By Nicholas Strakon
Published: 1995-04-01
Source:
https://codoh.com/library/document/who-bombs-children/en/
After
the Oklahoma City bombing, ordinary Americans all over the country were asking
in bewildered horror, „Who bombs children?“ I can answer that question without
having a scrap of evidence about who really employed Timothy McVeigh and Terry
Nichols, the accused bombers. I can answer it not because I am so smart but
because it is so easy.
My answer is: The United States government, among others.
With regard to war and the state, many Americans wander in a fog of
mystification – or, to put it not so generously, in a moral stupor. For heaven’s
sake, the Oklahoma City bombing occurred a mere 19 days before the 50th
anniversary of V-E Day. It occurred two months after the 50th anniversary of the
incineration of Dresden and less than four months before the 50th anniversary of
the incineration of Hiroshima. Let us, for once, connect historical events
everyone knows about with the values all civilized people are supposed to
cherish. Who is the greatest bomber of children if not the state?
When I write that World War II went far toward corrupting the moral sense of the
American people, making possible the civilizational collapse we are now
witnessing, I do not mean to indict the deceived, the propagandized, or the
maleducated. Instead, I mean to suggest that the ruling class has robbed us not
only materially but morally as well. And I mean to suggest that we can recapture
our moral sense by reading history, recalling the values we were taught as
children, and restoring certain vital connections between that history and those
values. Americans of today cannot overturn the Permanent Regime, but we can keep
it from stealing our souls. So let us remember all of what happened in World War
II, and let us call mass murder by its right name.
A Juvenile War Fan
I shrink at sounding holier-than-thou, so immediately I offer a mea culpa. I was
an adolescent World War II buff. I read everything about the war I could lay my
hands on, but especially books about the European Theater, where the dictators
were cinematic, the music was stirring, the massed tanks were exciting, and
glamorous cities were destroyed. In those days, the materials available to me
reflected the William Shirer/Time-Life triumphalist-nationalist school, but even
those works of propaganda gave strategic bombing at least a glance.
It’s safe to say that in 1962 the formative work for any bespectacled,
bloodthirsty 13-year-old war fan was the paperback edition of Shirer’s Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich. It certainly was for me. I read my copy until it fell
apart, and then I bought another. Now, Shirer, in the three pages – out of a
total of 1,483 – that he devotes to the subject of area bombing, describes the
destruction only of German „cities“ and „homes,“ as if the inhabitants
themselves were magically untouched. And in the entire massive work, he mentions
the bombing of Dresden not once. He does criticize the bombing of cities – but
because it was strategically unproductive, not because it was a monstrous
atrocity.
Still, it shouldn’t have taken much of a leap of imagination for me to conclude
that many children must have been turned into ash in those air raids. Indeed, I
may have made that connection; I don’t recall. I do recall that a few years
later when I started to learn about civilian casualties in Germany and Japan
from historians more honest than Shirer, I blamed not Roosevelt, Truman, and
Churchill but Hitler and Tojo. Those latter villains forced „us“ to kill the
civilians! And anyway, those civilians (including the children, I suppose) had
it coming for supporting Hitler and Tojo.
It is difficult to compartmentalize moral numbness, and mine infected more than
just my understanding of World War II. After 1945, Western propaganda ministries
abruptly dropped their loving descriptions of Stalin as the kindly, brave,
pipesmoking „Uncle Joe“ and transformed the Soviet people from „our glorious,
fraternal, democratic allies“ into our most fearsome, loathsome enemy. It was an
act of massive rectification that no doubt served as the principal inspiration
for George Orwell’s parables in 1984, where the dread enemy might change in
mid-speech from Eurasia to Eastasia, whereupon the people of Oceania were
obliged instantly to adopt the belief that „Oceania is at war with Eastasia ...
