The death of Paul Tibbets Jr., US Army Air Corps pilot of the B-29 "Enola Gay" which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, has stimulated a rich, enthusiastic and nostalgic thread on the list of Guys (almost entirely -- 2 females counted so far in more than a year) Fascinated by Ionizing Radiation and the Machines that Make and Detect It. (Nuclear bombs make ionizing radiation, bigtime.)About a dozen list posts a day have been a lot like a convention celebrating the Age of Iron Men and Wooden Ships, Horatio Nelson, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Horatio Hornblower.
A group largely of older American men has been looking back on an age they sincerely remember, or grew up sincerely perceiving, as a moment when our best and finest answers were provided for our greatest questions from giant, powerful flying machines that dropped massive amounts of high explosives from a mile above the cities of our enemies.
Finally the busy list, and the Glenn Miller music in the background, were shocked by a discordant post from a guy who was tremendously upset by the World War Two Strategic Bombing Nostalgia-thon.
Just add 65 short years, and things just don't look the same, the way they looked to Yanks and Canadians back in Glenn Miller's day. The bombs are still dropping, but the music's all changed.
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OK, enough is enough. Could you take the bomber-worship to another
list? Once there, perhaps you could give some thought to the purpose
for which these planes were designed and used, i.e. the mass murder of
defenceless civilians, in other words war crimes. Dwelling on the gee-
whiz factor while avoiding the real-world applications of these
aircraft is in the worst possible taste. In effect the modern bomber
is simply Auschwitz with wings. Please, while posting to this list,
try to conceal those nasty fascist tendencies for which the USA is so
well-known around the world.
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Hi BritColGuy --
I know the dynamics and customs of this list pretty well, and my own politics have run afoul of it now and then, but I feel an instinct to repond to you off-list.
You've quite fairly and reasonably, but quite bluntly, turned a pretty typical list thread toward a direction most members intentionally and scrupulously like to avoid.
FRED, the list-owner, very much to his credit, almost never enforces one particular politic or forbids a particular politic. At most he may gently hint or request that posters keep politics out of their posts.
My personal rule on that -- just another rule, not the best rule -- is that I tend to keep directly political things out of what I post unless I feel a prior post has provoked a very blunt response.
Which seems exactly to be why you posted as you did. This thread has certainly had the capacity to press a lot of the hottest of all emotional buttons.
Tibbets, a career Air Force officer, knowingly accepted a military assignment which (unless he was un-humanly stupid or naive) he must have realized would press peoples' hottest emotional buttons for the rest of his life and for long after even that.
Bombing cities from the air is something relatively new to the inherent brutality of war. Before aerial bombing, the physics of war imposed a closeness of attacker to victim; until the 20th century, it was pretty much eyeball-to-eyeball; you usually saw whom you were killing.
The aerial bombing that was perfected during World War Two substituted a near-complete distance and separation between attacker, a mile above the ground, and victims. The superpowers continue to pursue that technological trend into the present day and into the future. Air operations now are increasingly pilotless and robotic; from the attacker's point of view, warfare is almost entirely mathematical, resembling a push-button session at an ATM. We compute numbers, often from an air-conditioned office, and tens of thousands of completely faceless strangers receive our destruction.
Of modern wars, North Vietnam was the last combatant who could claim to have had half a chance of defense; their air defenses against American bombardment were better than those that defended occupied Europe during World War II.
Okay, this wasn't much of a Sherlock Holmes challenge, you're in Canada. I'm in Massachusetts, half a day south of Ontario or Quebec. Your nick suggests you're in BC.
I was born two years after our great joint partnership victory in World War Two. Before Pearl Harbor, Americans itchy to start the war early joined the Canadian Air Force. Later, during "my" war, Canadians itchy to get in on the Vietnam war crossed down to the US and joined to fight in Vietnam. While lots of our guys were fleeing to Canada to skip it, and have been Canadians ever since. I've been deeply grateful to Trudeau ever since for bravely offering them sanctuary.
Like the beer commercial says, you guys don't all live in igloos, and my folks aren't really all violent fascists. It's rather something more subtle and more troublesome than that.
You're making a McGill/Harvard argument, but sadly most of us didn't go to Harvard. I don't know how truly good American education was when it was at its very best -- and it once was very good indeed -- but it's declined badly ("dummied down") in the last three decades.
Arguments as complex and subtle as yours -- it's more than possible most Americans on a list like this have never experienced a school session that discussed the ethics and morals of modern war. I wouldn't even be surprised if I learned that most adult Americans never read "Slaughterhouse Five." (I read it once every year, without having to remind myself to.)
