Withdrawing Support For Militarism [179]
The problem with revenge is that it lowers the humanity of those who exercise it down to the same level, of even below, those who committed the original crime. Although we can't yet know who was responsible for 911 or 1012, we do now know that forces of the Coalition of the Willing (CoW) have, on occasions, been just as barbaric as the people who killed on those dates. This has been amply demonstrated in Afghanistan and again in Iraq. If you doubt this, seek out more facts about the CoW's use of DU and NDU weaponry and cluster bombs. These horror weapons continue, to this day, to put young children and adult civilians at risk of injury or death from unexploded munitions, radiation, and toxic substances in the ground water and the food chain.
The problem with revenge is that it lowers the humanity of those who exercise it down to the same level, of even below, those who committed the original crime. Although we can't yet know who was responsible for 911 or 1012, we do now know that forces of the Coalition of the Willing (CoW) have, on occasions, been just as barbaric as the people who killed on those dates. This has been amply demonstrated in Afghanistan and again in Iraq. If you doubt this, seek out more facts about the CoW's use of DU and NDU weaponry and cluster bombs. These horror weapons continue, to this day, to put young children and adult civilians at risk of injury or death from unexploded munitions, radiation, and toxic substances in the ground water and the food chain.
unexploded munitions, radiation, and toxic substances
The magnitude of these and other atrocities
War Crimes - The Ugliest Face Of The Military [178]
The US government has withdrawn from the International Criminal Court Treaty, citing a concern that the court has too much independence and potential to pursue US service members and civilians (i.e. senior officials) for war crimes. Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, stated that, "We believe that states, not international institutions are primarily responsible for ensuring justice in the international system." And, "We believe the ICC is an institution of unchecked power. ...power must never be trusted without a check." In other words, the US doesn't want its citizens tried in any other courts than those on its own territory, and within its own jurisdiction. However, history shows that 'victors' seldom prosecute their own forces or officials for war crimes.
Numerous war criminals were tried and convicted following World War II. They were German, Italian, or Japanese. However, there were major atrocities perpetrated by the Allied forces as well. Nobody faced a Nuremberg trial for the murder of at least 200,000 civilians in the deliberate fire bombing of Dresden, in Saxony. Nobody was ever tried, or even reprimanded, over the mass rapes of the women of Berlin during the Russian occupation. And, of course, nobody ever faced trial for the horrific deployment of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, President Harry Truman called the Hiroshima explosion, "..the greatest thing in history."
The magnitude of these and other atrocities committed by the Allied forces in World War II was as great, if not greater, than the war crimes of the Axis and Japanese armies. The incendiary attack on the university city of Dresden, where many German civilians had gathered to escape bombing aimed at industrial and military targets elsewhere, is recorded as the deadliest of any war to date.
Eleven square miles of the city was destroyed by some 3,000 tons of explosives and phosphorous incendiaries. During the war Dresden had become a centre for wounded, both civilian and military. There were 19 hospitals in Dresden at the time. Of these, 16 were badly damaged. Three of the hospitals were totally destroyed, and one of these was the maternity clinic. German figures show that out of 28,400 houses in the inner city, 24,900 were destroyed. Dresden had a population of some 1.2 million people at the time, but after the attacks were over it is recorded that there were not enough uninjured people left to bury the dead.
In February, 1945, there was no military imperative to attack the medieval city of Dresden. The end of the war in Europe was already in sight, there were no wartime industries associated with the city, there were no anti-aircraft or other defences, because the German army did not consider that there was anything to defend there. Dresden's population was swollen with injured soldiers and civilian refugees, but there were hardly any fighting men in the city or its surrounds. There have been claims, after the war, that Dresden was the main communications centre for part of the Eastern front. However, had this been true, the city would have been defended, and it was not.
Two attacks were flown by the RAF, and they were timed so that the second raid would catch rescuers and fire fighting teams in the open. A third attack by the USAF completed the carnage. Given the terrible nature of the new incendiary weapons; the way a mixture of phosphorous, magnesium and petroleum created 1,000 degree fireballs and 100 miles per hour winds that sucked people to their deaths in the inferno, the bombing raids on Dresden were coldly calculated murder.
Here are some quotations from survivors on the ground, airmen in the two attacks, and those who masterminded the fire bombing of Dresden.
"You guys [British] 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....A hell of a lot of Royal Air Force guys were ashamed of what Harris had made them do."
... Kurt Vonnegut, a fourth generation German-American who was a prisoner of war in Dresden at the time of the bombing, and was forced to help dig charred corpses out of the ruins.
Vonnegut later recorded his horrific experiences in a novel, Slaughterhouse Five. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a young US infantry scout who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge, and sent to Dresden. His experiences as a prisoner who takes shelter in the underground meat cellar of a slaughterhouse to survive the firestorm, and his accounts of the carnage he has to clean up later, are Vonnegut's first-hand experiences. Slaughterhouse Five, written in 1969, became a best-seller, but was banned in several US states, due to its graphic and factual accounts of what really happened to the people of Dresden in 1945. It contradicted the 'official truth' about the event that killed so many German civilians, you see. The truth is that one in every five German non-combatants who were killed in World War II died at Dresden.
"Then the bombing began again. This time there was no pause between detonations and the rocking was so severe, we lost our balance, and were tossed around in the basement like a bunch of rag dolls. At times the basement walls were separated and lifted up. We could see the flashes of the fiery explosions outside. There were a lot of firebombs and canisters of phosphorous being dumped everywhere. The phosphorous was a thick liquid that burned upon exposure to air and as it penetrated cracks in the buildings, it burned whatever it leaked through. The fumes from it were poisonous......I learned later that there had been over a hundred and seventy bodies taken out of that basement and twenty seven came back to life. I was one of them - miraculously."
"The memory that has remained so vividly in my mind was seeing and hearing humans trapped, standing in molten, burning asphalt like living torches, screaming for help which was impossible to give. At the time I was too numb to realise the atrocity of this scene but after I was 'safe' in hospital, the impact of this and everything else threw me into a complete nervous breakdown. I had to be tied to my bed to prevent me from severely hurting myself physically. There I screamed for hours and hours behind a closed door while a nurse stayed at my bedside."
This account is how Elisabeth, the mother of Edda West, who was 3 years old in 1945, remembers her experiences in Dresden. Thankfully, Edda was too young to remember the firebombing. But her mother and grand mother both survived to tell their stories to her.
"Dresden is one of those German cities which normally devotes Shrove Tuesday to Carnival activities. But on February 13, 1945, with the Red Army 60 miles away, the mood was sombre. The refugees, who were crowded into every house, each had his horror story about Russian atrocities. In many parts of the city, and particularly around the railway station, thousands of latecomers who could find no corner in which to sleep were camping in the bitter cold of the open streets. The only signs of Carnival spirit, when the sirens sounded at 9:55 p.m. were the full house at the circus and a few gangs of little girls wandering about in fancy dress. Though no one took the danger of a raid very seriously, orders must be obeyed and the population just had time to get down its shelters before the first bombs fell at nine minutes past the hour."
"Twenty-four minutes later, the last British bomber was on its way back to England, and the inner city of Dresden was ablaze. Since there were no steel structures in any of its apartment houses, the floors quickly capsized, and half an hour after the raid was over the firestorm transformed thousands of individual blazes into a sea of flames, ripping off the roofs, tossing trees, cars and lorries into the air, and simultaneously sucking the oxygen out of the air raid shelters. "
"Most of those who remained below ground were to die painlessly, their bodies first brilliantly tinted bright orange and blue, and then, as the heat grew intense, either totally incinerated or melted into a thick liquid sometimes three or four feet deep. But there were others who, when the bombing stopped, rushed upstairs. Some of them stopped to collect their belongings before escaping, and they were caught in the second raid. But some 10,000 fled to the great open space of the Grosse Garten, the magnificent royal park of Dresden, nearly one and a half square miles in all."