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.“
In any event, as a good citizen groping toward intellectual consistency in 1967,
I justified a surprise nuclear attack on Soviet cities – the old „throw a
thousand missiles over the pole“ strategy – by arguing that the Soviet people
had a moral imperative to overthrow their wicked regime, and if they didn’t,
they (the children, too, I suppose) deserved whatever „we“ had to do to them in
the course of extirpating communism. That is what I had learned from my studies
of World War II, and that is the tortured way I went about making it comport
with what I had learned about good and evil in Sunday School. It had to comport
somehow, or everything I believed about the sanctity of the United State would
be threatened.
Eventually, I found a better way to integrate what I knew of history with what I
believed about freedom, justice, slavery, and murder. A late-blooming moral
Columbus, I discovered America the beautiful, and had done with the hideous
United State and its grisly works.
Victims of an Allied bombing raid on Berlin, December 1943, are laid out for
identification in a gymnasium incongruously decorated with Christmas trees. An
estimated 50,000 to 60,000 Berliners perished in Allied air attacks. More than
half a million Germans civilians were killed in Allied bombing attacks during
the Second World War. In addition, Allied bombers took the lives of many tens of
thousands of civilians in France, Italy, Hungary, Belgium and other European
countries.
Kill a Child for FDR and Uncle Joe
The government of the United State is surely the champion bomber of children in
world history, with the British Imperial regime secure in second place. Some
writers tell us that the Eighth and Fifteenth air forces didn’t do much terror
bombing, as such, in Europe until late 1944 or early 1945, but in fact American
air forces became full partners with Britain’s terroristic Bomber Command much
earlier. The difference was that the Americans at first tended to bomb cities
for tactical reasons – that is, to clear the way for their armies; or for
reasons of economic strategy – that is, to shatter industry and infrastructure.
The resulting massacre of civilians was merely „collateral damage.“ Unintended.
Just accidental: „Ooops! There goes another orphanage! Sorry! Thought it was a
power plant. Don’t worry, when it’s all over, we’ll pass out choon gum,
chocolate, and Lucky Strikes to the kids, if any survive.“ The fliers didn’t
restrict their activities to Germany, by the way: they wrecked cities in Italy,
France, and Belgium as well. It was, one supposes, a case of having to destroy
those cities in order to liberate them.[1]
By the last months of the war in Europe, the American bomber force did resort to
outright terror bombing. For example, the courageous Eighth Air Force took over
from the heroic Brits on the second day of the destruction of Dresden, a city
with no AA guns but a million helpless refugees. And David Irving writes of
another noble military operation no doubt vital to winning the war: „To exploit
the refugee chaos in Berlin, the Americans sent over nine hundred heavy bombers
at noon on February 3 [1945] ... The city’s casualties were immense.“[2]
In the Pacific Theater, the United State had no close rival in child-bombing: it
ran the Allies’ only major air force, and that force rained havoc and death on a
scale that made the raids conducted on Chinese civilians by Japan’s rickety
bomber force look like juvenile vandalism.[3]
(Other nations win prizes in other classes of heroic, valorous endeavor. For
instance, that Red Army whose glorious achievements the Clintons celebrated in
Moscow the other day qualifies, at least in the European Theater, as the No. 1
Rapist – of women and children.)
The Butcher’s Bill
How many children, in both theaters, did the United State and British
Imperialist air forces slaughter? I’ve dabbled in a little demography in an
effort to come up with a figure. Douglas Botting, in From the Ruins of the
Reich, estimates that Allied bombing killed 500,000 civilians in Germany,
not counting another 100,000 civilians killed in the land warfare, which
included another type of bombing – artillery bombardment.[4]
The 500,000 figure seems decidedly conservative in light of estimates that
250,000 were killed in the raids on Dresden alone (February 13-14, 1945).[5]
But let it stand for our present purpose. In War Without Mercy (p. 298),
John Dower calculates that American saturation bombing of 66 Japanese cities
killed 393,000 civilians. Say, then, that about 893,000 civilians were killed in
air attacks on Germany and Japan. (I omit civilians murdered by the „liberation“
air forces in Italy, France, and the Low Countries.)