History's whims, more than our own conscious choice, chose to make the USA the New Rome, the only military superpower of this historical era. That subjects even a democratic open society to unique and perverse distortive pressures. The "shock and awe" superpower you see today as your neighbor evolved rapidly after Pearl Harbor, when we were first terrified of the Germans and Japanese, and then, almost with no breather, terrified for the next 45 years of our WWII-era allies, the Soviets/Russians.
Like Rome with Carthage, we outlasted and exhausted our superpower rivals, and are currently the only projectable military superpower on Earth. Inevitably, that status, and the industrial and economic structures that keep it going, regularly make us behave in ways that must, to observers in other countries, seem drunk or irrational, or, in your description, profoundly immoral.
I would be only a bit more charitable and describe the Americans of my lifetime and their political and military behavior as the behavior of extremely frightened, not terribly well educated, and not very well travelled people.
Fear may be based on lies and propaganda, but fear itself is very real. After the Nazis, the Japanese and the Soviets, we just had a horrific "booster shot" of fear with the attacks of 11 September 2001. Nothing I could say briefly here could do a better job of explaining its effects on ordinary Americans than Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911," which I'm sure you've seen. He said it very bluntly: Abject terror makes people make very bad political decisions.
That excuses nothing. If there's any meaning to moral or ethical behavior, it's our behavior when we're most challenged and stressed that has meaning; it's how we act, collectively and as individuals, when we're genuinely scared, that's most telling of ourselves, and our spiritual and political systems.
Historically I'd remind you that before the 9/11/01 attacks, the last time the continental United States was attacked on its own soil was when the British burned Washington DC in the War of 1812. Even both World Wars were violent episodes that, to Canadian and Yank civilians, happened "somewhere else" and "far away" and were largely ignorable in our day-to-day life.
I went to college in New York City just as the World Trade Centers were built. I like to see myself as well-educated, rational, and beyond the disorienting effects of raw terror, but when I visit or pass by New York City now, the hole in the skyline where those buildings were affects a deep emotional place within me.
I'd ask you to imagine the unimaginable: A comparable hostile destruction of the most familiar Toronto or Vancouver skyline.
And then fantasize the next decade of Canada's social and political behavior. I suspect you would find much of it unrecognizeable and much of it unpleasant.
It's sad, and in your word, tasteless, but a lot of frightened people leap for the comfort and safety they perceive in powerful engines of war.
I've lived with little kids -- a powerless and easily frightened phase of everyone's life -- and many of them just naturally take comfort in images and games of violence and war, swords and guns. It's the job of the most educated and responsible adults to impose understanding and balance on frightened children so they don't grow up to continue to seek safety and comfort in physical power and violence.
But even among educated adults, few choose to commit to the Quaker, Buddhist or Ghandi end of the spectrum of violence and non-violence. Most of us drift to easier, more "off-the-rack" responses, and in unexamined ways feel we can safeguard ourselves from the monsters in our bedroom closets by trusting in the answers powerful and expensive weapons seem to promise our inner frightened children.
Even Roman children were terrified when their parents told them "Hannibal's at the gates!" Every superpower has its Hannibal. This year his name is Osama bin Laden.
Well, just wanted to toss a few ideas back at you. I am hardly the USA Patriotic Society. These "Bush Years" have been incredibly difficult for me to endure, and for the first time in my life have tempted me to consider expatriating. Nixon, Vietnam and the draft couldn't chase me away, but Bush and those who've allowed him to manipulate them and pervert their best and most decent instincts have come close.
If you believe in old fairy tales, it's worth remembering that Nixon had to resign in disgrace (the only US president ever to resign), about 20 of his closest cronies went to prison, and a few months later, the Vietnam War ended. That was a very pleasant American memory for me, a Happy Ending that Americans and their own instincts, desires and institutions, insisted on.
If Canada had enthusiastically produced a new Trudeau as its national response to the excess and violence of Bush and his America, expatriating would have been far more tempting.
But everywhere I look, the people of the world have become afraid, and consequently irrational. Places I once believed were benevolent, enlightened paradises and utopias have now swung unrecognizeably to the "fascist" right, and see their own salvation in militarism and xenophobic border-sealing. Places that always rejected and ridiculed strong men and powerful weapons now vote for them.
I suspect there will be no easy national answers to move us beyond this era of fear. Each of us will have to educate and discipline his or her own heart, the only place on Earth where true safety lies. I wish both of us good things in those directions.
Bob
Massachusetts USA
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