"Here they were caught by the second raid, which started without an air-raid warning, at 1:22 a.m. Far heavier than the first - there were twice as many bombers with a far heavier load of incendiaries - its target markers had been deliberately placed in order to spread the fires into the black rectangle which was all the airmen could see of the Grosse Garten. Within minutes, the firestorm was raging across the grass, ripping up trees and littering the branches of others with clothes, bicycles and dismembered limbs that remained hanging for days afterwards."
"The most terrible scenes in the inner city took place in the magnificent old market square, the Altmarkt. Soon after the first raid finished, this great square was jam-packed with panting survivors. When the second raid struck, they could scarcely move until someone remembered the huge concrete emergency water tank that had been constructed to one side. This tank was a hundred by fifty yards by six feet deep.....When the rescuers reached the Altmarkt five days later, they found the tank filled with bloated corpses, while the rest of the square was littered with recumbent or seated figures so shrunk by the incineration that 30 of them could be taken away in a single bathtub."
"But perhaps the most memorable horror of this second raid occurred in the hospitals. In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a hospital city, with many of its schools converted into temporary wards. ....Thousands of crippled survivors were dragged by their nurses to the banks of the river Elbe, where they were laid in rows on the grass to wait for the daylight. But when it came there was another horror. Punctually at 11:30 a.m., the third wave of bombers, the two hundred eleven American Flying Fortress, began their attack. Once again, the area of destruction was extended across the city. But what the survivors all remember were the scores of Mustang fighters diving low over the bodies huddled on the banks of the Elbe, as well as the larger lawns of the Grosse Garten, in order to shoot them up. Other Mustangs chose as their targets the serried crowds that blocked every road out of Dresden."
"But some things survived destruction. The few factories Dresden possessed were outside the city centre, and soon were at work again. So too was the railway system. Within three days, indeed, military trains were running once again right through the city, and the marshalling yards - untouched by a bomb - were in full operation. ....In their salvage work, the Nazis relied on some 25,000 Allied prisoners of war, concentrated in and around the city. Dresden, as was very well known in London and Washington, was not only a hospital city but a prisoner-of-war city - still another reason why the authorities assumed it would not be attacked."
"What Dresdeners chiefly remember, of those first days after the raid, is the disposal of the bodies. Throughout the war, German local authorities had been extremely careful to show great respect for death, enabling relatives wherever possible to identify and to bury their own dead. At first, this procedure was followed in Dresden. But weeks after the raid there were still thousands of unopened cellars under the smouldering ruins, and the air was thick with the fog and sweet stench of rotting flesh. .....Hurriedly, a monstrous funeral pyre was constructed in the Altmarkt. Steel shutters from one of Dresden's biggest department stores were laid across broken slabs of ironstone. On this macabre gridiron, the bodies were piled with straw between each layer, soaked with gasoline and set ablaze. Nine thousand corpses were disposed of in this way, and eight cubic meters of ash were then loaded into containers and buried in a graveyard outside the city, 25 feet wide and 15 feet deep."
... From and article by R.H.S.Grossman, in Esquire Magazine, November 1963.
The WWW source, from which these excerpts came, makes the point that the numbers killed by the Dresden raid have never been agreed.
An alternative WWW source on the Dresden bombing, for example, states that, "Recent research suggests that 35,000 were killed." The latter estimate appears to be severely revisionist - it came from a 'history' site.
In contrast, a Swiss publication suggests that, on the basis of victims who were registered at the time, 480,000 died. The following breakdown is provided:
37,000 infants and toddlers
46,000 public school children
55,000 wounded and sick people, doctors and nurses
12,000 firemen, soldiers, medical aides, bunker assistants, police
330,000 'men, women and youth'.
Presumably, the latter figure includes a number (unknown) of Allied prisoners of war who were being held in Dresden.
"Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester, is also by far the largest unbombed built-up area the enemy has. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind and already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do."
... Royal Air Force memo (January, 1945).
"In February of 1945, with the Russian army threatening the heart of Saxony, I was called upon to attack Dresden this was considered a target of the first importance for the offensive on the Eastern front. Dresden had by this time become the main centre of communications for the defence of Germany on the southern half of the Eastern front......I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks [on Germany] were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself"...
... Air Marshall Arthur Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command.
"It struck me at the time, the thought of the women and children down there. We seemed to fly for hours over a sheet of fire - a terrific red glow with thin haze over it. I found myself making comments to the crew. 'Oh God, those poor people.' It was completely uncalled for. You can't justify it."
... Roy Akehurst, an RAF wireless operator who flew on the Dresden raid.
"The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and screams from somewhere, but all around is one single inferno. To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire."
... Margaret Frewyer, who was in Dresden on 13th February, 1945.
"The elephants gave spine-chilling screams. The baby cow elephant was lying in the narrow barrier-moat on her back, her legs up in the sky. She had suffered severe stomach injuries and could not move. A 90 cwt. cow elephant had been flung clear across the barrier moat and the fence by some terrific blast wave, and stood there trembling. I had no choice but to leave these animals to their fate."
... A keeper at the Dresden Zoo, on 13th February, 1945.
"That the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. It is not so much this or the other means of making war that is immoral or humane. What is immoral is war itself. Once full-scale war has broken out it can never be humanised or civilised, and if one side attempted to do so it would be most likely to be defeated. That to me is the lesson of Dresden."
... Robert Saundby, Deputy Air Marshall RAF Bomber Command, 1945.
The bombing of Dresden was the greatest war crime of the 20th century, by a very large margin. It was more cruel and inhuman than even the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was more shocking than the rape of the women of Berlin by the Red Army. Even though the mass violations of every female in that city between 8 years and 80 years of age, and the encouragement of the Russian commanders of their troops in these acts, was so totally reprehensible. The Dresden raids were the ultimate military atrocity. So, there are certainly lessons that can be drawn from it.
However, the fatalistic observation of Deputy Air Marshall Saundby, of RAF Bomber Command, is not the lesson of Dresden. The lesson of Dresden, the greatest war crime, and one of the least known of such crimes outside Germany, is that secrecy made it possible.
During World War II, and in many wars since, strict censorship and ironclad control of the news from the front, made it possible for nation states to wage wars against each other, without the citizens of the combatant countries knowing of the gruesome killing that was going on.
Even today, the CoW have been able to keep the ugly truths about their Iraq and Afghanistan invasions from the world. More importantly, they have largely succeeded in restricting, and 'spinning', the facts coming out of these campaigns, to the extent that their own citizens have been kept in the dark about war crimes that occurred. It has been relatively easy to do this, particularly in Afghanistan, where there is scant communications technology and infrastructure on the ground or in the hands of the local population.
But what if British, American and Australian forces - called the Allies in WWII, but now termed the Coalition of the Willing - were to attack Dresden with incendiaries in 2005? Germany is now saturated with 21st century information technology. Not only do most citizens on the street have hand-held digital capture devices in their phones, watches and other accessories, they are connected to the Internet by wireless networks that blanket the city. The Internet connects the citizens of Dresden to the world, including the American, British and Australian people. If the folk at home, in the CoW nations, were to see anything remotely like the firestorm of February, 1945, on their personal communications screens, the war would instantly become non-viable.
