The Evening Blues - 10-23-23
Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features blues slide guitar wizard Tampa Red. Enjoy!
Tampa Red - Uncle Bud
"If someone asked me to design the absolute worst place anyone could possibly detonate thousands of explosive munitions on, I’d probably come up with a densely populated area full of easily collapsed buildings wherein an extremely high percentage of the population are children."
-- Caitlin Johnstone
News and Opinion
Death toll in Israeli genocide against Gaza more than 4,100
Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, carried out with the support of the US, UK, French and German governments, continued Friday with the murder of another 352 Palestinians. Since October 7, Israel has launched a systematic campaign to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza and systematically demolish the area’s housing, hospitals and schools, while starving and dehydrating its population.
Over the past week, US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have all visited Israel to give their unequivocal endorsement of the genocidal policies of the Netanyahu regime, which is widely despised within Israel and by Jewish people around the world. ...
International humanitarian organizations fighting to save lives are themselves being targeted by the Netanyahu government. Two more United Nations personnel were murdered in airstrikes in the past 24 hours. “We are devastated to confirm that two more @UNRWA colleagues have been killed in #Gaza. The entire Agency is grieving,” wrote the UN agency for Palestine refugees on Twitter. At least 16 UN personnel have been killed in airstrikes and “the actual number is likely to be much higher,” it wrote. There have been 33 separate Israeli airstrikes against UN installations. ...
In an initial report on Israeli war crimes in Gaza over the past week, Amnesty International wrote that there is “Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza.” Amnesty International “has documented unlawful Israeli attacks, including indiscriminate attacks, which caused mass civilian casualties and must be investigated as war crimes.”
It notes, “Israeli attacks violated international humanitarian law, including by failing to take feasible precautions to spare civilians, or by carrying out indiscriminate attacks that failed to distinguish between civilians and military objectives, or by carrying out attacks that may have been directed against civilian objects.” The report calls on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to “Urgently expedite its ongoing investigation in the situation of Palestine, examining alleged crimes by all parties, and including the crime against humanity of apartheid against Palestinians.”
"Nowhere in Gaza Is Safe": Palestinian Death Toll Tops 5,000 as Israel Rejects Calls for Ceasefire
AP erases Israeli pledge to attack Gaza like ‘Axis Power’ as officials threaten Palestinians with ‘Dresden’ doctrine
The Associated Press has quietly deleted a reference to official Israeli threats to subject the Gaza Strip to a Dresden-style firebombing campaign — the latest move in legacy media outlets’ ongoing push to downplay the impacts of Tel Aviv’s siege of over two million Palestinians.
“Four U.S. officials familiar with the discussions said American diplomats became increasingly alarmed by comments from their Israeli counterparts regarding their intention to deny water, food, medicine, electricity and fuel into Gaza, as well as the inevitability of civilian casualties,” the AP article previously stated.
“Members of the Israeli security and political establishment told the U.S. diplomats that the eradication of Hamas would require methods used in the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II,” the AP originally wrote, adding that “Israeli officials have publicly made similar comparisons.”
The offending passages have since been deleted without explanation — a textbook violation of journalistic ethics. The decision is all the more baffling given that Israeli officials have made no secret of their desire to treat Palestinian civilians the same way Western Allies treated the Germans at the end of World War II.
In an October 16 interview, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, shrugged off concerns about the thousands of innocents killed in IDF strikes on Gaza, suggesting that because Allied powers killed tens of thousands of German civilians with relentless airstrikes in the 1940s, Israel is entitled to do the same.
“There were many, many civilians [that] got attacked from your attacks on German cities,” she told a Sky News anchor. “Dresden was a symbol, but you attacked Hamburg, you attacked other cities, and altogether it was over 600,000 civilian Germans that got killed.”
Comparing the militarily occupied Palestinian population to Nazis, Hotovley continued: “Was it worth it in order to defeat Nazi Germany? And the answer was yes.”
