the Nazis. don’t buy into fascist ideology – lovey-dovey peaceful negotiations would have prolonged the Holocaust even further.

For all your self-righteous anger, you’ve got a few things not quite right

1. Mass bombing of civilians was not ‘the fastest way possible’ to win the war. Huge resources in terms of the available planes and fuel were diverted away from assisting soldiers at the front line, bombing military positions behind the front line, or
destroying military factories or transportation lines. Soldiers needed thart air support and they often weren’t getting it because so many planes and fuel were committed to bombing German civilians.

And it DID NOT WORK. Just as the Battle of Britain made the British more determined to fight the Germans, so the bombing of German cities made the Germans more determined to fight back. Many Germans who did not support Hitler at all (a point I’ll get to) were persuaded by the bombing to at least fight to avenge the deads of thousands of children.
Harris’ claim that he could ‘break the will’ of the German
people never came true.

The only thing Harris’ bombing campaign achieved was a divertion of German resources towards counter-aid defence.
Not an impressive result compared to the resources
commited.

2. Appeasement was indeed a mistake, but we know that with hindsight. A fact often forgotten is that appeasement was not put forward by cowardly politicians. It was very very popular. You have the remember that in 1937 Europe was 18. Many still vividly remembered the massive pointless slaughter of that war. The young boys who were maimed in that war hadn’t reached their fourties yet. There was a very good reason that people wanted to avoid war at all cost.

3. German’s certainly did not experience 1945 as a moment of liberation. Their country was occupied and split into four pieces. The map was rewritten and big parts of East Germany were removed, with the millions of Germans there forced to leave with what they could carry. In 1946-1947 malnutrition resulted in massive waves of disease sweeping Germany, resulting in many thousands of deaths. It was not fun times.

4. But the Germans were nazis, so they deserve all they got, right? wrong. In 1933 when Hitler came to power, Germany had 66 million people in it. Although, through a campaign of terror, Hitler got 49% of the vote in presidential elections, many people could not or did not vote so that was only 17 million votes, 26% of the population as a whole. By 1945, 12 years had passed and people too young to vote in 1933 were now in their late twenties.

It’s safe to say that well over 75% of the German population in 1945 had never voted for Hitler. A significant number had been children when Hitler came to power. They lived in a brutal dictatorship that they did not choose. Should they at least have resisted? YES. And there was German resistance. But resisting was very dangerous. In most occupied countries (the Netherlands, Belgium, France, etc) less than 1% of the population resisted. Very few people actually risk their lives once they are in a dictatorship and statistically we are probably both not in the 1%.

Directly after the war there was a tendency to treat the entire history
of the Holocaust as a ‘German’ problem: something all Germans and only
Germans had supported. This made the victors feel comfortable but it is
blatantly untrue. Fascist were very popular in almost every European
country in the 1933s. Hitler was popular in the United States and got
many of his ideas on racial seperation from the United States. And even
among political parties who hated fascists, the idea of sterilizing or
killing ‘unwanted populations’ to achieve a better human race was
popular throughout Europe. This was never something uniquely cooked up
by the Germans. The rest of Europe shares a lot more of the blame than it wants to admit.

5. Aren’t some fascists saying all the things you’re saying? Well, first of all: historical facts are still true even if fascists are repeating them. But secondly, they’re not saying the same thing. A few fascists in Germany are using the factual history of Allied war crimes to claim that ‘both sides were equally bad’. That is obvious bullshit, using one historical truth to then deliver a series of lies.

Anti-fascist historians in the mean time are pointing out that fascism was more widespread than we think and the Allies were not the nice heroes we think they were, with the aim of deepening our understanding of fascism so that we can better prevent it, and acknowledging historical facts so that fascists do not get the opportunity to spread lies about it.

Fascists would LOVE it if they were the only people talking about Bomber Harriss, it would give credence to their claim that world war two history isn’t being told accurately and it would drive those curious about the complete history right into their hands. That would give them a fantastic way to spread their lies in the shadow of one big unacknowledged truth. I don’t want them to have that luxury.