In comparison to the horrors of Dresden, the now famous 'Napalm Girl' photograph taken by Nick Ut in Vietnam, in 1972, was mainstream pictorial. You can show it to most people and they will be upset by it, and critical of whoever dropped napalm on a Vietnam village, but they will not be so consumed by revulsion that they pick up the nearest phone and start screaming down the line at whoever will listen - in government, the military, or the church.
However, had there been a Nick Ut in Dresden, and had he been able to beam photographs and video clips to the world, that would have been the most likely reaction of most people. Viewers would have found it nearly impossible to contain their rage and anger at the sheer evil and inhumanity of the attacks carried out by the RAF and USAF. It would not have taken a year for the impact of the pictures and other information to halt all support for the war - as it did in the case of Vietnam.
If there had been today's imaging and communications technology available in Dresden at the time of the incendiary attacks, World War II would have been called off in March, 1945. A great many lives would have been saved if this had occurred. Sadly, it was not possible then. The power to start or end wars was still in the hands of nation states. The technology to shift this power to sovereign individuals on the streets had yet to be invented and widely dispersed.
It is important to realise that the sole reason that the war continued, and few people in Britain, the US, or Australia were ever aware of the greatest military crime of the 20th century, is that the Allies were able to suppress all pictures and detailed information from the public media. Given the nature and ubiquity of modern digital capture and communications technologies, this censorship would now be an impossibility in a developed country such as Germany. The CoW forces were able to suppress information coming out of Afghanistan only because that region of the world does not yet have such technology in the hands of its population.
The reality is that the returns on violence diminish to zero if the perpetrating states are exposed, and their 'leaders' put at risk of being hunted down by their own people and intelligent 'info-bots'. In the 21st century, war is thus rendered impractical as a means of anything more than a self-defence response on your own ground. It is no longer possible to launch cruel attacks on the non-combatants of other states and expect support from your own population.
This change has been brought about by new technology. In 1945, the wire services, broadcasting and print media were either state owned or in the hands of corporations that could be controlled by the state in matters of the 'national interest' and 'national security'. It was never deemed to be in the national interest to let the population know about war crimes and atrocities, such as Dresden fire bombing by the Allies and the Rape of Berlin by the Russians. Now, the largest communications network, the Internet and its associated wireless web, is in the hands of individual users all over the world. Anyone with a cellular phone and a digital imaging device is a front-line reporter. Rupert Murdoch is no longer the most powerful media baron in the world. You and I are.
Author's Note:
The incineration of Dresden is covered here because it was not only one of the worst atrocities of all time, but it is also the perfect example of a crime that could never be kept secret in the new technological age we now live in. There is another reason as well. I personally felt the anguish of this event, more than 20 years afterwards and some 12,000 miles from where it occurred.
In the 1960s I lived with my parents, next door to a German family who had emigrated to Australia after World War II. Two daughters had been born shortly after they arrived, and I greatly admired the eldest; sadly from afar. These neighbours were a quiet family who kept to themselves. When my folks moved into the house alongside them the father took my mother aside and explained that we should not think anything of noises in the night. He said that no one would be in need of assistance, it was just that his wife suffered from nightmares.
Generally, the noises would not last long, because the husband would wake his wife and calm her. But the screams that came from next door at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. in the morning were the most piercing and soul chilling I have ever heard. Despite the fact that my room was on the opposite side, and both our house and that of our neighbours had double brick walls, the sound seemed to fill my head.
In time, we learned that the family had lived in Cologne, and that the cause of the wife's nightmares had to do with her having been in Dresden when it was firebombed. When those who knew the truth said "She was in Dresden" the vast majority of Australians did not understand. We had no idea about anything so evil having happened there. The official silence about the Dresden raids was thorough.
Some years later, after I had read Slaughterhouse Five, and done some research, I came to understand what made that woman scream in her sleep, so long after. But I could never know what she must have been feeling and reliving. I would've had to have been to Hell to know that.
Withdrawing Support For Militarism [179]
The problem with revenge is that it lowers the humanity of those who exercise it down to the same level, of even below, those who committed the original crime. Although we can't yet know who was responsible for 911 or 1012, we do now know that forces of the Coalition of the Willing (CoW) have, on occasions, been just as barbaric as the people who killed on those dates. This has been amply demonstrated in Afghanistan and again in Iraq. If you doubt this, seek out more facts about the CoW's use of DU and NDU weaponry and cluster bombs. These horror weapons continue, to this day, to put young children and adult civilians at risk of injury or death from unexploded munitions, radiation, and toxic substances in the ground water and the food chain.
If an attack on civilians is horrific enough, and if the pictures and details reach the homelands of the perpetrating forces, it can stop a war. However, up until now, it has been possible for national armies to keep information of major, and graphically horrific, atrocities secret. It is still possible to do so in relatively low-tech countries such as Afghanistan. What is needed now is wide recognition in the CoW homelands that war itself is one great atrocity. Such realisation must lead to changed thinking and attitudes in relation to militarists who engage in wars, and troops who wage them.
The glorification of war and war heroes derives from thinking and attitudes that are simply wrong-headed. Nationalism and flag-waving propaganda play a part in this, but so does ignorance of the horrors involved. It is no accident that the US and Australian public were so ready to support revenge strikes on alleged terrorist strongholds and states said to harbour terrorists. There has not been a war on the soil of those countries within the living memory of their populations. In contrast, the people of Britain, France and Germany, where there are still many people who have experienced war in their homeland, were far more reluctant to support attacks on the populations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
A mother's account of a visit to see her son in camp, just before he left for Iraq, captures the problem that those who have never experienced war face when the prospect of a conflict looms ahead. They know only the glamorised face of war, and are ignorant of the horrors that are omitted from news reports and many history books. They are aware of the ticker-tape parades for returning troops, the uniformed men with medals covering their chests, and the approval that is typically accorded veterans of war. But they do not know the full truth about war, and they cannot weigh the horrors against nationalistic glory and the adulation that surrounds men in uniform. The American mother said this.
"Here is what was weird about being in Texas, at Fort Hood, with my son last week: almost every civilian we met, off the base, that found out that my son was Iraq-bound got very excited, like it was a good thing, they were almost envious. They didn't question what the heck we're doing there at all, they just pumped my son's hand and slapped him on the back like he was a hero."
"There's such a thing as misguided patriotism and misguided courage, don't you think? On the base, well, there was absolutely no grey area at all...you could feel the bizarre, almost happy energy that everything was geared up for war...it really made my stomach flip-flop. It was surreal. Fort Hood is the biggest military base in the world, and everywhere I went there was a happy electricity that there's "a war on"...the worst was the PX - it was selling war trinkets like you see souvenirs sold at Disneyland...In the book section there wasn't a single thing for sale that wasn't pro-military, or about any other subject. Talk about brainwashing!"
Hopefully that mother's son returned from Iraq, uninjured and without having been involved in helping to carry out atrocities. Many didn't and many won't. Their suffering, the suffering of their families, and the suffering of the 'enemies' they fought, will have in no way lessened the grief of 911. Nor will it have done anything to blunt the threat of future terrorist attacks on the CoW nations. As William S. Lind has observed, "Because these enemies are not states they have nothing we can bomb, no tanks we can take out, no capital we can occupy. And each one is a Hydra. Every time we kill an enemy, we recruit more."
Arguments of a moral nature will not give CoW militarists reason to pause, or to halt the perpetual War on Terror. It is a waste of time telling these people that they should act humanely and with restraint. Many of the aircrews who flew the Dresden raids knew that their actions were morally indefensible. They said, "It was completely uncalled for. You can't justify it." But they were ordered to do it just the same. There are several courses of action that ordinary citizens can take to restrain militarism and halt wars.