Israeli ambassador to the UK cites the firebombing of Dresden in 1945 (deliberate aerial incineration of civilian population centers by US and UK) as precedent for what Israel is about to do in Gaza pic.twitter.com/GFXuv5T2Lq
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 16, 2023
Neocons cannot be stopped, they will get war
Israel intensifies attacks on north Gaza as WFP says more aid urgently needed
Israel has said it is intensifying attacks on northern Gaza and warned that anyone who stayed risked being considered as “an accomplice in a terrorist organisation”, as airstrikes continued on Sunday in the south, where civilians had fled hoping to survive the war.
A second trickle of aid was allowed into Gaza from Egypt on Sunday, but the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) warned that the humanitarian situation was now catastrophic for the 2.3 million people trapped inside the territory. Speaking on ABC’s This Week programme, the WFP chief, Cindy McCain, described the amount of aid delivered into Gaza so far as a “drop”. “We need – we need secure and sustainable access in there ... This is a catastrophe happening and we just simply have to get these trucks in.”
Up to 19 aid trucks crossed into Gaza on Sunday but there was a brief panic at the crossing when witnesses said a blast was heard and that ambulances could be heard deploying from the Egyptian side. Later, the Israeli military said one of its tanks accidentally hit an Egyptian post near the border. The military expressed sorrow for the incident but gave no further details. Several Egyptian border guards sustained minor injuries, the Egyptian army spokesperson said in a statement.
Israel is preparing for a ground invasion that is likely to deepen civilian suffering.
People are going hungry and drinking dirty water, and some doctors have been reduced to using vinegar as anaesthetic and operating with sewing needles, the Associated Press reported.
Who's behind Gaza hospital massacre?
NYT FORCED To Apologize After CARELESS Misreporting On Gaza Hospital Bombing
Israel Told Gazans to Flee South—Where It Continues to Bomb
The Israeli military continued to pummel Gaza with airstrikes on Sunday, including residential neighborhoods in the south, as a top IDF commander said the bombing would now intensify ahead of an expected ground invasion.
Despite urging Palestinians and others caught in Gaza to flee the northern areas, bombings that claimed the lives of yet more civilians—including children—were reported in Khan Younis and the city of Rafah.
The attacks came hours after the IDF's Rear Adm Daniel Hagari called on Gaza’s residents to move south "for your own safety." ...
Israeli airstrikes continue this morning in Rafah, the very Southern part of Gaza where civilians have been told to go. An UNRWA school in Khan Younis (South Gaza) was targeted this morning. Those in North Gaza have been warned that they will be treated as terrorists and killed. pic.twitter.com/tOXpYSlGaW
— Mira Hammad (@MiraHammad10) October 22, 2023
In an update on Saturday, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the number of those killed by Israeli airstrikes, citing Gaza Ministry of Health figures, had surpassed 4,300. Of those killed, said OCHA, 62% were children and women.
The ministry itself later on Saturday put out numbers that said 4,651 people have been killed, including 1,873 children.
The numbers are staggering, yet they do not begin to convey the full scale and horror of Israel’s assault on Gaza pic.twitter.com/84iUvGI0oL
— Sharif Kouddous شريف عبد القدوس (@sharifkouddous) October 22, 2023
The OCHA estimates 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza are now displaced and that 42% of the housing units in the territory have been damaged or totally destroyed by the IDF bombing campaign.
The Israeli military on Oct. 13 ordered all civilians in the north of the besieged Gaza Strip to evacuate towards the south ahead of an increased bombing campaign and a potential ground invasion by Israeli Defense Forces troops amassed on the border.
But even as critics noted at the time the order would be impossible to comply with for many and should be seen as the prelude to "mass atrocities," many Palestinians fled toward the south to seek refuge from the unrelenting assault and humanitarian crisis.
