FORGOTTEN
If you know me then you know that I hate Remembrance Week (as it is currently constructed and observed.) This here is my annual Remembrance rant. Please enjoy.
Come November 11th, ask yourself (or your friends, or your friendly neighbourhood history buff, or the folks delivering your Remembrance Day assembly) why the incineration of two Japanese cities, and the entire populations therein, was considered palatable to the West? (Isn't that an interesting question? Why yes, yes it is. And there's an interesting answer to be found too.)
The answer to this question is that, by comparison to the pure horror committed by Allied forces (our team, the good guys) in Europe – arguably one of the most appalling crimes ever perpetrated by our species – incinerating whole populations almost instantly in a nuclear flash, and contaminating the region with radiation indefinitely, was deemed rational and humane.
What was this Allied war crime I speak of? (You're forgiven for not knowing. I heard nothing about it in high school or college history classes, despite debating at length about aspects of WWII, and it wasn't valorized in any of the 900 war films I've seen...) Well, before the Manhattan Project was successful, and the atom bomb developed and tested, Allied forces theorized then implemented another weapon of mass destruction. The military theorists of the day argued that, rather than dropping traditional explosives on strategic targets, as was the norm, large-scale, indiscriminate bombing with incendiary weapons could create massive, city-scale firestorms that would leave a carnage so deeply disturbing, so wholly and truly terrorizing, that the enemy in neighbouring cities and countries would be simply traumatized into submission.
And so in February of 1945 our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers flew 2,000 war planes over, and dropped 200,000 incendiary bombs upon, the city of Dresden, Germany. As most of the men of Dresden were off fighting on the battlefield, those facing this attack were almost all women, children, and elderly. Additionally, as Dresden was considered a non-strategic location, the city was known to be a safe-haven for hundreds of thousands of refugees attempting to escape the war.
The attacks came at night and most folks sheltered in the basements of their brick apartment blocks. Many smaller fires grew, eventually coalescing into massive, swirling, neighbourhood-sized infernos. (The diary of Victor Klemperer reports that the fires were so many and so bright that night turned into day.) That night, we're told Allied airmen successfully set fire to more than six square kilometres of a modern European city. The heat generated from these fires is said to have been so intense and persistent that roadways softened into something resembling lava. These hellish firestorms continued to grow and rage all over town and, as planned, consumed much of the oxygen at street level. Those civilians who weren't mercifully killed by exploding incendiary bombs often enjoyed one of two experiences: those who attempted to flee into the streets had the pleasure of either passing out from a lack of oxygen or having hellfire scorch their lungs and causing them to suffocate to death; alternatively, those who remained sheltered indoors and did not suffocate, spent their last moments being broiled alive with their loved ones and neighbours in apartments turned brick ovens... turned tombs.
None of this was an accident. Every element of this experience was designed, approved, and implemented by the very heroes we acknowledge and celebrate every November. Sure, this was total-war. Yes, the Axis had to be broken and the Nazis eliminated. But why, I ask, do we never speak of Dresden? Why don't we learn of this in school? (Elementary, high school, or college?) Why not "lest we forget Dresden"? Why not "never again"?
German children are taught about the crimes of their grandfathers. They actually remember. They cannot forget. Every German city has little bronze memorials on virtually every street reminding people of what happened, how, to whom, and exactly where. (Lest they forget.) We, on the other hand, have a federally mandated annual holiday in which we help one another collectively mis-remember, entirely forget, or never even learn about in the first place. Did you ever learn about the firestorms? Were you ever taught that the international community attempted to make the indiscriminate mass killing of civilians a war crime, with the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 – and that the United Kingdom and the United States blocked this act of sanity for fear that it would be seen as a self-indictment for their systematic mass extermination of German and Japanese civilians? I wasn't. And it's not in the current curriculum either. Why is that? Because this is something we're trying to forget? Well, it would certainly seem that way.
Actually, I think it's worse than mere forgetting. Though it seems I write and say this weekly now, I'm going to write it here again. When words come to mean their opposite we are all in serious trouble. This, unless you've forgotten, is the very definition of Orwellian. (And there's no hyperbole here. None.) You are living it in its purest form. (Please find a different reading for me.) And in November it is not enough that we've virtually eliminated any trace of the above history from our education system, and even from our specific day of war remembrance, no; further, we're encouraged by our fellow citizens to show publicly our commitment to this government-mandated bastardization of language, and our remembering to forget, by wearing our devotion for all to see in the form of a red pin on our breast. I find this both weird and upsetting. It makes me shudder every time I see it.
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