The Silence of the Civilian Dead!

Posted by Joel Friedlander | 4 Comments

I’m sure that you all remember the “Silence of the Lambs.”
Here is a little segment to ponder:

Clarice Starling: I don’t know. I don’t know. “Now let me ask you to consider if we, as a nation, might hear screaming in the night if we really thought about our past?

“Hannibal Lecter: You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.
Clarice Starling: Yes.
Hannibal Lecter: And you think if you save poor Catherine, you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the lambs.

Let me add this, I consider every American who lives here today to be responsible for every evil thing that we as a country ever did, even if our people were somewhere in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, or Latin American when that evil was done. When you breathe the air of freedom as an American you must believe that everything that has happened here, for good or for evil, happened on your watch. If you will take that as a given, consider the following:

Roger Cohen, in his NY Times editorial today “The Unthinkable Option.”

http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/02/05/opinion/05cohen.html?s=1

discusses a wide variety of reasons why the United States should not attack Iran with either nuclear or conventional weapons. The following was written by me in response, but since they still have it at the bottom of the page for hours now I don’t think that they will ever print it, so her we go.

Mr. Cohen, all of your reasons for not bombing Iran are practical foreign policy considerations, but there is of course the one reason you slight: It is morally and ethically wrong! WE ARE NOT AT WAR WITH IRAN; IRAN HAS NOT DIRECTLY ATTACKED ANYONE; IRAN IS NOT A DANGER TO US, and the Iranian potential to create nuclear weapons will not put them in a different position than the weapons held by the Pakistanis and the North Koreans, AND the Israelis. WE HAVE NO RIGHT TO ATTACK THEM AND CONTINUE TO CALL OURSELVES AMERICANS.

During World War II the Allied Forces in Europe, and our Forces in the Far East engaged in a campaign of Firebombing of Axis Cities which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The details and the numbers are below. In those cases we were at war with adversaries (Japan and Germany) who had a boundless capacity and propensity to murder millions of civilians. The numbers of innocent civilians we killed does not reach the numbers of civilians killed by the Axis Powers. BUT, WE WERE AT WAR WITH THEM.

* Hamburg as a result of Operation Gomorrah, suffered a Feuersturm” (firestorm). Quite literally a tornado of fire, this phenomenon created a huge outdoor blast furnace, containing winds of up to 150 mph (240 km/h) and reaching temperatures of 1500 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius). It caused street asphalt to burst into flame, cooked people to death in air-raid shelters, sucked pedestrians off the sidewalks like leaves into a vacuum cleaner and incinerated some eight square miles (21 km²) of the city. Most of the casulties (40,000) of Operation Gomorrah were suffered this night. An additional 10,000 died in later bombings.

http://www.nationmaster.com…

* the Bombing of Dresden, 25,000 dead.

The bombing of Dresden by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) between February 13 and February 15, 1945 remains one of the more controversial events of World War II. Historian Frederick Taylor says: The destruction of Dresden has an epically tragic quality…

* Bombing of Kassel (10,000 dead)
* Bombing of Pforzheim (20,277 dead, almost 31,4 % of the Population)
* Bombing of Würzburg (5,000 dead)
* Bombing of Wuppertal 10 May 1943
* Bombing of Remscheid 31 July 1943
* Bombing of Kaiserslautern 14 July 1944
* Bombing of Braunschweig 15 October 1944
* Bombing of Saarbrücken 05 August 1944
* Bombing of Darmstadt 11 September 1944 (12,300 dead)
* Bombing of Stuttgart 12 September 1944
* Bombing of Heilbronn 06 December 1944 (6,500 dead)
* Bombing of Mainz 27 February 1945
* Bombing of Würzburg 16 March 1945
* Bombing of Hildesheim 23 March 1945

http://www.nationmaster.com…

The bombing of Kobe. (8,841 dead)

On March 17th, 1945, three hundred and thirty-one American B-29 bombers launched a firebombing attack against the city of Kobe, Japan. Approximately 8,841 of the city’s residents were killed in the resulting firestorms, which destroyed an area 3 square miles in size and included 21% of Kobe’s urban area.

http://www.nationmaster.com…

The Bombing of Tokyo (100,000 dead)

The first raid using low-flying B-29s carrying incendiaries to drop on Tokyo was on the night of February 24-25 1945 when 174 B-29s destroyed around one square mile (3 km²) of the city.

Changing their tactics to expand the coverage and increase the damage, 279 B-29s raided on the night of March 9–10, dropping around 1,700 tons of bombs. Approximately 16 square miles (41 km²) of the city were destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the resulting firestorm, more than the immediate deaths of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

WE HAVE NO RIGHT TO ATTACK IRAN. OUR ETHICS AND MORALITY WERE NEARLY DESTROYED DURING THE LAST PRESIDENTIAL ADMINISTRATION. WE MUST NOT CONTINUE THOSE POLICIES.

— Joel L. Friedlander, Plainview, New York

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