US Military PREPS For IRAN WAR
Netanyahu told to ‘quit now’ as ex-leaders pin blame on dysfunctional government
Former Israeli military, political and intelligence officials have expressed doubts over the leadership of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as debate rages inside the country about the response to the Hamas attacks on 7 October that killed 1,400 Israelis.
Former prime minister Ehud Barak described the terrorist attack as “the most severe blow Israel has suffered since its establishment to date”. “I don’t believe that the people trust Netanyahu to lead when he is under the burden of such a devastating event that just happened under his term,” he told the Observer.
A former chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces said that Netanyahu should “resign now”, while a former intelligence official described the government as “dysfunctional”. ...
Netanyahu, who has held office for a total of more than 16 years, had already drawn widespread criticism from much of the Israeli public, former military leadership and other former officials about his efforts to overhaul the Israeli judiciary before the devastating attack on 7 October. The Israeli PM also remains embroiled in a corruption trial on an array of charges including fraud, breaching public trust and accepting bribes, all of which he denies.
Pressure grows on Israel to negotiate release of Gaza hostages
Pressure has intensified on Israel to negotiate the release of more than 200 people held by Palestinian militants in Gaza, with desperate families begging officials to help free their loved ones before an anticipated ground invasion. An Israeli military spokesperson announced on Sunday that more than 212 people were held in Gaza, as officials worked to identify and locate those missing after a deadly incursion by Hamas on 7 October. ...
The pressure comes from inside and outside Israel. Many of the hostages were citizens or dual nationals of countries around the world, including Israel’s closest allies. At least some of the 10 US citizens still unaccounted for after the 7 October attack are believed to being held in Gaza. There are also 17 Thais among the hostages, and eight Germans. Seven British nationals and seven French citizens are still classified as missing, and some of them are believed to be hostages too.
So far, two US citizens, Judith Raanan and her daughter Natalie, whom Hamas have been released after mediation by Qatari officials. Members of the International Committee of the Red Cross escorted the pair out of Gaza late on Friday night. ...
CNN reported on Sunday that the Biden administration had pressed Israel to delay the ground assault on Gaza to allow time for the release of more hostages and the delivery of more aid to the besieged enclave. ...
Pressure on Israeli officials increased after an announcement by Abu Obeida, a spokesperson from Hamas’s military wing, the Al Qassam brigades, who said the next day that the group had also offered to free two Israeli citizens, “for humanitarian reasons and without expecting anything in return. However, the Israeli occupation government refused to accept them”. The office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, denied Hamas’s claim of an offer to release more hostages, describing it as “mendacious propaganda”, adding: “We will continue to do everything necessary to bring all the captives and missing back home.”
US to Send Israel Artillery Shells Initially Bound for Ukraine
The US is sending Israel tens of thousands of 155mm artillery shells that were designated for Ukraine, Axios reported on Thursday.
Israeli officials requested the artillery shells as they’re preparing for a ground invasion of Gaza and worried about an escalation with Hezbollah and the possibility of a northern front.
Earlier this year, the US began dipping into a weapons stockpile it has in Israel to ship more artillery shells to Ukraine. According to Axios, Israel has requested that the US replenish its stockpile of ammunition in Israel in case the Israeli military needs them on short notice. The US agreed to the request and is expected to send the 155mm shells in the coming weeks.
Geez, I thought that if there was profit to be made that capitalists would "rebuild the industrial base" out of self-interest. You mean there's not enough profit to be made in weapons-making, Mitch?
Mitch McConnell backs Biden’s $106bn aid request for Israel and Ukraine
Mitch McConnell offered a strong endorsement on Sunday of the Joe Biden White House’s $106bn aid proposal to Israel and Ukraine, saying he and the president were essentially “in the same place” on the issue.
McConnell, the powerful Republican leader in the Senate, also rebuffed some of his GOP colleagues in the Senate who have called for a package separating assistance for the two countries, saying it would be “a mistake” during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation.
