While Britain and America claim to be an advocates of human rights in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and many other countries around the world, history itself is corroborating evidence that they, the greatest human rights preachers, has also been the most flagrant human rights breachers.
With the Russians advancing rapidly towards Berlin, tens of thousands of German civilians fled into Dresden, once known as "Florence on the Elbe", believing it to be safe from attack. As a result, the city's population swelled from its usual 600,000 to at least one million. Dresden was known for its china and its Baroque and Rococo architecture and its galleries which housed works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Botticelli.It had not been attacked during the war and was virtually undefended by anti-aircraft guns.
On the night of Feb. 13-14 1945, Allied bombers using the Dresden football stadium as a reference point, over 2000 British Lancasters and American Flying Fortresses dropped loads of gasoline bombs and phosphorus bombs every 50 square yards out from this marker. The enormous flame that resulted was eight square miles wide, shooting smoke three miles high. For the next 18 hours, regular bombs were dropped.
Twenty-five minutes after the bombing, winds reaching 150 MPH sucked everything into the heart of the storm. Because the air became superheated and rushed upward, the fire lost most of its oxygen, creating tornadoes of flame that can suck the air right out of human lungs. 70% of the Dresden dead either suffocated or died from poison gases that turned their bodies green and red. The intense heat melted some bodies into the pavement like bubblegum, or shrunk them into three-foot-long charred carcasses. Clean-up crews wore rubber boots to wade through the "human soup" found in nearby caves. In other cases, the superheated air propelled victims skyward only to come down in tiny pieces as far as 15 miles outside Dresden. People died by the thousands, cooked, incinerated, or suffocated. More than 100,000 people died, mostly civilians but the exact number may never be known due to the high number of refugees in the area.
According to the historian author Max Hastings, by February 1945, attacks upon German cities had become largely irrelevant to the outcome of the war. Austrian historian Jörg Friedrich agrees the RAF's relentless bombing campaign against German cities in the last months of the war served no military purpose. This war was a "good" war. State-approved violence has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Robert Saunby, Deputy Air Marshal at Bomber Command commented after the war "That the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. It is not so much this or the other means of making war that is immoral or inhumane. What is immoral is war itself. Once full-scale war has broken out it can never be humanized or civilized, and if one side attempted to do so it would be most likely to be defeated. That to me is the lesson of Dresden." Apologists for the bombing point to Nazi Germany's own crimes. Following the war's end, however, the U.S. and Britain occupiers were quick to allow all but the top Nazi leaders to play a role in western Germany.
With the Russians advancing rapidly towards Berlin, tens of thousands of German civilians fled into Dresden, once known as "Florence on the Elbe", believing it to be safe from attack. As a result, the city's population swelled from its usual 600,000 to at least one million. Dresden was known for its china and its Baroque and Rococo architecture and its galleries which housed works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Botticelli.It had not been attacked during the war and was virtually undefended by anti-aircraft guns.
On the night of Feb. 13-14 1945, Allied bombers using the Dresden football stadium as a reference point, over 2000 British Lancasters and American Flying Fortresses dropped loads of gasoline bombs and phosphorus bombs every 50 square yards out from this marker. The enormous flame that resulted was eight square miles wide, shooting smoke three miles high. For the next 18 hours, regular bombs were dropped.
Twenty-five minutes after the bombing, winds reaching 150 MPH sucked everything into the heart of the storm. Because the air became superheated and rushed upward, the fire lost most of its oxygen, creating tornadoes of flame that can suck the air right out of human lungs. 70% of the Dresden dead either suffocated or died from poison gases that turned their bodies green and red. The intense heat melted some bodies into the pavement like bubblegum, or shrunk them into three-foot-long charred carcasses. Clean-up crews wore rubber boots to wade through the "human soup" found in nearby caves. In other cases, the superheated air propelled victims skyward only to come down in tiny pieces as far as 15 miles outside Dresden. People died by the thousands, cooked, incinerated, or suffocated. More than 100,000 people died, mostly civilians but the exact number may never be known due to the high number of refugees in the area.
According to the historian author Max Hastings, by February 1945, attacks upon German cities had become largely irrelevant to the outcome of the war. Austrian historian Jörg Friedrich agrees the RAF's relentless bombing campaign against German cities in the last months of the war served no military purpose. This war was a "good" war. State-approved violence has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Robert Saunby, Deputy Air Marshal at Bomber Command commented after the war "That the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. It is not so much this or the other means of making war that is immoral or inhumane. What is immoral is war itself. Once full-scale war has broken out it can never be humanized or civilized, and if one side attempted to do so it would be most likely to be defeated. That to me is the lesson of Dresden." Apologists for the bombing point to Nazi Germany's own crimes. Following the war's end, however, the U.S. and Britain occupiers were quick to allow all but the top Nazi leaders to play a role in western Germany.
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