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.
  

The Pope's no to the people's yes: The tide of British History. (9).

Counting them all out, and counting them all back: Rabbits of the Japanese Imperial navy are relieved to see their planes  safely back from attacking the demons.

 
        The propaganda techniques developed by the British in World War One had slithered right around the globe by the outbreak of World War Two. On their way through the United States, these techniques had bumped into Edward Bernays and studied hard. By the time they got to Nazi Germany, they were trained and lean and straining to articulate the inchoate thoughts of many.           
      People's innate tendancies to form a group, as well as traditional prejudice often necessary to maintain that group, would be piled together like fasces, as propaganda poured on the petrol.　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　
　     

                                                         

            The language in this Nazi propaganda film is chosen to evoke certain ideas in the listener. Tasty sound-bites are arranged without any need for argument or explanation.

         The Jews: "mercilessly looting the culturally superior rightful inhabitants" (of the promised land.)........"born of totally different racial elements"......."They differ from us in body and above all in soul."
         We are informed that they "wandered relentlessly" and "everywhere made themselves unwelcome."
         And then, with a simple act of description, the spread of the Jewish people is compared to the historic movement and success of rats; "they are cunning and cruel and usually appear in massive hordes" states the narrator over footage of the swarming rodents. It finishes with: "They represent the elements of sneakiness among animals, just as the Jews do among mankind", as the image dissolves from rodents to Jewish people.
        Questions are of course, not encouraged.
        To encourage a nation to go to war, to encourage the levels of contempt necessary to load people into cattle-trucks, or incinerate civilians, it requires that the idea of the other as less-than-human must spread, carried on the back of a plague of propaganda.

Allied propaganda shows Japan as a snake, an octopus and
the old favourite, a rat.

Takoyaki, courtesy of the U.S. Marines.*

           The Japanese themselves had adopted western propaganda techniques, and in 1943 produced the first long-form Japanese anime entitled 桃太郎の海鷲/ Momotaro's Sea Eagles.
(It can be seen here with English sub-titles.)
　　　　　Based on the traditional Japanese tale of Momotaro, the young hero is the captain of an air-craft carrier ploughing through the Pacific. His brave crew consist of his traditional animal friends of dog, monkey and pheasant; as well as some kawaii rabbits. They are all patriotically engaged in a sneak attack on 鬼ヶ島/ Demon Island, otherwise known as Hawaii.
          The film is aimed at children and includes comedic moments to keep the viewer entertained. It is when those comedic moments include an American sailor on fire after the bombing  that the actual intention of the propaganda becomes clear: Bombing and killing the enemy is a good and noble pursuit and should be enjoyed. **
          Japan had also learned that in the art of war, deception is key, and propaganda must ensure that you can march into people's countries and make the claim that you are doing it for their good.  So it was that Japan marched into the British colonies of Singapore and Hong Kong promising to free the people from the yoke of the Empire and offering a place in The Great East Asia Prosperity Sphere (大東亜共栄圏）, where they would, of course, be serving the purposes of the Japanese Empire.
          Germany used the concept of Lebensraum to give its own invasions an aura of inevitable logic, the implied idea being that the superior invading the land of the untermenschen is simply the natural order.***
         And, inevitably, everyone had God on their side.****
        
         Everywhere, the clashing powers were asserting their ancient right to ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles..(and) call it Empire, and...make a desert and call it peace.+

       The value of communication in encouraging people to fight can be clearly seen in the British propaganda of World War Two.  As dramatised in the 2011 Oscar-winner The King's Speech, the fact that King George VI needed training to overcome his speech impediments and that this was considered of national importance shows the increasing importance of radio addresses as propaganda.
       In 1938, with what was possibly the first modern sound bite, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, freshly returned from a meeting in Munich concerning Germany's territorial claims in Czechoslovakia, famously promised: "Peace for our time."
      The war in Europe would start within the year.
      After Chamberlain's resignation in 1940, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. Having earned his living as a writer, Churchill fully appreciated the magical power of words in forming ideas.  Especially at  the beginning of the war, his speeches played a vital part in British propaganda, encouraging people to fight at a time when the outlook was bleak, and prominent cabinet members were arguing for a peace settlement with Hitler. 
      
        Churchill's speech after he became Prime Minister noted the importance of fighting the "monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the long lamentable catalogue of human crime". George Orwell would explain it thus-
       The choice before human beings is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world: that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choice you will not come out with clean hands.     
       On the 10th of May 1940, the day that Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, Britain invaded the neutral country of Iceland.
      
       But this invasion was nothing compared to just how dirty Britain's hands would be by the end of the war.
      
      
                 

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*I've sometimes said to my students in Japan: "If I was here 60 years ago, I'd be trying to kill you..."#
  
**Popeye's sparring partner Bluto, is shown trying to survive the attack. A deliberate choice must have been made not to include Popeye. Probably because the drunken and blubbering Bluto serves the propaganda purpose better than a Popeye who,  well known to the young viewers, would come storming back.

*** One could ask why the successful spread of  the Jewish hordes is not considered a mark of  their superiority. But as in any increasingly fascist system, Bela Lugosi, if not dead, knows that his life depends on keeping his mouth shut. 

**** Japan would claim that not only was God on their side, but that he was Japanese; and everyone knew where he lived in Tokyo.

+ The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that this was from a speech by the Caledonion Calgacus. Most interestingly, historians consider that Tacitus made it up

++ I was surprised to discover that that actual quote is not: "Peace in our time."  This mis-quotation must be in the top ten mis-quotes that would also include such you-must-remember-this certs as: "Play it again, Sam."   As always: Information------> Idea.

# (So stop complaining...)