Dresden
The bombing of Dresden was a British/American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, during World War II. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city.[1] The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city centre.[2] An estimated 22,700[3] to 25,000[4] people were killed,[a] although larger casualty figures have been claimed. Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March aimed at the city's railway marshalling yard and one smaller raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas.Immediate German propaganda claims following the attacks and postwar discussions[5] of whether the attacks were justified have led to the bombing becoming one of the moral causes célèbres of the war.[6] A 1953 United States Air Force report defended the operation as the justified bombing of a strategic target, which they noted was a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the German war effort.[7] Several researchers claim that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were targeted, nor were extensive industrial areas outside the city center.[8] Critics of the bombing have asserted that Dresden was a cultural landmark while downplaying its strategic significance, and claim that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and not proportionate to the military gains.[9][10][11] Although not supported by any legal standard, as Dresden was both defended and constituted a major military transportation hub, and housed many war industries, some have claimed that the raid constituted a war crime.[12] Some, mostly in the German far-right, refer to the bombing as a mass murder, calling it "Dresden's Holocaust of bombs”.
read more:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
Picture by Gus Leonisky

Opinion: Steinmeier defends democracy, 75 years after Dresden bombing

With his surprisingly effective speech marking the 75th anniversary of the Dresden bombing, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier showed himself to be a staunch defender of German democracy, says Jens Thurau.

Any speech commemorating the horrific bombing of Dresden in February 1945 is a high-wire act. The firestorm that scarred the Saxon city on the banks of the Elbe has been repeatedly instrumentalized by various groups over the years — first the Nazis, then the East German government and today the neo-Nazis and those who remain stuck in the past.

Read more: Dresden marks WWII bombing in far-right stronghold

Often, such opportunistic misuse has ended in an absurd argument over the number of people that died in the attack. The Nazis, for instance, mendaciously claimed that several hundred thousand people were killed. Yet, since German reunification, the fight has mainly been over the question of whether the tragedy should be remembered as an isolated event, or whether the memory of victims would be better served when viewed in the larger historical context of the war.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier was well aware of the scrutiny his words would be subjected to when he wrote his speech. The German president not only mastered the task of presenting context, he also delivered a very timely speech that openly addressed the origins of the war and the destruction that followed. In fact, the word Dresden didn't even come up until he was three long paragraphs into his address. Instead, Steinmeier began by speaking about the German invasion of Poland and the ensuing violence that was unleashed across Europe.

Defending democracy

The president did not, however, relativize Dresden's suffering at any point during his speech. In fact, he did quite the opposite. He painted a visceral picture of that night with stark words — describing the howling drone of bombers, the blood-red sky, the fire that sucked the oxygen out of the city's streets.

But he also spoke of other cities across Germany and Europe: Hamburg and Würzburg, Naples and Genoa, Warsaw and Coventry. Steinmeier ended that portion of his speech with a clear statement: "Those who today seek to weigh the number of dead in Dresden against the dead of Auschwitz, who seek to downplay German misdeeds, who distort historic facts although they know better, it is those people that we, as democrats, must stand up to."

Read more: Commemorating the legacy of the WWII bombing of Dresden

With the words, "we, as democrats," Steinmeier also made it clear that he is well aware that some German politicians choose to deny the country's Nazi past, and he drew a clear distinction between them and himself. He also drew an altogether new interpretation of the role of the German president. Historically, the role of president has been to remain neutral — reflecting, summarizing and moderating the myriad opinions held by the country's populous. But now is not the time for such neutrality.

Steinmeier even dared to go a step further, addressing the resurgence of anti-Semitism and xenophobia: "When elected parliamentarians mock the institution in which they serve, they are attempting to destroy democracy from within." Right-wing populists in the Bundestag and state parliaments will know full well who he is talking about. And yes, all of that has its rightful place in a speech marking the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden.

Steinmeier also spoke of the one thing that should unite all Germans: the Basic Law, the foundation of Germany's democracy. "Let us protect the dignity of every human, also here in Dresden," he said, referring to the rights of every person, not just every German.

