Atrociticies and collective memory

It is always them. The victors are the ones who write history, and they tend to blame the losers for the horrors of war. However, there is hardly a better example of the hypocritical fashion in which we have built our moral self-image than the historical obliviousness surrounding the Allies behaviour in the final year of the Second World War. Whereas crimes committed by the German, the Japanese, and the rest of the Axis members during the War have been extensively documented, it is striking how scarcely the deliberate murder of civilians (particularly Germans) in huge proportions by the British and American forces in 1944 appears in Western history books -even in German ones-, as if this exercise on collective awareness and memory was not necessary, as if we in the West were naturally immune to brutality, as if it was the remotest possibility it could happen again, with us as perpetrators. After all, it is well known no one else is to blame but them, whoever they are…

Here is an account of the Allied bombardments of Dresden and other German cities during the last years of the War: (1)

“In May 1942, Cologne became the first target of the Tausenbombernacht, as the victims called them. But Berlin was the favoured objective, it was ‘the evil capital’ and the lair of ‘the Huns’ […] on the night of 18 November, 1943, the city was bombarded by an airbone fleet of almost 450 bombers. The operation was repeated a few weeks later, but now with 750 planes. Entire neighbourhoods were in flames. 2,000 people were killed. […] On 26 February, 1944, old Alexanderplatz went up in a sea of flames and exploding ‘blockbusters’. By that point more than 1.5 million citizens of Berlin had been ausgebombt. In the end, seventy per cent of the city would be reduced to rubble. […] In Hamburg, on 28 July, 1943, the first firtestorm was created. People ran down the street like living torches; almost 40,000 suffocated in the burning cyclone or were roasted alive in bomb shelters that quickly became as hot as ovens. […] During the German bombardments of England. 60,000 civilians were killed, 90,000 were badly wounded and another 150,000 were injured. The Allied raids of Germany claimed five times that number, around 300,000 victims, including 75,000 children. Almost 800,000 people were badly wounded. Seven million Germans were left homeless, and a fifth of all the country´s houses were destroyed.  The effect of the bombings on the German war industry, however, was far less severe. […] This disproportion between industrial damage and civilian casualties was no accident. It was a concious policy. […] For every ton of bombs that landed on London, Coventry and a few other places, the British and the Americans dropped more than 300 tons back on Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Nuremberg and other German cities. […] The bombardment of civilians became a special science. […] A pronounced preference arose for residential neighbourhoods, as being more susceptible to ‘demoralisation’. Specialists calculated which bomb could best be used to destroy which building, how a firestorm could be created by first using a blockbuster to blow out all doors and windows, how a house could quickly be set alight by adjusting a bomb to explode only after it had first crashed through three floors. To kill firemen and other helpers, time bombs were dropped that went off only 36, 72 or 144 hours after deployment. […] On the night of 13 February, 1945, Dresden was full of refugees from the East. The city had no war industry to speak of, but that was not the point. Precisely according to plan, a firestorm raced through the streets within half an hour of the first bombs falling. To maximise the number of victims, the British and American strategists had devised a triple-whammy. They knew that, in a burning city, bomb shelters provided protection only for about three hours. After that the ground and the walls became so hot that everyone had to go back outside. It was at precisely that moment that the second attack came. The citizens of Dresden had to choose between the sea of fire outside and the oven-like bomb shelters within. Then, while everyone was busy saving themselves and others, a third attack followed. […] Today, local historians […] estimate the number of people killed in the bombardment of Dresden at 25-30,000. In the old market square in the centre of town, a funeral pyre was built that burned for five whole weeks. The cremation was supervised by SS Sturmbahnführer Karl Streibel, who had gained his experience burning bodies at the Treblinka death camp.”

Can we say we in the West have left behind and for good this kind of brutality? What on earth makes us think we are vaccinated against its resurgence, specially when we have decided to remain intentionally and shamefully ignorant about our recent past?

(1) Geert Mak, 2008, In Europe. Travels Through the Twentieth Century, New York, Vintage, pp. 560-561, 563-567.

Read on:

W. G. Sebald, 2003, On the Natural History of Destruction, New York, Random House [originally published in German in 1999 as Luftkrieg und Literatur, Munich, Hanser Verlarg].

Victor Klemperer, 1997, Das Tagebuch 1933-1945, Berlin, Aufbau-Taschenbuch Verlarg.

Michael Ignatieff, 2000, Virtual War. Kosovo and Beyond, New York, Metropolitan Books.

Photo: Dresden after World War II © Emory U.