1) Actively discredit the effectiveness of the War On Terror, using the logic of people like Lind and the evidence of failures such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Direct this reasoning at your fellow citizens, who are the ones who ultimately fund the wars through their taxes and fill the ranks of the CoW forces with their own flesh and blood. Help them to understand that it is neither necessary or effective to sacrifice their sons in the War on Terror.
2) Cultivate an enduring rage against the harming of civilians and the use of terror weapons. This is more than a spontaneous reaction to an horrific photograph or specific atrocity. It is cold, unyielding anger at both the overt and covert institutions of the state that wage war on other people's countries, to no just purpose whatsoever.
3) Refuse to accord militarists and their institutions any honour. Do not attend parades to welcome troops home. Do not observe anniversaries of a military nature, such as Anzac Day or Veterans Day. Do not contribute in any other way to the glorification of war and the military services. Never, ever, relent in this regard.
4)Totally reject the Geneva Conventions, as devices put in place by nation states to lend their wars a respectability that war can never have. War is murder, plain and simple.
There is no point throwing the Sixth Commandment in the face of a militarist. The Allied action against the citizens of Dresden, in 1945, was a case of Christians incinerating Christians. The plain, unequivocal, commandment, "Thou shalt not kill", was overridden by precedents and conventions built up over hundreds of years of warfare. The rule of law usurped the rule of God. In the event, even the rule of law was forgotten. Pure evil took charge.
No, the dictum that must be espoused to militarists is one that drives at their self-esteem and egos, at their love of valour and glory and the wearing of a chest full of medals. It is, like the Sixth Commandment, a simple message:
"Real men don't harm women or children."
The parrot people might well denounce the above notions as 'unpatriotic'. However, militarism has no place in a Level 4 Civilization, and this must be made clear to the Feds and those who serve them. This is not about belittling the contributions and sacrifices of the veterans of past conflicts. Nor is it about condemning the vast majority of the serving members of the armed forces. It is about manifestly withdrawing support for further wars, the obscene levels of expenditure on military budgets, and the development of terror weapons.
Related:
Surveillance
It is up to ordinary people to raise the level of debate about the undemocratic surveillance practices of the many faceless and unaccountable agents who make daily intrusions on individual privacy, and about the apologists and propagandists for the War nn Terror who applaud every new attack on human rights and freedoms as "prudent" or "necessary". If there is no discussion of reverse surveillance in the national media, create it on the streets on a citizen to citizen basis. If nobody is talking about the outrageous assaults on privacy and human rights embodied in the new antiterrorist acts forced through US, UK and Australian legislatures, start talking about it to your neighbours and friends.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108175.php
2nd Renaissance -13
Such a development is part of the phenomenon of reverse surveillance that will come to characterise the 2nd Renaissance and a rapid transition to a Level 4 Civilization and a truly free society. You can learn more about reverse surveillance at the 'Surveillance' freesite. Reverse surveillance principles extend well beyond the use of ubiquitous digital imaging technologies, and include audits of all aspects of federal government operations, by randomly selected teams of citizens. The Feds and the parrot people will be quick to pronounce that such monitoting is "not in the national interest," but it will definitely be in our interests, and those of future generations of humanity.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/107989.php
2nd Renaissance -12
There are reports that in one Balinese kampong that provided labour to the clubs in Kuta Beach, seven empty coffins were buried, because there were no identifiable remains of the missing workers. It was as if they had been vaporised. Scores of people, mainly locals, are thought to have disappeared without trace.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/107756.php
2nd Renaissance -11
Fortunately, the power and control of government and military elites is illusory in the 21st century. The world no longer works the way it did, and there is nothing to compel people to support failed, outdated systems any longer. This is an understanding that must be widely and quickly shared. The future of our children and the planet depends upon our changing our thinking about governments, and our support for them.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107560.php
2nd Renaissance -10
In the Afghanistan turkey shoot the CoW forces used vast numbers of hard target weapons and other munitions containing depleted uranium (DU). This substance is almost twice as dense as lead. When it punches through concrete bunkers, armour, or mud huts, DU disintegrates into a chemically toxic and radioactive dust. In contrast to the earlier DU weapons used in Gulf War I, the newer ordinance produced deaths and deformities within weeks of the start of military action by the CoW. Between 1990-91 and 2001 the US arms manufacturers are thought to have "improved" the DU technology by introducing milled uranium ore to their warheads. This non-depleted uranium (NDU) is - wait for it - cheaper to produce and far more potent than DU. It poses massive health risks to civilian populations exposed to it, and constitutes, in every sense of the word, a weapon of mass destruction, or WMD. "Hey they're hunting them in Iraq, aren't they?"
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107216.php
2nd Renaissance -9
The Old World Order will not do anything to smooth the path to a Level 4 Civilization, and a better world. On the contrary, they will do whatever they can to make it difficult. The police, the military, the media, the financial system, the rule of law, and all the mechanisms of civil control and surveillance will be mobilised in defence of the status quo. But, once they understand their options, the people of the world will not engage in a battle with the forces of the OWO. They will simply abandon the old way of living under national rule, for a better, freer, life in new tribal societies. Kinship mechanisms will help people cope with the pressures of official opposition to radical changes that will finally enable them to escape the invisible prison that the OWO had fashioned around them.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107047.php
2nd Renaissance -8
Ultimately the old order will lose the battle to preserve their privileged way of life, based on all prevailing scarcity, pseudo-democracy, and the rule of law. But in the interim, hundreds of millions of innocent people might lose their lives in bloody resistance to the changes being made by the Old World Order (OWO).. If such a terrible thing happens, it will all have been for nothing, because:
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106816.php
Tales of Adam
Daniel Quinn*
http://ishmael.com/index1.cfm
2nd Renaissance -7
When coupled with the introduction of artificial scarcity and taker concepts of property ownership and legal tender, Western death-fearing religions played a significant role in subduing, otherwise independent, tribal peoples.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106537.php
2nd Renaissance -6
The second route involves the setting up of entirely new living spaces on tribal lands that were previously seized by colonising governments that espoused and followed Taker philosophies. This route has greater credibility, in the sense of secession rights, where clear historical ownership of the land can be shown.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106327.php
2nd Renaissance -5
Quinn contends that while governments can imagine a revolution they can't imagine abandonment. As he puts it, "..even if it could imagine abandonment , it couldn't defend against it, because abandonment isn't an attack, it's just a discontinuance of support."
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106136.php
2nd Renaissance -4
In due course, there is one achievement of overriding significance that Caral might well provide. One great contribution or lesson that can be applied to the 2nd Renaissance. How to live in peace, with spiritual meaning, and without warfare, for a thousand years.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105935.php
The New Renaissance
Daniel Quinn*
http://www.mnforsustain.org/quinn_d_new_renaissance.htm
2nd Renaissance -3
Plichta writes of this model as follows. "There was a time I used to make fun of the Apocalypse of St John and believed it to be a totally unreliable historical source. Today I am filled with deep humility, perhaps because I am now able to give a concrete description of the foundation of the world as seen by St John with my mathematical discoveries, and thus possibly open a new way to all of humanity which has now reached a dead end."
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105799.php
2nd Renaissance -2
Georg Cantor (1845-1918), by his origination of modern set theory and his studies of the nature of infinity, left science a valuable legacy. Cantor was regularly admitted to a psychiatric clinic within the University of Halle, in Germany, where he lectured and worked as a Professor of Mathematics. On each occasion that he became ill he had been thinking about infinity and the continuum hypothesis. Such intense thought, at the boundaries of his comprehension, caused Cantor to suffer repeated mental breakdowns. Infinity drove him mad.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105634.php
2nd Renaissance
This story was published in September 2004 and it was a big secret. I received it on disk but I think it should be public by now anyway. It is interesting to look back at it and in terms of today's world some two years on. I will link each chapter as I go along over the coming weeks.- The Old World Order - Happy reading!