Nine Republican senators wrote a letter to McConnell on Thursday saying that Ukraine and Israel aid should not be paired together. “These are two separate conflicts and it would be wrong to leverage support of aid to Israel in an attempt to get additional aid for Ukraine across the finish line,” the group wrote.
McConnell rejected that view on Sunday.
“I view it as all interconnected,” he said during the interview. “If you look at the Ukraine assistance, let’s – let’s talk about where the money is really going. A significant portion of it’s being spent in the United States in 38 different states, replacing the weapons that we sent to Ukraine with more modern weapons. So we’re rebuilding our industrial base,” he said.
Pro-Palestinian views face suppression in US amid Israel-Hamas war
Widespread attempts to suppress pro-Palestinian views in the US after the Hamas attack on Israel have forced the cancellation of major conferences, prompted demands for the dismissal of workers who express support for Palestinians and led to intimidation campaigns against Arab American voices critical of Israeli policies.
Earlier this week, a leading US Jewish group forced the cancellation of a major Palestinian campaign organisation’s national conference by alleging it was a front for Hamas, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis and abducted about 200 people in its attack from Gaza.
Palestinian American activists say television networks also have censored or cancelled interviews. NPR and the BBC pulled advertising for a widely praised new book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after a campaign of “listener complaints”.
The Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce has declared a “victory” after pressuring Hilton hotels into cancelling the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights event in Houston later this month at which the congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was to be the main speaker.
Duvi Honig, the chamber’s founder and CEO, publicly denounced the USCPR meeting as “a conference for Hamas supporters” and called Tlaib and other speakers “notoriously proud Jew-haters”. Honig’s message was reposted repeatedly on social media – with contact details for Hilton’s president, Christopher Nassetta – where it gained traction, with the USPCR being falsely accused of supporting statements by more marginal groups praising the Hamas attack.
China and the Philippines trade blame over two South China Sea collisions
Beijing and Manila have traded blame for two separate collisions on Sunday between Chinese vessels and Philippine boats on a resupply mission to Filipino troops on a remote outpost in the disputed South China Sea. The incidents occurred near Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly Islands – a hotly contested region where Beijing deploys ships to assert its claims over almost the entire sea.
The Philippines accused China’s coast guard of colliding with a supply boat, saying the “dangerous blocking manoeuvres of China Coast Guard vessel 5203 caused it to collide with the Armed Forces of the Philippines-contracted indigenous resupply boat” about 25km from Second Thomas Shoal.
China said the “slight collision” happened after the resupply boat ignored “multiple warnings and deliberately passed through law enforcement in an unprofessional and dangerous manner”, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported, citing the foreign ministry. In another incident, a Philippine coastguard vessel escorting a routine resupply mission was “bumped” by what the Philippine taskforce described as a “Chinese Maritime Militia vessel”.
China, however, accused the Philippine boat of “deliberately” stirring up trouble by reversing in a “premeditated manner” into a Chinese fishing vessel.
Video released by the Philippine military showed the bow of the Chinese coastguard ship and the stern of the smaller resupply vessel briefly touching. No one on either Philippine vessel was injured, but the supply boat involved in the collision was damaged, according to the Philippine coast guard.
US crime statistics from FBI should be viewed with caution, experts warn
After a spike of homicides in 2020 and 2021, the rate of violent crimes, including homicide, in the US fell last year to pre-pandemic levels, even as other types of crime increased, data released this week by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) show. But experts say these findings should be viewed with caution, since much of it is based on incomplete data from local police departments.
The FBI data is based on voluntary reporting by individual law enforcement agencies, and last year, half of US police departments, including those in big cities such as Los Angeles and New York, failed to submit data for 2021.
In 2022, 83% of US law enforcement agencies submitted data to the federal government, which means that about 10% of the population is not represented in this data, according to the FBI. And while more localities are included in this year’s data release, researchers caution that department data can also be “patchy” because less than half of the nation’s violent crimes, like rapes and robberies, are reported to law enforcement, according to the Appeal.
