It's worth nothing that in WWII American bombers flattened German cities full of politically cooperative centrists - and the innocent alike - because it was believed that those who passively accepted the war-making fascist government were therefore supporters, and as morally culpable as anyone for the Nazi war machine. The queasiness that was in many German stomachs from watching their neighbors dragged off by the Gestapo, but as they continued to cooperate, did not excuse them from the lethal judgement of an enraged American democracy.
This judgement, military, philosophical and political, horrifically took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, in exchange for the informed hope, indeed the real prospect, that justice and peace could be obtained for many more millions of people.
There was direct precedent in the one bloodier conflict for America: the U.S. Civil War.
This judgement was a real part of why tens of thousands of American bombers flew with lethal cargoes, losing thousands of planes full of men, all for dropping high explosives on living cities, to kill their people and their function- or phrased differently, to destroy the defenses - defenses made of money making business and ordinary passivity - which prevented the return of a more just world.
I have never been able to shake a phrase from an American pilot who got the order one morning to attack a city, not a military target.
"This either accomplishes Justice, or it's simply mass murder."
I have never been able to shake a phrase from an American pilot who got the order one morning to attack a city, not a military target.
"This either accomplishes Justice, or it's simply mass murder."
