Posted on 02/13/2020 7:17:08 AM PST by C19fan
There's a little more to this than Americans playing "nice"; it has as much to do with Americans lacking any idea of what our purpose in Afghanistan is.
You may or may not be familiar with the release this past December of "Lessons Learned", which was a report commissioned by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and declassified in response to a lawsuit.
The results of the report would make any American simply hurl it against a wall; by the admission of those in charge of the efforts in Afghanistan since 2001, we have absolutely no idea of what we are doing over there.
(John Sopko, the Inspector General himself, admitted to the Washington Post that the document reveals that "The American people have constantly been lied to.")
It would be easy to put the responsibility for our 19-year long debacle in Afghanistan on politicians who want to play "nice", but this country has spent all of this time and effort (to say nothing of the blood and money) with no clear idea of who the enemy even is. (Even if we WANTED to superheat another population center, which one would it be?)
“Did he become a “squishy Leftist” before or after his experiences in the Second World War? It’s not a rhetorical question; Army NCOs as a rule aren’t known for being “squishy Leftists”, and it’s fair to think his experiences in February 1945 had something to do with this.” [Captain Walker, post 200]
I’m not 100 percent familiar with Kurt Vonnegut’s personal journey through morality, ethics, nor ideology. A prototype college slacker: at Cornell, he opposed American involvement in WW2, in writing, though he was in ROTC. Couldn’t keep up his grades and left one step ahead of the boot. Enlisting before he could be drafted, he was in training programs at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and University of Tennessee before being sent to an infantry unit. A few months after arriving in the European theater, he was captured.
After the war he enrolled in a hybrid undergrad/grad program at the University of Chicago, but failed to complete it. Shortly later, he lied about his educational status to get hired by General Electric.
So it’s a safe guess that Vonnegut’s harrowing experiences in Dresden didn’t change his basic philosophical outlook all that much.
You seem anxious to claim him as a validator of your moralistic take on things.
After meeting thousands of military personnel, working closely with hundreds, and knowing a few dozen fairly well, I can say you lend greater significance to Vonnegut’s experiences and his worldview (especially any changes to it) than it deserves.
“As a rule” has no meaning; members of the military are not nearly so one-dimensional as you have assumed. They change their minds all the time, for a million and one reasons. They sign up for uniquely personal reasons, and leave the service for yet other personal reasons. Despite a presumed uniformity of training and indoctrination, it’s common to find two members enduring exactly the same experience, who react quite differently in the moment, and draw markedly differing conclusions later.
You know more about the man than I do, assuming you didn't just pull this from an internet site. (I knew he was in an ROTC program but it was my understanding that the military desperately needed men and began reaching for people previously considered off-limits such as ROTC students and individuals in defense-related jobs; he had ended up as an NCO because of his education. I may be wrong on this; "Slaughterhouse Five" was the only novel of his I've read and I can't say that I have ever been a fan of his.)
In any event, the argument against the targeting of a population center isn't based on the opinion of a survivor of the raid, it's based on the belief that non-combatants cannot be targeted. Vonnegut deserves a mention because (first and foremost, perhaps) he was Jewish and might be expected to have feelings of ill-will towards the Germans; after that, he had fought for his country and had seen combat against the Germans who then took him prisoner. (Among the Keyboard Warrior Class, of course, his military service and his Jewish background mean nothing. The man said something negative about that sacrosanct subject known as the Second World War and dared to suggest that the Allies and even (gasp) the Americans committed large scale acts of brutality; he must be torn down, his military service in defense of his country be damned.)
There has been a repeated effort here on this thread to describe the non-combatant deaths in Dresden as "collateral damage", which simply isn't true. "Collateral damage" is unintended damage; these people were the targets. (And they were the targets, by the way.)
The Allies (predominantly, the Brits) took it upon themselves to super-heat a German city in the waning months of the war knowing full well that they would get away with it; the Americans had just started the practice on the other side of the world, as Curtis LeMay's B-29 crews (operating from the recently-seized Marianas Islands) began dropping napalm on Japanese cities up and down the Japanese islands. (That the two bombs in August of 1945 should be the cause of consternation it became would must have been a shock to LeMay, who simply did what he had been doing for the six months prior, only on these two occasions with a much smaller carbon footprint.)
