No city, no war production. Plus, big time civil disruption and gigantic refugee problems for the enemy to deal with. Not exactly humanitarian motives, but nobody ever thought firebombing Dresden would get civilians to demand German withdrawal from the rest of Europe.
I would imagine that both were acts of total war. You however are arguing that it was an act of terrorism according to the definition I had given.
I’m wondering if you can support that, because I happen to think my definition was pretty good.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/reviews/Dresden/Esquire1163.html
Scylla, what do you think of this article?
Let me confess that I haven’t read it all the way through, but it seems to support (at least in the first page or two) the idea that Dresden was part of a terror campaign.
“Sir Winston had accused “Ike” of being soft to the German civilians and ordered him to use terror tactics in order to panic them out of their homes and onto the roads, and so to block the German retreat.”
I will admit that it’s ambiguous whether the point of terrorizing and slaughtering civilians was to get them to pressure the government, or merely to set the cat among the pigeons.
As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my understanding was that the point was very much to induce terror, to shock the Japanese government into backing down. I also thought that those two cities had been spared conventional bombing in order to leave them as pristine subjects for the atomic bomb “experiment.”
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWfirestorm.htm
“In 1941 Charles Portal of the British Air Staff advocated that entire cities and towns should be bombed. Portal claimed that this would quickly bring about the collapse of civilian morale in Germany.”
Does “collapse of civilian morale” not meet your definition of terrorism?
Let me also clarify that I myself am not sure if I’d call these acts terrorism. Horrible certainly, unnecessary maybe, but terrorism? Not everything bad is terrorism. (In fact, I would probably judge Dresden to be much worse than the Pentagon’s current plan to sponsor Iranian terrorists. But the latter case really is terrorism.)
The main point I’ve been trying to make all along is pretty simple. The U.S. is not some New Jerusalem on the Hill. We have done, and continue to do, bad things as well as good things. The terrorists are not cartoon devils bearing pitchforks. They are human beings. It may be comforting to think that they are utterly alien from us, but it’s just not so.
I find it problematic, for example, that people declare the 9-11 hijackers to be “cowardly,” and brand any dissent from that opinion as treasonous. I don’t like the mentality by which the enemy must not only be opposed to us, not only evil, but also stupid, poorly groomed, and motivated by the free-floating evil for evil’s sake which motivates Skeletor.
That’s a pretty damn interesting article. Thank you for posting it. I’m afraid though that it really doesn’t contradict my point.
Dresden may have been an atrocity, but it doesn’t appear to be one for it’s own sake. It was, as I said, an act of total warfare, at that stage, of conquest.
It wasn’t done for publicity value as a pure act of terrorism is.
If your point is that terroristic type attacks and tactics occur during warfare and that the line is not always as clear as we would like it to be, I will agree.
On the other hand, I think there’s a pretty clear seperation between most conventional warfare and acts of terrorism in the world as we know it today.
Ben:
No. Not really. The collapse has a direct military benefit. Softening somebody up so that you can conquer them easier is different than just bombing them for the attention value.
You see the difference I’m drawing?
Yes, Scylla, something just clicked in my head and I think I understand you now. I’m not sure I find your difference to be a morally significant one, but like I said, not everything that is evil is terrorism, and I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.
I’m not sure it’s morally significant either.