Re: [Marxism] It's the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden

["Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "rrubinelli" <rrubinelli@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> That being said, Dresden had no strategic or tactical importance to the
> Allies plan for the defeat of Germany.  It was an exercise in payback..

I try to put myself in the position of the average person in WWII

Interestingly, my grandfather on my mom's side, who was a POW of the
germans, didn't share my views. He came out of the war an alcoholic, a
pacifist and a Yugoslav-phile, for it  was a Yugoslav who saved his life
during a forced march from France and into Germany.

But most people lack that perspective.

What is revolution if not the oppressed extracting payback from the
oppresors?

Payback is a large part of what war in essence is about, revolutionary war
included. That the objective of imperialist war is more war, and the
objective of revolutionary war is socialist peace, is a matter of content
not of form.

I wonder if Trotsky's massacre of civilians in Kronstad, the CNT's massacres
of civilians and clergy in the Catalonian countryside, the FLN's massacres
of civilians in Algeria, the Cuban attrocities in Angola, fall into the same
categorization of being excercises in unnecesary payback?

That I am morally appalled by such excercises is overshadowed by a political
understanding that those events were ultimately inevitable, and even
necesary.

> not even terror on a massive scale, just pure and simple destruction for
> the sake of destruction-- a pathology.

Then it follows that all war is a pathology, not the midwife of a world
pregnant with a new world.

I must say that for me it has always been the weakest argument by
revolutionaries against war. War is an atrocity. WWII, all said and done,
was a necesary war. It was an imposition by force of modernity over
neo-feudality. Hence, its atrocities are not to be denied, but neither are
they to be subjected to post-facto moralizations that serve no political
purpose other than claiming some sort of moral superiority on the part of
the one doing the criticism.

"The only good fascist is a dead one" was a brutally practical consideration
at the time, not an empty, radical sounding slogan it means today. We must
view Dresden in that light.

sks




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