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105519.php
Fight Iemma - Debnam
All they can say is 'lock em up'
It seems we are in the thick of it again - the stupid, heartless "Law & Order" auction.
Premier Morris Iemma and Opposition leader Peter Debnam are trying to outdo each other with idiotic "tough on crime" policies.
Original Article
http://sydney.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=64701&group=webcast
The US government has withdrawn from the International Criminal Court Treaty, citing a concern that the court has too much independence and potential to pursue US service members and civilians (i.e. senior officials) for war crimes. Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, stated that, "We believe that states, not international institutions are primarily responsible for ensuring justice in the international system." And, "We believe the ICC is an institution of unchecked power. ...power must never be trusted without a check." In other words, the US doesn't want its citizens tried in any other courts than those on its own territory, and within its own jurisdiction. However, history shows that 'victors' seldom prosecute their own forces or officials for war crimes.
Numerous war criminals were tried and convicted following World War II. They were German, Italian, or Japanese. However, there were major atrocities perpetrated by the Allied forces as well. Nobody faced a Nuremberg trial for the murder of at least 200,000 civilians in the deliberate fire bombing of Dresden, in Saxony. Nobody was ever tried, or even reprimanded, over the mass rapes of the women of Berlin during the Russian occupation. And, of course, nobody ever faced trial for the horrific deployment of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, President Harry Truman called the Hiroshima explosion, "..the greatest thing in history."
The magnitude of these and other atrocities committed by the Allied forces in World War II was as great, if not greater, than the war crimes of the Axis and Japanese armies. The incendiary attack on the university city of Dresden, where many German civilians had gathered to escape bombing aimed at industrial and military targets elsewhere, is recorded as the deadliest of any war to date.
Eleven square miles of the city was destroyed by some 3,000 tons of explosives and phosphorous incendiaries. During the war Dresden had become a centre for wounded, both civilian and military. There were 19 hospitals in Dresden at the time. Of these, 16 were badly damaged. Three of the hospitals were totally destroyed, and one of these was the maternity clinic. German figures show that out of 28,400 houses in the inner city, 24,900 were destroyed. Dresden had a population of some 1.2 million people at the time, but after the attacks were over it is recorded that there were not enough uninjured people left to bury the dead.
In February, 1945, there was no military imperative to attack the medieval city of Dresden. The end of the war in Europe was already in sight, there were no wartime industries associated with the city, there were no anti-aircraft or other defences, because the German army did not consider that there was anything to defend there. Dresden's population was swollen with injured soldiers and civilian refugees, but there were hardly any fighting men in the city or its surrounds. There have been claims, after the war, that Dresden was the main communications centre for part of the Eastern front. However, had this been true, the city would have been defended, and it was not.
Two attacks were flown by the RAF, and they were timed so that the second raid would catch rescuers and fire fighting teams in the open. A third attack by the USAF completed the carnage. Given the terrible nature of the new incendiary weapons; the way a mixture of phosphorous, magnesium and petroleum created 1,000 degree fireballs and 100 miles per hour winds that sucked people to their deaths in the inferno, the bombing raids on Dresden were coldly calculated murder.
Here are some quotations from survivors on the ground, airmen in the two attacks, and those who masterminded the fire bombing of Dresden.
"You guys [British] 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....A hell of a lot of Royal Air Force guys were ashamed of what Harris had made them do."
... Kurt Vonnegut, a fourth generation German-American who was a prisoner of war in Dresden at the time of the bombing, and was forced to help dig charred corpses out of the ruins.
Vonnegut later recorded his horrific experiences in a novel, Slaughterhouse Five. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a young US infantry scout who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge, and sent to Dresden. His experiences as a prisoner who takes shelter in the underground meat cellar of a slaughterhouse to survive the firestorm, and his accounts of the carnage he has to clean up later, are Vonnegut's first-hand experiences. Slaughterhouse Five, written in 1969, became a best-seller, but was banned in several US states, due to its graphic and factual accounts of what really happened to the people of Dresden in 1945. It contradicted the 'official truth' about the event that killed so many German civilians, you see. The truth is that one in every five German non-combatants who were killed in World War II died at Dresden.
"Then the bombing began again. This time there was no pause between detonations and the rocking was so severe, we lost our balance, and were tossed around in the basement like a bunch of rag dolls. At times the basement walls were separated and lifted up. We could see the flashes of the fiery explosions outside. There were a lot of firebombs and canisters of phosphorous being dumped everywhere. The phosphorous was a thick liquid that burned upon exposure to air and as it penetrated cracks in the buildings, it burned whatever it leaked through. The fumes from it were poisonous......I learned later that there had been over a hundred and seventy bodies taken out of that basement and twenty seven came back to life. I was one of them - miraculously."
"The memory that has remained so vividly in my mind was seeing and hearing humans trapped, standing in molten, burning asphalt like living torches, screaming for help which was impossible to give. At the time I was too numb to realise the atrocity of this scene but after I was 'safe' in hospital, the impact of this and everything else threw me into a complete nervous breakdown. I had to be tied to my bed to prevent me from severely hurting myself physically. There I screamed for hours and hours behind a closed door while a nurse stayed at my bedside."
This account is how Elisabeth, the mother of Edda West, who was 3 years old in 1945, remembers her experiences in Dresden. Thankfully, Edda was too young to remember the firebombing. But her mother and grand mother both survived to tell their stories to her.
"Dresden is one of those German cities which normally devotes Shrove Tuesday to Carnival activities. But on February 13, 1945, with the Red Army 60 miles away, the mood was sombre. The refugees, who were crowded into every house, each had his horror story about Russian atrocities. In many parts of the city, and particularly around the railway station, thousands of latecomers who could find no corner in which to sleep were camping in the bitter cold of the open streets. The only signs of Carnival spirit, when the sirens sounded at 9:55 p.m. were the full house at the circus and a few gangs of little girls wandering about in fancy dress. Though no one took the danger of a raid very seriously, orders must be obeyed and the population just had time to get down its shelters before the first bombs fell at nine minutes past the hour."
"Twenty-four minutes later, the last British bomber was on its way back to England, and the inner city of Dresden was ablaze. Since there were no steel structures in any of its apartment houses, the floors quickly capsized, and half an hour after the raid was over the firestorm transformed thousands of individual blazes into a sea of flames, ripping off the roofs, tossing trees, cars and lorries into the air, and simultaneously sucking the oxygen out of the air raid shelters. "
"Most of those who remained below ground were to die painlessly, their bodies first brilliantly tinted bright orange and blue, and then, as the heat grew intense, either totally incinerated or melted into a thick liquid sometimes three or four feet deep. But there were others who, when the bombing stopped, rushed upstairs. Some of them stopped to collect their belongings before escaping, and they were caught in the second raid. But some 10,000 fled to the great open space of the Grosse Garten, the magnificent royal park of Dresden, nearly one and a half square miles in all."
"Here they were caught by the second raid, which started without an air-raid warning, at 1:22 a.m. Far heavier than the first - there were twice as many bombers with a far heavier load of incendiaries - its target markers had been deliberately placed in order to spread the fires into the black rectangle which was all the airmen could see of the Grosse Garten. Within minutes, the firestorm was raging across the grass, ripping up trees and littering the branches of others with clothes, bicycles and dismembered limbs that remained hanging for days afterwards."