Steinmeier will have no problem living with criticism of his speech from the far right; it won't be the first time he's faced it. But it's more comforting than ever to know the president clearly sees himself as a defender of living democracy. A democracy not solely defined by laws, regulations and parliamentary rules, but rather by insights, clear positions and historical responsibility. A clear majority of Germans share Steinmeier's views. And it's good that he has raised his voice in their defense.

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-steinmeier-defends-democracy-75-years-afte...

 

Read from top.

 

 

 

“I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel about the World War II bombing of the German city of Dresden appeared the year I graduated from West Point. While dimly aware that its publication qualified as a literary event, I felt no urge to read it. At that moment, I had more immediate priorities to attend to, chief among them: preparing for my upcoming deployment to Vietnam.

Had I reflected on Vonnegut’s question then, my guess is that I would have judged the present to be both very wide and very deep and, as a white American male, mine to possess indefinitely. Life, of course, was by no means perfect. The Vietnam War had obviously not gone exactly as expected. The cacophonous upheaval known as “the Sixties” had produced considerable unease and consternation. Yet a majority of Americans — especially those with their hands on the levers of political, corporate, and military power — saw little reason to doubt that history remained on its proper course and that was good enough for me.

In other words, despite the occasional setbacks and disappointments of the recent past, this country’s global preeminence remained indisputable, not just in theory but in fact. That the United States would enjoy such a status for the foreseeable future seemed a foregone conclusion. After all, if any single nation prefigured the destiny of humankind, it was ours. Among the lessons taught by history itself, nothing ranked higher or seemed more obvious. Primacy, in other words, defined our calling.

Any number of motives, most of them utterly wrong-headed, had prompted the United States to go to war in Vietnam. Yet, in retrospect, I’ve come to believe that one motive took precedence over all others: Washington’s fierce determination to deflect any doubt about this country’s status as history’s sole chosen agent. By definition, once U.S. officials had declared that preserving a non-communist South Vietnam constituted a vital national security interest, it became one, ipso facto. Saying it made it so, even if, by any rational calculation, the fate of South Vietnam had negligible implications for the wellbeing of the average American.

As it happened, the so-called lessons of the Vietnam War were soon forgotten. Although that conflict ended in humiliating defeat, the reliance on force to squelch doubts about American dominion persisted. And once the Cold War ended, taking with it any apparent need for the United States to exercise self-restraint, the militarization of American policy reached full flood. Using force became little short of a compulsion. Affirming American “global leadership” provided an overarching rationale for the sundry saber-rattling demonstrations, skirmishes, interventions, bombing campaigns, and large-scale wars in which U.S. forces have continuously engaged ever since.

Simultaneously, however, that wide, deep, and taken-for-granted present of my youth was slipping away. As our wars became longer and more numerous, the problems besetting the nation only multiplied, while the solutions on offer proved ever flimsier.

The possibility that a penchant for war might correlate with mounting evidence of national distress largely escaped notice. This was especially the case in Washington where establishment elites clung to the illusion that military might testifies to national greatness.

Somewhere along the way — perhaps midway between Donald Trump’s election as president in November 2016 and the assault on the Capitol in January of this year — it dawned on me that the present that I once knew and took as a given is now gone for good. A conclusion that I would have deemed sacrilegious half a century ago now strikes me as self-evident: The American experiment in dictating the course of history has reached a dead-end.

How could that have happened over the course of just a few decades? And where does the demise of that reassuring present — arrangements that I and most other Americans once took to be fixed and true — leave us today? What comes next?

Inflection Point

“So it goes.” As Vonnegut recounts the journey of his time-traveling protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, in Slaughterhouse-Five, that terse phrase serves as a recurring motif. It defines Vonnegut’s worldview: fate is arbitrary, destiny inexplicable, history a random affair. There is no why. Whatever happens, happens. So it goes.

Such sentiments are deeply at odds with the way Americans are accustomed to thinking about past, present, and future. Since the founding of our republic, if not before, we have habitually imputed to history a clearly identifiable purpose, usually connected to the spread of freedom and democracy as we understand those concepts.

Yet as crises without easy solutions continue to accumulate, Vonnegut’s cynicism – tantamount to civic blasphemy — might warrant fresh consideration. “So it goes” admits to severe limits on human agency. While offering little in terms of remedies, it just might offer a first step toward recovering a collective sense of modesty and self-awareness.