Census figures indicate that in 1970, children 14 or younger made up
approximately 28 percent of the U.S. population.[6]
It is reasonable to assume that the cohort of German and Japanese children was
proportionally larger in the 1940s – a time of larger families and shorter life
expectancy – but, again, let the conservative estimate stand.
If 28 percent of the victims were age 14 and younger, we end with an estimated
butcher’s bill of about 250,000 children murdered by American and British
fliers. Extrapolating from the total figures, we can assume, roughly, that 44
percent of the murdered children were Japanese and 56 percent were German. If
all the murdered Japanese children were murdered by Americans, for 44 percent of
the total, and – at a guess – a third of the murdered German children were
murdered by Americans, for another 18.67 percent of the total, we arrive at a
figure of 62.67 percent or 156,675 children murdered by Americans, and 37.33
percent or 93,325 murdered by the British.
156,675 children! Call to mind the child the whole world saw in the Oklahoma
City fireman’s arms – and then imagine having to see a different child
suffocated or crushed or incinerated on the front page of your daily paper every
day for almost 429 years!
I don’t mince words, because this must be clear: it wasn’t „bombing“ or „air
raids“ or „airplanes“ that accounted for those homicides. It was the government
employees crewing the planes. B-17s don’t bomb people; people bomb people. Some
crewmen were conscripts, „serving“ with a gun in their back; but the pilots,
navigators, and bombardiers were officers. Doing what they did should ignite 50
years’ worth of fiery nightmares, for anyone with a moral imagination.
Hey, Hey,LBJ ...
I could not compartmentalize my moral numbness, and neither could other
Americans. It infected our evaluation of other public calamities. For every
youngster in the ‘60s who chanted, „Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill
today?“ there had to be a hundred Americans who never gave a second thought to
those „collateral losses“ produced by the strategic bombing of Vietnam. In fact,
many probably thought the chanting kids ought to be lynched for insulting „our“
president. (In the end, the war did become quite unpopular with most adults, but
primarily because they didn’t care to have their sons’ tails shot off by an
unbeatable enemy, not because of any holocaust of underage Oriental Commies.)
Worse: although it was no secret, in 1983, that the battleship New Jersey had
bombarded unseen Lebanese villages with its 16-inch guns, most Americans were
surprised when, in response, Shiite soldiers gave their lives to blow up the
Marine barracks in Beirut. The ugliest thing wasn’t that Americans failed to
take seriously the murdering of the villagers – including children – by US
sailors, but that they didn’t even expect the Lebanese to take those
homicides seriously enough to want to strike back. In fact, they thought of the
avengers as typical Ayrab fanatics for carrying out their strike! Apparently,
only Americans are allowed to be outraged when their civilians and children are
murdered. Such an attitude reveals not merely a lapse, but the death, of the
moral imagination.
It Can’t Happen Here
Writing without regard to nationality, I believe I have made my case that the
United States is the greatest bomber of children in history. That is all I
wanted to demonstrate in order to shed some light on this odd season of terror
and celebration, and it is all I can demonstrate. I have no secret knowledge,
only black suspicions, about what happened in Oklahoma City. However, for the
benefit of those who object that the children bombed to death in World War II
were, after all, mere foreigners, and that „It (government child-bombing)
can’t happen here,“ I go on to suggest that just as the popular vocabulary, from
curse words to the names of ethnic groups, has undergone considerable
rectification in recent decades, so the definition of „us“ and „them“ has
changed.
On makeshift grids of steel girders, heaped bodies of victims of the Dresden
fire storm air raid were cremated in large bonfires. Some two thousand British
and American bombers took part in the devastating attack, February 13-14, 1945.
So intense was the heat of the firestorm created in the raid that rivers of
molten asphalt flowed through the streets. Conservative estimates put the number
of victims at 135,000 – the great majority of them civilians. Authoritative
sources estimate that as many as 300,000 perished in the raid.