As I have alluded to earlier in the thread, a lot of the opinions on this subject are "generational"; anyone who learned about how evil the Germans and Japanese were and how good the Americans were on his veteran father's knee isn't going to change his mind on these subjects (certainly not at this point in their lives).
But for the rest of us "unstuck in time" ;), the "John Ford" version of these events doesn't hold any special significance.
“... the argument against the targeting of a population center isn’t based on the opinion of a survivor of the raid, it’s based on the belief that non-combatants cannot be targeted... these people were the targets. (And they were the targets, by the way.)...a lot of the opinions on this subject are “generational”...But for the rest of us “unstuck in time” ;), the “John Ford” version of these events doesn’t hold any special significance.” [Captain Walker, post 203]
It’s less than honest to cite Kurt Vonnegut Jr as some sort of moral authority. In 1945 he just one of millions in uniform, and he escaped alive by inches. Americans of the day knew nothing of his Jewishness, nor did most of them have any notion of what the Nazis had been doing to the Jews (or the Romany, the gays, those judged mentally deficient or physically deformed, the political prisoners - all those other groups who made up the other half of the Third Reich’s victims).
Of course Vonnegut was affected by his experiences in Dresden. Who would not have been? Experiences endured by millions of others caught in the war. Some POWs held by the Axis nations did not survive Allied air attacks. Other POWs were killed by US submarines sinking Japanese transport ships that were taking them to the Home Islands for slave labor. The subs sometimes surfaced after an attack; unaware of their presence and unable to distinguish them from Japanese personnel in the water, the crew of at least one sub killed POWs who’d escaped their sinking ship with small arms fire.
Your absolute condemnation of British and American air bombardment strategies on moralistic grounds leads one to ask:
Do you prefer the moral to the real?
You're sadly mistaken on this point, FRiend; the Jews were smashing down the doors to flee Germany as the persecutions increased. While the most finite details of Endlösung ("Final Solution") would not be known until after the war, everyone knew of the threat they faced. (What would be the point of the efforts to get them out of harm's way (in some cases, by Germans themselves), if there really was, in fact, no awareness of the danger they were in?)
And I don't cite Vonnegut as an authority on this or any other moral matter; I only refer to him as a credible witness. (The moral act of targeting a city doesn't pass or fail judgment in light of his or any other POW's opinion.) Whether or not others knew of his Jewish background is irrelevant; he knew exactly what his background was. And if he, a secular American Jew, could recognize the immorality of targeting a population center, even in a country that had deported his "kind" to death camps en masse, then his opinion on the subject bears far more evidence than that of his fellow American who simply shouts, "'Murica!" but who has never seen anything as graphic as a bad car accident.
Your absolute condemnation of British and American air bombardment strategies on moralistic grounds leads one to ask:
Do you prefer the moral to the real?
I prefer the moral to the immoral; the "real", of course, is simply the one we choose.
“...everyone knew of the threat they faced...
...And I don’t cite Vonnegut as an authority on this or any other moral matter...
...I prefer the moral to the immoral; the “real”, of course, is simply the one we choose.” [Captain Walker, post 205]
My goodness. I apologize for lack of clarity. Always difficult to guess in advance, what another knows or doesn’t.
It’s insupportable to assert that “everyone” knew what the Nazis were doing. Even if you have questioned a statistically significant number of survivors, you could never have been sure who was being truthful and who wasn’t.
If you brought Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s name into this as a mere eyewitness, I must say it’s a first. Everybody else who has written or spoken about it in my hearing or in print I have eyeballed cannot wait to imbue him with special authority. Victimhood grants special moral powers. Or so lots of people think.
By “real” I meant the observable aspects of existence apart from human thought and emotion.
Reality impacts us every moment of every day (and night), independent of our thoughts, feelings, education, or mindset. Perhaps the simplest example: if someone climbs to the top of a building and jumps, they’re going to fall. Doesn’t matter if they hold a PhD or dropped out of high school, if they have a million dollars in savings or none, if they are a divinity student or a drug smuggler.
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