This incomplete national data can then be used by police departments and officials to justify tough-on-crime agendas and to push back against reforms like zero-bail policies.
“You miss the full story when you have incomplete and patchy data,” said Insha Rahman, vice-president of advocacy and partnerships at Vera Institute of Justice. “The issue of crime is deeply weaponized and politicized and we see that come up especially during election cycles. Florida has very incomplete data but Governor [Ron] Desantis’s campaign is stating they’ve made Florida the safest state.” In Florida, only 8% of the police departments are represented in the 2022 data, according to the Marshall Project.
NINE Republicans Join House SPEAKER Race
Billions of snow crabs in Alaska likely vanished due to warm ocean
Warmer ocean temperatures have likely caused the sudden and shocking disappearance of billions of snow crabs in Alaska, which had previously baffled scientists and environmentalists, a new study has shown.
The eastern Bering Sea snow crabs, once thought to be overfished, actually starved to death en masse because the change in water temperature “increased their caloric needs considerably”, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in the study.
The years 2018 and 2019 saw record-breaking ocean temperatures, which at first led to a boom in the snow crab population before it quickly plummeted. Then 2022 saw a sharp decline of 10 million crabs.
A marine heatwave, which happens when ocean temperatures are persistently and anomalously warm, causes stress to corals and other marine ecosystems, leaving sea life vulnerable and causing chaos across food chains. The phenomenon is a product of the climate crisis since “the ocean absorbs 90% of the excess heat associated with global warming”, the Noaa said.
Ex-officials at UN farming body say work on methane emissions was censored
Former officials in the UN’s farming wing have said they were censored, sabotaged, undermined and victimised for more than a decade after they wrote about the hugely damaging contribution of methane emissions from livestock to global heating.
Team members at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) tasked with estimating cattle’s contribution to soaring temperatures said that pressure from farm-friendly funding states was felt throughout the FAO’s Rome headquarters and coincided with attempts by FAO leadership to muzzle their work.
The allegations date back to the years after 2006, when some of the officials who spoke exclusively to the Guardian on condition of anonymity wrote Livestock’s Long Shadow (LLS), a landmark report that pushed farm emissions on to the climate agenda for the first time. LLS included the first tally of the meat and dairy sector’s ecological cost, attributing 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions to livestock, mostly cattle. It shocked an industry that had long seen the FAO as a reliable ally – and spurred an internal clampdown by FAO hierarchy, according to the officials.
“The lobbyists obviously managed to influence things,” one ex-official said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism.”
Serving and former FAO experts said that between 2006 and 2019, management made numerous attempts to suppress investigations into the cow/climate change connection. Top officials rewrote and diluted key passages in another report on the same topic, “buried” another paper critical of big agriculture, excluded critical officials from meetings and summits, and briefed against their work. “There was substantial pressure internally and there were consequences for permanent staff who worked on this, in terms of their careers. It wasn’t really a healthy environment to work in,” said another ex-official.
Also of Interest
Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.
The US Empire’s PR Crisis In Gaza
Netanyahoo's Strategic Dilemma
Memo on the Final Solution for One State – Israel or Palestine
Middle Easterners Have Words For The Western Press Who’ve Been Lying About Them
Unconfirmed ‘Beheaded Babies’ Report Helped Justify Israeli Slaughter
'Totally Insufficient': Groups Say Trickle of Gaza Aid No Match for Ongoing 'Mass Atrocities'
Israel Intends to Make Gaza Uninhabitable by Cutting Power Permanently
Former US congressman says family members killed in Gaza church blast
Argentina’s Trump on track to become president
Palestinian Human Rights Lawyer Raji Sourani Describes Surviving Israel Bombing His Home in Gaza
Israel REJECTS Hostage Release As US PLEADS For More Time
SHOCK POLL: Majority Rejects Weapons To Israel
Two elderly Israeli women being held hostage in Gaza released by Hamas
Dave Chappelle BOO'D, Audience WALKS OUT After He Accuses Israel Of WAR CRIMES
A Little Night Music
Tampa Red - It Hurts Me Too
Tampa Red - Boogie Woogie Dance
Tampa Red - Things 'Bout Coming My Way (1931 Version)
Tampa Red - Mama Don't Allow No Easy Riders Here
Tampa Red - I'm A Stranger Here
Tampa Red - Juicy Lemon Blues
Tampa Red - Harlem Swing
Tampa Red - Love With A Feeling
Tampa Red - Let Me Play With Your Poodle
Comments
What a relief, the G-7 stands united on genocide s/
https://www.azerbaycan24.com/en/us-and-other-western-nations-issue-joint...