At the time of the attack Dresden was packed with hundreds of thousands of
German women and children fleeing advancing Soviet forces. One of Europe’s great
cultural and architectural treasures, the German city had no importance as a
military target. Mass killing and terrorism were the sole objectives of the
Dresden attack, which British diplomat and author Harold Nicolson called „the
single greatest holocaust by war.“
I maintained in „Dark Suits and Red Guards“ that, since the completion of the
Suits’ Managerial Revolution and the rise of the Guards in the ‘60s, the two
wings of the American ruling apparatus have shared a growing contempt, if not a
loathing, for us ordinary, unprogressive, provincial Majority Americans. In the
conclusion of an earlier article, I envisioned a near-future American regime
dispatching Rapid Deployment Force planes with paraquat, Agent Orange, napalm,
and anthrax to wipe out backwaters that had become difficult to govern.
„Extreme?“ I wrote. „But why would we expect our cosmopolitan Suits and Guards
to display sentiments toward domestic rubes and yahoos any warmer than those
which earlier, nationalistic American elites displayed toward the inhabitants of
Dresden, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima?“
Why, indeed? To the elites, what happens to us American „yahoos“ at century’s
end matters as little as what happened to the „grinning yellow monkeys“ and
„bestial Huns“ – of whatever tender age – in the 1940s. How much crippling
inflation and taxation – how many policies destroying families, small
businesses, small towns, and traditional culture – how much nihilistic Red Guard
propaganda in the schools and media – how much reverse discrimination – how many
campaigns for civil disarmament – how many managed-trade and world government
schemes – how much ruinous foreign aid and intervention – how many
expropriations in favor of Wall Street banks, Israel, and Third World
dictatorships must we suffer before we understand that it is not for us
that the elites are building their New World Order? We ordinary Americans in the
1990s have more in common with the ordinary people of Germany and Japan than we
have with our masters in New York and Washington.
Many of the victims in Oklahoma City were not just Americans, of course, but
friends and servants of the regime. Even if the deracinated elites would
hesitate to murder American children no more than they would Lebanese children,
wouldn’t they flinch at killing their own servants?
I think they would not flinch. Regimes have always been willing to sacrifice
some of their hapless minions for reasons of state.[7]
Perhaps there would have been some resistance to a plan to butcher low-level
nobodies at a facility on the Bicoasts. (Of course, that wouldn’t have worked
half as well for terroristic purposes, either.) But the bureaucrats and others
who were targeted were mere Heartlanders – Okies, Velveeta eaters, K-mart
shoppers, folks with unwashed accents, butts of Bicoastal jokes and ridicule.
Almost all were undoubtedly Christians. In the eyes of New York and Washington,
they were absolute nobodies from nowhere (although the media and other, more
official spokesmen for the regime must make it seem that they were somebodies,
for the benefit of the other nobodies in front of the tube).
I was relating to an acquaintance of mine, a 28-year veteran of the Central
Government bureaucracy, the conspiratorial allegation that none of the „senior
personnel“ assigned to the Murrah building showed up for work the morning of the
bombing. „Senior personnel!“ he said, chuckling. „What senior personnel?“ He
said he doubted whether Murrah housed anyone at all in the Senior Executive
Service, let alone any important political appointees. „At most, you had a
handful of GS-15s. In DC, a GS-15 doesn’t even rate a reserved parking space.“
Infantile Bromides
I no longer support mass murder, but I’m afraid millions of nice, friendly,
peaceful-looking Americans acquiesce in it, without thinking much about it.
Undoubtedly, they would have the murdering limited to war – the slaughter
specially sanctified by statesmen. But we all should remember that we live in an
era of undeclared wars, secret wars, and „moral equivalents“ of war. We should
pray that the statesmen of our own nation don’t decide to make war on us.