Because he’s president, Joe Biden must necessarily profess to believe otherwise. By any objective measure, Biden is a long-in-the-tooth career politician of no particular distinction. He is clearly a decent and well-meaning fellow. Yet his prior record of substantive achievement, whether as a long-serving senator from Delaware or as vice president, is thin. He is the Democratic Party’s equivalent of a B-list movie actor honored with his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in tribute to his sheer doggedness and longevity.

That said, some Americans entertain high hopes for the Biden presidency. Especially in quarters where Trump Derangement Syndrome remains acute, expectations of Biden single-handedly charting a course back from the abyss toward which his predecessor had allowed the nation to drift are palpable. So, too, is the belief that he will thereby reconstitute some version of American political, economic, and military primacy, even in a world of Covid-19, climate change, a rising China, and a host of other daunting challenges. Despite this very tall order, “so it goes” can have no place in Biden’s lexicon.

During its decades-long interval of apparent global dominion, American expectations about the role presidents were to play grew appreciably. Commentators fell into the habit of referring to the occupant of the Oval Office as “the most powerful man in the world,” presiding over the planet’s most powerful nation. The duties prescribed by the U.S. Constitution came nowhere near to defining the responsibilities and prerogatives of the chief executive. Prophet, seer, source of inspiration, interpreter of the zeitgeist, and war-maker par excellence: presidents were expected to function as each of these.

In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt boosted the morale of Depression-era Americans by assuring them that they had a “rendezvous with destiny.” At the very moment when he entered the White House in 1961, John F. Kennedy thrilled his countrymen with a pledge to “pay any price, bear any burden, [and] meet any hardship” to prevent the extinction of liberty itself globally. In his second inaugural address, delivered in the midst of two protracted wars, George W. Bush announced to his fellow citizens that “ending tyranny in our world” had become “the calling of our time.” Even today, tyranny shows no signs of disappearing. Even so — and notwithstanding four years of Donald Trump — the delusion that presidents possess visionary gifts persists. And so it goes.

As a result, whether he likes it or not — and he probably likes it quite a lot — observers are looking to Biden to demonstrate similarly prophetic gifts. Even though expressing himself in less than soaring terms, he’s sought to oblige. According to the president, the United States — and by implication the world as a whole — has today arrived at an “inflection point,” a technocratic tagline that’s become a recurring motif for both him and his administration.

That “inflection point” conveys little by way of poetry in no way diminishes its significance. Quite the opposite, it expresses Biden’s own sense of the historical moment. Implicit in the phrase is a sense of urgency. Also implicit is a call to action: “Here we are. There is where we need to go. Follow me.” Consider it the very inverse of “so it goes.”

Three Vectors

Given both Biden’s advanced age and his party’s precarious majority in Congress, not to mention the legions of Americans hankering to return Donald Trump to the White House, the opportunity to act on this imagined inflection point may well prove fleeting at best, nonexistent at worst. If Republicans gain control of the Senate or House of Representatives next year, “so it goes” may become the mournful refrain of a lame-duck presidency. Hence, Biden’s understandable determination to seize the moment, before rising inequality at home, a rising China abroad, rising seaseverywhere, and a potentially resurgent Trumpism swamp his administration.

So even though the Biden team is not yet fully in place, the inflection point already finds expression in three distinct commitments. Together, they give us a sense of what to expect from this administration — and what we should worry about.

The first commitment bears the imprint of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It assumes that vigorous government action under Washington’s benign and watchful eye can indeed repair a battered and broken economy, restoring prosperity, while redressing deep inequities. Given the necessary resources, that government can solve problems, even big ones, has for more than a century been a central precept of American liberalism. To demonstrate liberalism’s continued viability, Biden proposes to spend trillions of dollars to “build back better,” while curbing the excesses of a neoliberalism to which his own party contributed mightily. The spending and the curbs inevitably elicit charges that Biden has embraced socialism or something worse. So it goes in American politics these days.