"The most terrible scenes in the inner city took place in the magnificent old market square, the Altmarkt. Soon after the first raid finished, this great square was jam-packed with panting survivors. When the second raid struck, they could scarcely move until someone remembered the huge concrete emergency water tank that had been constructed to one side. This tank was a hundred by fifty yards by six feet deep.....When the rescuers reached the Altmarkt five days later, they found the tank filled with bloated corpses, while the rest of the square was littered with recumbent or seated figures so shrunk by the incineration that 30 of them could be taken away in a single bathtub."
"But perhaps the most memorable horror of this second raid occurred in the hospitals. In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a hospital city, with many of its schools converted into temporary wards. ....Thousands of crippled survivors were dragged by their nurses to the banks of the river Elbe, where they were laid in rows on the grass to wait for the daylight. But when it came there was another horror. Punctually at 11:30 a.m., the third wave of bombers, the two hundred eleven American Flying Fortress, began their attack. Once again, the area of destruction was extended across the city. But what the survivors all remember were the scores of Mustang fighters diving low over the bodies huddled on the banks of the Elbe, as well as the larger lawns of the Grosse Garten, in order to shoot them up. Other Mustangs chose as their targets the serried crowds that blocked every road out of Dresden."
"But some things survived destruction. The few factories Dresden possessed were outside the city centre, and soon were at work again. So too was the railway system. Within three days, indeed, military trains were running once again right through the city, and the marshalling yards - untouched by a bomb - were in full operation. ....In their salvage work, the Nazis relied on some 25,000 Allied prisoners of war, concentrated in and around the city. Dresden, as was very well known in London and Washington, was not only a hospital city but a prisoner-of-war city - still another reason why the authorities assumed it would not be attacked."
"What Dresdeners chiefly remember, of those first days after the raid, is the disposal of the bodies. Throughout the war, German local authorities had been extremely careful to show great respect for death, enabling relatives wherever possible to identify and to bury their own dead. At first, this procedure was followed in Dresden. But weeks after the raid there were still thousands of unopened cellars under the smouldering ruins, and the air was thick with the fog and sweet stench of rotting flesh. .....Hurriedly, a monstrous funeral pyre was constructed in the Altmarkt. Steel shutters from one of Dresden's biggest department stores were laid across broken slabs of ironstone. On this macabre gridiron, the bodies were piled with straw between each layer, soaked with gasoline and set ablaze. Nine thousand corpses were disposed of in this way, and eight cubic meters of ash were then loaded into containers and buried in a graveyard outside the city, 25 feet wide and 15 feet deep."
... From and article by R.H.S.Grossman, in Esquire Magazine, November 1963.
The WWW source, from which these excerpts came, makes the point that the numbers killed by the Dresden raid have never been agreed.
An alternative WWW source on the Dresden bombing, for example, states that, "Recent research suggests that 35,000 were killed." The latter estimate appears to be severely revisionist - it came from a 'history' site.
In contrast, a Swiss publication suggests that, on the basis of victims who were registered at the time, 480,000 died. The following breakdown is provided:
37,000 infants and toddlers
46,000 public school children
55,000 wounded and sick people, doctors and nurses
12,000 firemen, soldiers, medical aides, bunker assistants, police
330,000 'men, women and youth'.
Presumably, the latter figure includes a number (unknown) of Allied prisoners of war who were being held in Dresden.
"Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester, is also by far the largest unbombed built-up area the enemy has. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind and already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do."
... Royal Air Force memo (January, 1945).
"In February of 1945, with the Russian army threatening the heart of Saxony, I was called upon to attack Dresden this was considered a target of the first importance for the offensive on the Eastern front. Dresden had by this time become the main centre of communications for the defence of Germany on the southern half of the Eastern front......I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks [on Germany] were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself"...
... Air Marshall Arthur Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command.
"It struck me at the time, the thought of the women and children down there. We seemed to fly for hours over a sheet of fire - a terrific red glow with thin haze over it. I found myself making comments to the crew. 'Oh God, those poor people.' It was completely uncalled for. You can't justify it."
... Roy Akehurst, an RAF wireless operator who flew on the Dresden raid.
"The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and screams from somewhere, but all around is one single inferno. To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire."
... Margaret Frewyer, who was in Dresden on 13th February, 1945.
"The elephants gave spine-chilling screams. The baby cow elephant was lying in the narrow barrier-moat on her back, her legs up in the sky. She had suffered severe stomach injuries and could not move. A 90 cwt. cow elephant had been flung clear across the barrier moat and the fence by some terrific blast wave, and stood there trembling. I had no choice but to leave these animals to their fate."
... A keeper at the Dresden Zoo, on 13th February, 1945.
"That the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. It is not so much this or the other means of making war that is immoral or humane. What is immoral is war itself. Once full-scale war has broken out it can never be humanised or civilised, and if one side attempted to do so it would be most likely to be defeated. That to me is the lesson of Dresden."
... Robert Saundby, Deputy Air Marshall RAF Bomber Command, 1945.
The bombing of Dresden was the greatest war crime of the 20th century, by a very large margin. It was more cruel and inhuman than even the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was more shocking than the rape of the women of Berlin by the Red Army. Even though the mass violations of every female in that city between 8 years and 80 years of age, and the encouragement of the Russian commanders of their troops in these acts, was so totally reprehensible. The Dresden raids were the ultimate military atrocity. So, there are certainly lessons that can be drawn from it.
However, the fatalistic observation of Deputy Air Marshall Saundby, of RAF Bomber Command, is not the lesson of Dresden. The lesson of Dresden, the greatest war crime, and one of the least known of such crimes outside Germany, is that secrecy made it possible.
During World War II, and in many wars since, strict censorship and ironclad control of the news from the front, made it possible for nation states to wage wars against each other, without the citizens of the combatant countries knowing of the gruesome killing that was going on.
Even today, the CoW have been able to keep the ugly truths about their Iraq and Afghanistan invasions from the world. More importantly, they have largely succeeded in restricting, and 'spinning', the facts coming out of these campaigns, to the extent that their own citizens have been kept in the dark about war crimes that occurred. It has been relatively easy to do this, particularly in Afghanistan, where there is scant communications technology and infrastructure on the ground or in the hands of the local population.
But what if British, American and Australian forces - called the Allies in WWII, but now termed the Coalition of the Willing - were to attack Dresden with incendiaries in 2005? Germany is now saturated with 21st century information technology. Not only do most citizens on the street have hand-held digital capture devices in their phones, watches and other accessories, they are connected to the Internet by wireless networks that blanket the city. The Internet connects the citizens of Dresden to the world, including the American, British and Australian people. If the folk at home, in the CoW nations, were to see anything remotely like the firestorm of February, 1945, on their personal communications screens, the war would instantly become non-viable.
In comparison to the horrors of Dresden, the now famous 'Napalm Girl' photograph taken by Nick Ut in Vietnam, in 1972, was mainstream pictorial. You can show it to most people and they will be upset by it, and critical of whoever dropped napalm on a Vietnam village, but they will not be so consumed by revulsion that they pick up the nearest phone and start screaming down the line at whoever will listen - in government, the military, or the church.
However, had there been a Nick Ut in Dresden, and had he been able to beam photographs and video clips to the world, that would have been the most likely reaction of most people. Viewers would have found it nearly impossible to contain their rage and anger at the sheer evil and inhumanity of the attacks carried out by the RAF and USAF. It would not have taken a year for the impact of the pictures and other information to halt all support for the war - as it did in the case of Vietnam.