And although it won’t change anything in the bloody world around us, we might
remember the simple moral teachings of the West we all learned as children, such
as „Two wrongs don’t make a right,“ „Innocent until proven guilty,“ „Spare the
children,“ and „Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.“ Call them
infantile bromides if you will, but they are central tenets of any decent
civilization, and of any decent man.
Notes
1 |
See James J . Martin, „The Bombing and Negotiated Peace Questions in
1944,“ in Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical
Tradition (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Ralph Myles, 1971), pp. 116-17.
[Available from the IHR for $9.75, postpaid. (check www.ihr.org for
current availability and price; ed.)]
This revelatory essay describes the hate campaign mounted by the US and
British regimes and their unofficial mouthpieces, designed to corrupt
the American and British peoples so they would be ready to accept what
Martin calls „the new barbarism.“ Before reading this essay, I had never
heard of the Peace Now Movement (1943-1944). |
2 |
David Irving, Hitler’s War: 1942-1945 (London: Macmillan, 1985
[1977]), p. 762. See also: David Irving, Hitler’s War and The War
Path, 1933-1945 (London: Focal Point, 1991), p. 735. |
3 |
I do not mean to minimize Chinese losses and suffering from other
causes. John W. Dower, in War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the
Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986 [pp. 295-296]), suggests that
a figure of nine million civilian deaths, from all causes, is a
conservative estimate. |
4 |
Douglas Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945-1949
(New York: Crown, 1985), p. 125. |
5 |
D. Irving, Hitler’s War: 1942-1945 (London: 1985 [1977]), p. 771,
and D. Irving, Hitler’s War (London: Focal Point, 1991), p. 739.
„Most of the [Dresden] victims were refugee women and children,“ writes
Frederick J.P. Veale. The Allied „strategic air offensive,“ he reports,
killed a total of 600,000 civilians in Germany. F.J.P. Veale, Advance
to Barbarism: The Devel opment of Total Warfare (Institute for
Historical Review, 1993), pp. 191, 199. |
6 |
The Statistical History of the United
States from Colonial Times to the Present,
introduction and user’s guide by Ben J. Wattenberg (New York: Basic
Books, 1976), p. 23. |
7 |
Whoever carried out the bombing, we may be skeptical about the extent to
which the Dark Suits considered it a threat to themselves and their
agenda, given the fact that the Dow index not only closed at a record
high on the day of the bombing but also set new highs on each of several
days immediately thereafter. |
The Bombardier’s Song
Here’s an example of how moral numbness can propagate factual error and, in
effect, result in the Orwellian rectification of history. I heard recently on my
local socialist radio station a locally produced „concert preview“ for the Fort
Wayne Philharmonic, which was scheduled to perform Carl Orff’s „Carmina Burana.“
The announcer was recounting the life and career of the German composer. Reading
from a prepared script, he informed us that Orff had been working at the
Guntherschule in Munich, but that his work was interrupted in 1943 when the
Nazis bombed the school.
Now, I found that statement remarkable, given the fact that Orff shared with
Richard Strauss the distinction of being the Nazi regime’s favorite contemporary
composer. And oddly, none of my books on World War II reports a „Nazi“ bombing
of Munich in 1943. However, B.H. Liddell Hart, in his History ofthe Second
World War, does report that the British Bomber Command perpetrated a major
raid on Munich the night of October 7, 1943.
The scriptwriter whose presentation I heard was brought up to believe that
whatever the Allies did was, by definition, good. Conversely, if a bad thing
happened in World War II to something that, in his present context, he regards
as good, in this case a music school, the Nazis must have done it. Even if it
was a Nazi music school!
– N. S.
Rights and Duties
„We are born into no right whatever but what has an equivalent and corresponding
duty right alongside of it. There is no such thing on this earth as something
for nothing. Whatever we inherit of wealth, knowledge or institutions from the
past has been paid for by the labor and sacrifice of preceding generations.“
– William Graham Sumner