The second commitment that derives from Biden’s inflection point centers on the culture wars. Its progressive purpose is to supplant a social order in which white heterosexual males (like Biden and me) have enjoyed a privileged place with a new order that prizes diversity. Creating such a new order implies expunging the non-trivial vestiges of American racism, sexism, and homophobia. Given trends within late modernity that emphasize autonomy and choice over tradition and obligation, this effort may eventually succeed, but rest assured, such success will not come anytime soon. In the meantime, Biden will catch all kinds of grief from those professing to cherish a set of received values that ostensibly formed the foundation of the American Experiment. So it goes.

The third commitment deriving from that inflection point relates to America’s once-and-future role in the world. Suffused with nostalgia, this commitment seeks to return the planet to the heyday of American dominion, putting the United States once more in history’s driver’s seat. Reduced to a Bidenesque bumper sticker, it insists that “America is back.” With decades of foreign policy experience to draw on, the president appears committed to making good on that assertion.

His much ballyhooed first trip abroad put this aspiration on vivid display, while also revealing its remarkable hollowness. As a start, Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a vapid revision of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, in essence posing as ersatz versions of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Few who witnessed the charade were fooled.

Then Air Force One delivered the president to Brussels where he cajoled the members of NATO into tagging China as a looming threat. Doing so meant ignoring the ignominious failure of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan and disregarding French President Emmanuel Macron’s reminder that “NATO is an organization that concerns the North Atlantic,” whereas China just happens to be located on the other side of the world.

The pièce de résistance came when Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a nearly substance-free “summit” in Geneva. Possessing neither the drama of Kennedy vs. Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, nor the substance of Ronald Reagan’s encounter with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, it proved an empty show, even if it did play to a full theater.

Still, the entire trip and the bloated media coverage it generated were instructive. They illuminated what Biden’s inflection point truly signifies for America’s role in the world. The Biden administration yearns to reinstall familiar verities dating from World War II and the Cold War as the basis of U.S. policy. Many members of the press corps share that yearning. Hence the inclination to define the present age in terms of a new Cold War version of great-power competition, while paying little more than lip service to the need for fresh thinking and vigorous action on matters like climate change, environmental degradation, refugee flows, and nuclear proliferation.

Modeled at least in part on a New Deal that Americans remember fondly but inaccurately, Biden’s economic policies will in all likelihood promote growth and reduce unemployment. Even taking into account the risk of unintended consequences such as inflation, the effort is probably worth undertaking.

By wading into the culture wars, Biden might also bring the country closer to fulfilling the aspirations expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. No doubt arguments about the proper meaning of freedom and equality will continue. But the correct goal is not utopia. Merely reducing the gap between professed ideals and prevailing practice will suffice. Here, too, the effort is at least worth undertaking.

When it comes to America’s role in the world, however, it becomes difficult to profess even modest optimism. If Biden clings to a calcified and militarized conception of national security — as he appears intent on doing — he will put his entire presidency at risk. Rather than restoring American primacy, he will accelerate American decline.

Harkening back to where the nation was when I received my commission in 1969, I’m struck today by how little we Americans learned from our Vietnam misadventure. Pain did not translate into wisdom. That we have learned even less from our various armed conflicts since appears only too obvious. When it comes to war, Americans remain willfully and incorrigibly ignorant. We have paid dearly for that ignorance and will likely pay even more in the years ahead. So it goes.

 

This column is distributed by TomDispatch.

Andrew Bacevich is the author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, which has just been published by Random House.

 

Read more:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/29/the-passing-of-the-present-and-the-decline-of-america/

 

 

"In ten years, a German Reich will probably no longer exist" ("da ja wohl in zehn Jahren ein Deutsches Reich nicht mehr existieren wird!")

                               Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler

 

 

READ FROM TOP. See also: ants of the nest...

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW ßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßß⁄⁄⁄⁄¡¡¡11!!!!!!!

 

 

Let no one charge Leon Wieseltier with flinching from what needs to be done. Writing in Liberties, the quarterly that he recently founded and edits, the aging literary lion, his previously exalted reputation today somewhat tarnished, once more summons his countrymen to take up their assigned post. Summons does not do justice to the authority that his writing conveys. Wieseltier instructs, insists, demands, orders. Humankind needs saving. That’s America’s job and we have fallen down on it.