If there had been today's imaging and communications technology available in Dresden at the time of the incendiary attacks, World War II would have been called off in March, 1945. A great many lives would have been saved if this had occurred. Sadly, it was not possible then. The power to start or end wars was still in the hands of nation states. The technology to shift this power to sovereign individuals on the streets had yet to be invented and widely dispersed.
It is important to realise that the sole reason that the war continued, and few people in Britain, the US, or Australia were ever aware of the greatest military crime of the 20th century, is that the Allies were able to suppress all pictures and detailed information from the public media. Given the nature and ubiquity of modern digital capture and communications technologies, this censorship would now be an impossibility in a developed country such as Germany. The CoW forces were able to suppress information coming out of Afghanistan only because that region of the world does not yet have such technology in the hands of its population.
The reality is that the returns on violence diminish to zero if the perpetrating states are exposed, and their 'leaders' put at risk of being hunted down by their own people and intelligent 'info-bots'. In the 21st century, war is thus rendered impractical as a means of anything more than a self-defence response on your own ground. It is no longer possible to launch cruel attacks on the non-combatants of other states and expect support from your own population.
This change has been brought about by new technology. In 1945, the wire services, broadcasting and print media were either state owned or in the hands of corporations that could be controlled by the state in matters of the 'national interest' and 'national security'. It was never deemed to be in the national interest to let the population know about war crimes and atrocities, such as Dresden fire bombing by the Allies and the Rape of Berlin by the Russians. Now, the largest communications network, the Internet and its associated wireless web, is in the hands of individual users all over the world. Anyone with a cellular phone and a digital imaging device is a front-line reporter. Rupert Murdoch is no longer the most powerful media baron in the world. You and I are.
Author's Note:
The incineration of Dresden is covered here because it was not only one of the worst atrocities of all time, but it is also the perfect example of a crime that could never be kept secret in the new technological age we now live in. There is another reason as well. I personally felt the anguish of this event, more than 20 years afterwards and some 12,000 miles from where it occurred.
In the 1960s I lived with my parents, next door to a German family who had emigrated to Australia after World War II. Two daughters had been born shortly after they arrived, and I greatly admired the eldest; sadly from afar. These neighbours were a quiet family who kept to themselves. When my folks moved into the house alongside them the father took my mother aside and explained that we should not think anything of noises in the night. He said that no one would be in need of assistance, it was just that his wife suffered from nightmares.
Generally, the noises would not last long, because the husband would wake his wife and calm her. But the screams that came from next door at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. in the morning were the most piercing and soul chilling I have ever heard. Despite the fact that my room was on the opposite side, and both our house and that of our neighbours had double brick walls, the sound seemed to fill my head.
In time, we learned that the family had lived in Cologne, and that the cause of the wife's nightmares had to do with her having been in Dresden when it was firebombed. When those who knew the truth said "She was in Dresden" the vast majority of Australians did not understand. We had no idea about anything so evil having happened there. The official silence about the Dresden raids was thorough.
Some years later, after I had read Slaughterhouse Five, and done some research, I came to understand what made that woman scream in her sleep, so long after. But I could never know what she must have been feeling and reliving. I would've had to have been to Hell to know that.
Withdrawing Support For Militarism [179]
The problem with revenge is that it lowers the humanity of those who exercise it down to the same level, of even below, those who committed the original crime. Although we can't yet know who was responsible for 911 or 1012, we do now know that forces of the Coalition of the Willing (CoW) have, on occasions, been just as barbaric as the people who killed on those dates. This has been amply demonstrated in Afghanistan and again in Iraq. If you doubt this, seek out more facts about the CoW's use of DU and NDU weaponry and cluster bombs. These horror weapons continue, to this day, to put young children and adult civilians at risk of injury or death from unexploded munitions, radiation, and toxic substances in the ground water and the food chain.
If an attack on civilians is horrific enough, and if the pictures and details reach the homelands of the perpetrating forces, it can stop a war. However, up until now, it has been possible for national armies to keep information of major, and graphically horrific, atrocities secret. It is still possible to do so in relatively low-tech countries such as Afghanistan. What is needed now is wide recognition in the CoW homelands that war itself is one great atrocity. Such realisation must lead to changed thinking and attitudes in relation to militarists who engage in wars, and troops who wage them.
The glorification of war and war heroes derives from thinking and attitudes that are simply wrong-headed. Nationalism and flag-waving propaganda play a part in this, but so does ignorance of the horrors involved. It is no accident that the US and Australian public were so ready to support revenge strikes on alleged terrorist strongholds and states said to harbour terrorists. There has not been a war on the soil of those countries within the living memory of their populations. In contrast, the people of Britain, France and Germany, where there are still many people who have experienced war in their homeland, were far more reluctant to support attacks on the populations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
A mother's account of a visit to see her son in camp, just before he left for Iraq, captures the problem that those who have never experienced war face when the prospect of a conflict looms ahead. They know only the glamorised face of war, and are ignorant of the horrors that are omitted from news reports and many history books. They are aware of the ticker-tape parades for returning troops, the uniformed men with medals covering their chests, and the approval that is typically accorded veterans of war. But they do not know the full truth about war, and they cannot weigh the horrors against nationalistic glory and the adulation that surrounds men in uniform. The American mother said this.
"Here is what was weird about being in Texas, at Fort Hood, with my son last week: almost every civilian we met, off the base, that found out that my son was Iraq-bound got very excited, like it was a good thing, they were almost envious. They didn't question what the heck we're doing there at all, they just pumped my son's hand and slapped him on the back like he was a hero."
"There's such a thing as misguided patriotism and misguided courage, don't you think? On the base, well, there was absolutely no grey area at all...you could feel the bizarre, almost happy energy that everything was geared up for war...it really made my stomach flip-flop. It was surreal. Fort Hood is the biggest military base in the world, and everywhere I went there was a happy electricity that there's "a war on"...the worst was the PX - it was selling war trinkets like you see souvenirs sold at Disneyland...In the book section there wasn't a single thing for sale that wasn't pro-military, or about any other subject. Talk about brainwashing!"
Hopefully that mother's son returned from Iraq, uninjured and without having been involved in helping to carry out atrocities. Many didn't and many won't. Their suffering, the suffering of their families, and the suffering of the 'enemies' they fought, will have in no way lessened the grief of 911. Nor will it have done anything to blunt the threat of future terrorist attacks on the CoW nations. As William S. Lind has observed, "Because these enemies are not states they have nothing we can bomb, no tanks we can take out, no capital we can occupy. And each one is a Hydra. Every time we kill an enemy, we recruit more."
Arguments of a moral nature will not give CoW militarists reason to pause, or to halt the perpetual War on Terror. It is a waste of time telling these people that they should act humanely and with restraint. Many of the aircrews who flew the Dresden raids knew that their actions were morally indefensible. They said, "It was completely uncalled for. You can't justify it." But they were ordered to do it just the same. There are several courses of action that ordinary citizens can take to restrain militarism and halt wars.
1) Actively discredit the effectiveness of the War On Terror, using the logic of people like Lind and the evidence of failures such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Direct this reasoning at your fellow citizens, who are the ones who ultimately fund the wars through their taxes and fill the ranks of the CoW forces with their own flesh and blood. Help them to understand that it is neither necessary or effective to sacrifice their sons in the War on Terror.
2) Cultivate an enduring rage against the harming of civilians and the use of terror weapons. This is more than a spontaneous reaction to an horrific photograph or specific atrocity. It is cold, unyielding anger at both the overt and covert institutions of the state that wage war on other people's countries, to no just purpose whatsoever.
