The Pope's no to the People`s yes: The tide of British history.(10)

 Dresden 1945,  corpses from the Allied bombing are piled to be burned.
Reaping the Whirlwind or Slaughterhouse?

     In September 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, Britain declared war on Germany. In the years that followed, incredible leaps of technology would see the Second World War go from Polish troops on horseback to one single bomb that could destroy an entire city. The ever Increasing industrialisation of war would be typified by the horrors of the Nazi Concentration Camps, an idea initially borrowed from the British and taken to new depths. War planners and people who could have been spending their time doing other things, poured their energies into figuring out even better ways to kill others.
      At the heart of all this destruction was the struggle of ideas:  whose we should live by. After the fighting, the people of Britain would process the information of these events and have some new ideas of their own. But during the war, the ideas with the most currency were those that helped to destroy the enemy. Once again, strong and beautiful branches of Britain's tree of knowledge were chopped off and used as burnt offerings to Mars.
      

Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur Harris- Bomber? Butcher? Hero? 

      Sir Arthur Harris had very firm ideas about how to win the war. Having studied the Nazis own tactics, he decided that the way to victory would necessarily involve area bombing: a tactic which meant deliberately targeting German cities and their civilian population. This tactic would most famously culminate in the bombing of Dresden when over a thousand allied bombers destroyed the center of the city and at least 22,000 lives were lost.
      The Dresden bombing makes for various ideas. Those responsible for organising it would see it as a practical step towards victory. On the other hand, British P. M. Churchill wrote about how " the question of increasing the terror...should be reviewed." How many history books speak of Churchill as: "the self-confessed terrorist."?
       The testimony of survivors of the bombing offer a different perspective to the "terror":
  It is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion, worse than the blackest nightmare. We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.
                                                                                                      - Lothar Metzger
     
   To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire.   Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then—to my utter horror and amazement—I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt to cinders.
                                                                                                    - Margaret Freyer
   

    Across the globe, the war in the Pacific reached a climax on the 9th and 10th of March 1945 with the single most destructive bombing raid in history as 1665 tons of destruction rained on Tokyo. About 100,00 people lost their lives. But, as usual, abstract numbers often fail to generate ideas of reality.

　　Here's some people in Tokyo in 1944. A proud father, a happy mother, a not-particularly easy-to-please baby.
                 
    

    
 
   
                              Here's some people in Tokyo after the bombing:


     

Tokyo 1945, a mother and her baby burned alive.

   
        In this war, this war as a choice between two evils that George Orwell spoke of, this is what the good guys did.

        And as our cultures encouraged most of its finest minds to produce weapons of death, we weren't finished yet.
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Ares and Aphrodite discovered by Hephaestus.

   On 16 July 1945, Aphrodite's long passion for Ares would reach a shuddering climax. The jealous Hephaestus would smash atoms upon his anvil and a mushroom-shaped cloud rose from the desert in New Mexico. The following month, the gods of love and war would both come again, twice, as the new bombs were dropped on people. Some victims would diappear in a flash, leaving only their shadow on a wall. Survivors would scream for water as their skin fell from their bones. This is what the good guys did.

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      World War Two resulted in at least 50 million dead; a staggering necropolis. During the conflict, Aphrodite and Ares's children, Phobos and Deimos, both ran amok. Since that time, human beings have used words and light and sound in attempting to try to deal with the awful information, the terrifying ideas, that are contained within this massive slaughterhouse.
    Yet, we often don't want to look too closely. It would take Hollywood, for example, 50 years to produce a realistic account of the Normandy landings.
     However, when looked at intelligently, the human carnage in this field of Mars is a vast encompassing mirror.
　　　Observing fｒom one angle, our heads culturally-clamped, it may please us to see honour and glory. On closer inspection we may see designated demons at night ralleys, wondering not where their ideas came from, or how they managed to crawl out of hell.
     For if we are to start asking, if we are to examine the mirror more closely, there are disturbing notions of Fascism Light vs Fascism Dark, that it wouldn't do to think about, as images of segregated soldiers and British colonies play in the background.
     For if we have the courage to look square and honestly into this looking glass we can see what, looking askance, we may not wish to see..... ourselves, looking back.
     Not God, not Satan, nor some glorious fight between good and evil; just us. Just us.