Throughout human history there have been atrocities of one kind or other visited upon its fellow man -inclusive term including women and children.
Atrocities continue to take place today.
It is eighty years since between 13 and 15 February 1945 members of the British and American working class, at the behest of their capitalist overlords, devastated fellow German workers at Dresden.
American novelist, Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden as a prisoner of war at the time of the raid. He wrote Slaughter House Five based on his experience there.
“ Germans did not expect Dresden to be bombed, Vonnegut said. "There were very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut
Below is reposted from SOYMB 15 February 2013.
'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.'
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2013/02/mass-murder.html
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