The second person plural is Wieseltier’s preferred mode of expression. From his perch atop Mount Olympus, he speaks to and on behalf of all Americans. Throughout his essay, the we’s accumulate like cicada carcasses. Over the past dozen years, he charges, “We have been living contentedly… in this springtime for Hitlers.” The U.S. failure to intervene in the Syrian civil war draws his particular ire: “We chose to stand idly by, feeling bad and watching it.” As a consequence, “we were disgusting.” American timidity infuriates him. “Right now,” he writes, “we are hardly in danger of doing too much. This has been a golden age of too little.” As a consequence, “we are miserable,” with action the only antidote to misery: “We can be big in the world by doing good in the world. Lacking bigness or goodness, we (and not only we) are doomed.” Nor is there any time to lose. “Soon, if we do not recover our sense of our historical role,” we will find ourselves taking a back seat to China.

The remedy is clear: “America in full, unafraid of history’s pace, unembarrassed by its enthusiasm for democracy and human rights, larger than its mistakes and its crimes, comfortable with the assertion of its power in its own defense and in the defense of others, inspired by the memory of its magnitude, repelled by the rumors of its decline” needs to get back to work tout suite. Cue the National Anthem.

Let me admit to my personal inability to discern “history’s pace.” As for deciphering the “memory” of America’s “magnitude,” I’ll leave that to journalistic hucksters like Henry Luce, who coined the pernicious phrase “American Century.” And when it comes to American decline, it’s not “rumors” that bother me but certain undeniable facts: gaping inequality, internal division, political dysfunction, institutional incompetence, fiscal disarray, and a sequence of grotesquely mismanaged wars.

 

Wieseltier has little time for facts, much preferring self-indulgent exhortation. His long essay contains not a single piece of data. The approach has its advantages, enabling him, for example, to offer glib judgments such as this one: “I have no doubt that the costs of American action in Iraq have been much less than the costs of American inaction in Syria”—an opinion proffered without either tallying up the Iraq War’s cumulative costs or considering who ended up footing the bill. Hint: it was not Wieseltier’s privileged cohort of the American “we.”

If the Iraq War gets short shrift, the even longer war in Afghanistan qualifies for only a single passing mention. Yet, surely these two protracted conflicts—Operations Enduring Freedomand Iraqi Freedom—deserve recognition as instances when “we” set out to do “good.” How to explain Wieseltier’s lack of interest in exploring why the outcomes achieved have been so disappointing?

 

Intellectual dishonesty offers one likely explanation. After all, he writes, “The prophetic feeling is a nice feeling, especially in a land where prophets pay no price.” As a self-assigned prophet who vents at great length while leaving others to worry about the price, Wieseltier is no doubt familiar with that nice feeling. As his impassioned homily appears in print, even if only in his own magazine, one can imagine him bathing in it.

That said, Liberties exercises no discernible influence in policy circles. Neither does its editor. Wieseltier exerts himself to convey a contrary impression, alluding to “friends who wanted to talk with me on the way to an appointment at the White House.” As a practical matter, he wields about as much clout as one of Donald Trump’s discarded national security advisers—Michael Flynn, say, or John Bolton.

 

His bleating merits our attention for one reason only: it reminds us of the post-Cold War hubris that raised havoc abroad and helped to pave the way for Trumpism at home. Eager even today to use force with expectations of thereby doing “good,” Wieseltier remains an unapologetic proponent of moralistic militarism. While at least some militarists have had the good grace to recant or fall silent, he remains steadfast. On that score, he is not alone.

Wieseltier decries what he refers to as this nation’s “choice to abdicate global preeminence and to withdraw from decisive historical action.” In fact, illusions that military mastery empowered the United States to undertake decisive historical action in response to 9/11 demolished any U.S. pretensions to global preeminence. Wieseltier partook in those illusions and remains in their grip. He has learned nothing.

“Where are the Americans?” This is the title that Wieseltier chose to introduce his essay. A plausible answer: trying to find themselves.

In that vein, allow me to suggest that a far more fundamental question demands priority attention: “What have we become?”  Unless Americans find a way to reunify their polity and renew their Republic, they may discover that no real “we” exists. In that case, a loss of global preeminence may rank as the least of our problems.

 

 

Andrew J. Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His most recent book is After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/does-leon-wieseltiers-we-include-you/

 

Read from top...

 

assangex