3) Refuse to accord militarists and their institutions any honour. Do not attend parades to welcome troops home. Do not observe anniversaries of a military nature, such as Anzac Day or Veterans Day. Do not contribute in any other way to the glorification of war and the military services. Never, ever, relent in this regard.
4)Totally reject the Geneva Conventions, as devices put in place by nation states to lend their wars a respectability that war can never have. War is murder, plain and simple.
There is no point throwing the Sixth Commandment in the face of a militarist. The Allied action against the citizens of Dresden, in 1945, was a case of Christians incinerating Christians. The plain, unequivocal, commandment, "Thou shalt not kill", was overridden by precedents and conventions built up over hundreds of years of warfare. The rule of law usurped the rule of God. In the event, even the rule of law was forgotten. Pure evil took charge.
No, the dictum that must be espoused to militarists is one that drives at their self-esteem and egos, at their love of valour and glory and the wearing of a chest full of medals. It is, like the Sixth Commandment, a simple message:
"Real men don't harm women or children."
The parrot people might well denounce the above notions as 'unpatriotic'. However, militarism has no place in a Level 4 Civilization, and this must be made clear to the Feds and those who serve them. This is not about belittling the contributions and sacrifices of the veterans of past conflicts. Nor is it about condemning the vast majority of the serving members of the armed forces. It is about manifestly withdrawing support for further wars, the obscene levels of expenditure on military budgets, and the development of terror weapons.
Related:
Surveillance
It is up to ordinary people to raise the level of debate about the undemocratic surveillance practices of the many faceless and unaccountable agents who make daily intrusions on individual privacy, and about the apologists and propagandists for the War nn Terror who applaud every new attack on human rights and freedoms as "prudent" or "necessary". If there is no discussion of reverse surveillance in the national media, create it on the streets on a citizen to citizen basis. If nobody is talking about the outrageous assaults on privacy and human rights embodied in the new antiterrorist acts forced through US, UK and Australian legislatures, start talking about it to your neighbours and friends.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108175.php 2nd Renaissance -13
Such a development is part of the phenomenon of reverse surveillance that will come to characterise the 2nd Renaissance and a rapid transition to a Level 4 Civilization and a truly free society. You can learn more about reverse surveillance at the 'Surveillance' freesite. Reverse surveillance principles extend well beyond the use of ubiquitous digital imaging technologies, and include audits of all aspects of federal government operations, by randomly selected teams of citizens. The Feds and the parrot people will be quick to pronounce that such monitoting is "not in the national interest," but it will definitely be in our interests, and those of future generations of humanity.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/107989.php 2nd Renaissance -12
There are reports that in one Balinese kampong that provided labour to the clubs in Kuta Beach, seven empty coffins were buried, because there were no identifiable remains of the missing workers. It was as if they had been vaporised. Scores of people, mainly locals, are thought to have disappeared without trace.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/107756.php 2nd Renaissance -11
Fortunately, the power and control of government and military elites is illusory in the 21st century. The world no longer works the way it did, and there is nothing to compel people to support failed, outdated systems any longer. This is an understanding that must be widely and quickly shared. The future of our children and the planet depends upon our changing our thinking about governments, and our support for them.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107560.php 2nd Renaissance -10
In the Afghanistan turkey shoot the CoW forces used vast numbers of hard target weapons and other munitions containing depleted uranium (DU). This substance is almost twice as dense as lead. When it punches through concrete bunkers, armour, or mud huts, DU disintegrates into a chemically toxic and radioactive dust. In contrast to the earlier DU weapons used in Gulf War I, the newer ordinance produced deaths and deformities within weeks of the start of military action by the CoW. Between 1990-91 and 2001 the US arms manufacturers are thought to have "improved" the DU technology by introducing milled uranium ore to their warheads. This non-depleted uranium (NDU) is - wait for it - cheaper to produce and far more potent than DU. It poses massive health risks to civilian populations exposed to it, and constitutes, in every sense of the word, a weapon of mass destruction, or WMD. "Hey they're hunting them in Iraq, aren't they?"
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107216.php 2nd Renaissance -9
The Old World Order will not do anything to smooth the path to a Level 4 Civilization, and a better world. On the contrary, they will do whatever they can to make it difficult. The police, the military, the media, the financial system, the rule of law, and all the mechanisms of civil control and surveillance will be mobilised in defence of the status quo. But, once they understand their options, the people of the world will not engage in a battle with the forces of the OWO. They will simply abandon the old way of living under national rule, for a better, freer, life in new tribal societies. Kinship mechanisms will help people cope with the pressures of official opposition to radical changes that will finally enable them to escape the invisible prison that the OWO had fashioned around them.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107047.php 2nd Renaissance -8
Ultimately the old order will lose the battle to preserve their privileged way of life, based on all prevailing scarcity, pseudo-democracy, and the rule of law. But in the interim, hundreds of millions of innocent people might lose their lives in bloody resistance to the changes being made by the Old World Order (OWO).. If such a terrible thing happens, it will all have been for nothing, because:
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106816.php Tales of Adam
Daniel Quinn*
http://ishmael.com/index1.cfm 2nd Renaissance -7
When coupled with the introduction of artificial scarcity and taker concepts of property ownership and legal tender, Western death-fearing religions played a significant role in subduing, otherwise independent, tribal peoples.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106537.php 2nd Renaissance -6
The second route involves the setting up of entirely new living spaces on tribal lands that were previously seized by colonising governments that espoused and followed Taker philosophies. This route has greater credibility, in the sense of secession rights, where clear historical ownership of the land can be shown.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106327.php 2nd Renaissance -5
Quinn contends that while governments can imagine a revolution they can't imagine abandonment. As he puts it, "..even if it could imagine abandonment , it couldn't defend against it, because abandonment isn't an attack, it's just a discontinuance of support."
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106136.php 2nd Renaissance -4
In due course, there is one achievement of overriding significance that Caral might well provide. One great contribution or lesson that can be applied to the 2nd Renaissance. How to live in peace, with spiritual meaning, and without warfare, for a thousand years.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105935.php The New Renaissance
Daniel Quinn*
http://www.mnforsustain.org/quinn_d_new_renaissance.htm 2nd Renaissance -3
Plichta writes of this model as follows. "There was a time I used to make fun of the Apocalypse of St John and believed it to be a totally unreliable historical source. Today I am filled with deep humility, perhaps because I am now able to give a concrete description of the foundation of the world as seen by St John with my mathematical discoveries, and thus possibly open a new way to all of humanity which has now reached a dead end."
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105799.php 2nd Renaissance -2
Georg Cantor (1845-1918), by his origination of modern set theory and his studies of the nature of infinity, left science a valuable legacy. Cantor was regularly admitted to a psychiatric clinic within the University of Halle, in Germany, where he lectured and worked as a Professor of Mathematics. On each occasion that he became ill he had been thinking about infinity and the continuum hypothesis. Such intense thought, at the boundaries of his comprehension, caused Cantor to suffer repeated mental breakdowns. Infinity drove him mad.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105634.php 2nd Renaissance
This story was published in September 2004 and it was a big secret. I received it on disk but I think it should be public by now anyway. It is interesting to look back at it and in terms of today's world some two years on. I will link each chapter as I go along over the coming weeks.- The Old World Order - Happy reading!
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105519.php Fight Iemma - Debnam
All they can say is 'lock em up'
It seems we are in the thick of it again - the stupid, heartless "Law & Order" auction.
Premier Morris Iemma and Opposition leader Peter Debnam are trying to outdo each other with idiotic "tough on crime" policies.
Original Article
http://sydney.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=64701&group=webcast
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