Freedom and civic courage

I still have many progressive acquaintances that purport to cherish freedom, but would never criticize autocratic regimes… if they happen to be “leftist”, that is. These people would do themselves a favor if they watched attentively the film The lives of others (Das Leben der Anderen, Germany, 2006, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck). What would they say then about states that destroyed so meticulously the lives of so many people on behalf of socialism? Would they agree with the claim that building an egalitarian society required spying most citizens, looking at every aspect of private, individual lives, and locking up or eliminating all those over who fell the slightest shadow of a paranoic doubt of disloyalty to the regime, proof of what could often be the mere possesion of a Western newspaper? Perhaps they would try to convince themselves that this events happened long time ago, sidestepping the fact that the terrorist practices of the Eastern European socialist governments against their own citizens were in place until 1989, or that it was a corruption of the true ideas of socialism. But how to avoid linking the millions of lives destroyed by regimes like the former DDR with those being equally destroyed nowadays in Cuba, China or Venezuela, for instance? Those who experienced first hand the fear of the secret police, censorship, and terror at some point in their lives are much more willing to stand up for individual freedom than some of those who were born in a free society, take their liberties for granted, and for whom being progressive is just an empty aesthetic exercise which requires no critical, honest thinking. After all, Nazism and Communism arrived in Germany after decades of constitutional and semi- or fully democratic governments. Those ones that tend to think democracy can defend itself -or worst: that governments will safeguard our liberties, and that it is a task requiring no individual effort on our side- should take the best lessons from this excellent film. On the other hand, and timely related to the film, two days ago the Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel commemorated the 20th Anniversay of the so called “Pan-European picnic”, an spontaneous meeting of East Germans and Hungarians in the border between Austria and Hungary that helped precipitate the fall of the Berlin wall (“Hungary Remembers Picnic That Cracked Iron Curtain”, thanks for the link, J.), and which is the perfect example of the civic courage needed to fight totalitarianism. How many of us here in the Western world would show nowadays the same resolution if our liberties were in danger?

Photo: Das Leben der Anderen, 2006 © moviezkult

It´s Afghanistan, stupid!

Following what President Obama stated during his campaign, the new American administration has started shifting its foreign policy efforts away from Irak to focus on Afghanistan. Along with a deployment of additional troops, however, comes the news that the administration is seriously considering displacing Afghan President Karzai from government, in favor of some new and apparently more reliable and potentially effective candidates.

Despite the corruption cases in Karzai´s government, and the presence of warlords both in the national and local administration, the US should not involve itself in the daily political management of the country. On the one hand, it comes as no surprise corruption is thriving in one of the poorer countries on earth; on the other hand President Karzai had to co-opt certain warlords as the only way to mantain peace and keep some provinces (more or less) under Kabul´s rule. Politics in Afghanistan is a chaotic and undemocratic business but, what were we in the Western world expecting after a 30 years war in a country that always remained stuck in a sort of economic and social Middle Ages? What do we expect after failing to live up to our promises to assist them with substantial economic and financial help and the deployment of enough troops to guarantee peace in the country? We are helping them, somehow, though this is far from enough, and also far from what we committed ourselves to do, but nevertheless our patience is running out with countries such as Afghanistan, which do not democratize at the pace we want them to become Jeffersonian democracies.

After the tragic failure of the ill-conceived experiment in Irak, it should be clear for everyone that Afghanistan is the primary token if the West is to be trusted in its claims to be working to bring democracy and prosperity to countries that still enjoy no political freedom. If we are to succeed here, both in our terms -international security and democratic principles- and in theirs -Afghans are asking for our help to build a peaceful, viable State-, we should devote our efforts not to the realm of micro-politics but to building capacities, that is, infraestructure, roads, hospitals, schools, telecommunications, police, internal safety, law enforcement, market development, criminal justice, women´s health, education and protection… All this implies devoting money and personnel, and lots of it, but also trusting locals and working with them in identifiying their own needs, as opposed to imposing our goals. Only as a consecuence of a long term economic and social transformation could this place start its journey towards a viable, sustainable and fair democracy. We cannot change overnight what has remained like this for ages. We cannot allow ourselves to be inpatient. We should be ready to commit ourselves for a long time. It is worth it, and not only for Afghanistan itself and their inhabitants, but also as an example of what we are willing to do to help other countries and even as a proof of the coherence between our beliefs and our democracy promotion efforts.

Photo: ‘Kabul, Afghanistan’, 2009 © Lyndsey Addario, The New York Times

European paternalism

These may be unimportant news… or perhaps not. Adducing a certain research on the dangers of listening to loud music in mp3 devices, the European Commission wants to limit the decibels such electronic gadgets may reach, effectively banning the manufacturing and distribution of the more powerful ones in the European markets.

Nice the most top political institution in Europe pays attention to our health in such trivial matters. However, should it not devote its energy to the issues it has a explicit mandate over? Why governmental bodies find it so difficult to differentiate between making information relevant to our private daily lives available and ruling on private matters? Why they often cross the boundaries of their legitimate and beneficial informative functions -no objections to the Commission diffusing the aforementioned study- to become paternalistic organizations that feel entitled to control private decisions that affect only the individuals making them, not to speak of broadly distort markets?

Since all answers given to these questions throughout history have to do with the accumulation and use of power, this fact highlights the importance of states observing neutrality over different conceptions of what may be regarded as a personal good life, and of limiting governmental authority, in particular when it comes to the undisputable core of our private realm.

Photo: ‘Bossanova ‘84: Orwell’s world’, 2008 © Manuel Todde