Power to the people....I think not
I haven't seen this Chris Hedges interview of Norman Finkelstein here
at C99, but I might've missed it. It's most certainly worth the watch
for those that haven't watched it
I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish
"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"
Heard from Margaret Kimberley
evening ggersh...
great cartoon!
thanks for the hedges/finkelstein interview, i had missed that one.
have a great evening!
Trottels
Biden: First Trottel, who doesn't even know what a Trottel is
Selensky: Second Trottel, who enjoys being a Trottel and plays a bad Trottel without knowing
Putin: Third Trottel, who plays an evil Trottel without knowing that nobody cares
Mimi is for now a super, duper Trottel:ine.
Sigh.
What's the difference bwetween a war and a real war? In a war only the right people die, in a real war all the wrong people die - Or the other way around.
Let's just trottel along.
Pfft.
heh. Mimi is nobody's trotteline, absolutely fer sure.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
evening mimi...
here's a little something to trot to:
thanks that is a good trott along/nt
Have no fear! Sahra Wagenknecht will surely save us! /s n/t
A Short Fable from Caitlin Johnstone
... was in my inbox today. It describes a process, that evidence suggests, scrambles the logic functions in the brains of many susceptible people — How to win hearts and minds by short-circuiting the Universal Moral Compass of humanity. She breaks down the logic-twisting mental injury, step by step. I think Caitlin got it just right:
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
That’s brilliant!
She has taken a ton of flack on the Twit for being against the Ukraine War too. Putin lover is what she is accused of the most. I too am getting tired of people being accused of supporting Hamas just because they are against genocide. And people saying that the Palestinians deserve it because they voted for Hamas in 2006. People really ought to rethink that view because we have been re-electing the people who have taken us to one war after another. Collective punishment might be in our future one day.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
evening pluto...
it's sad that some people fall for that faulty logic, but i have to wonder if they fall for it because they want to support a particular position.
i dunno.
More from Caitlin
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Very interesting articles from Cook and Mondoweiss
.
I’ve been reading more articles that question whether Hamas actually killed all the Israeli civilians. Here’s 2 more.
Mondoweiss
Both are worth a full read.
I’ve also read that there were Israeli soldiers at the rave and people there were also caught in the crossfire. Dunno who wrote that article or if it’s been verified. BTW the rave’s location was moved 2 days before it started. I wonder who made that decision and why?
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
evening snoopy...
yeah, sometime last week (it is all blurring together now) i posted a radio interview with a hostage in one of the kibbutz' who said that much of the killing was done by the israelis.
if it's true, i would imagine that our propaganda infrastructure will suppress it and attempt to keep those facts from becoming common knowledge.
Oh the irony
.
What a fcking liar he is. Israel has bombed the crossing twice and Egypt doesn’t want to open it. But sure it’s Hamas fault.
Isn’t America wanting to a ceasefire and to freeze things in Ukraine which they expect Russia to go along with like they have forgotten how they already did that with the Minsk agreements.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
heh...
over at antiwar.com there's a post that comments on blinkiman's lies:
Specious argument about saturation bombing
Actually, saturation bombing of cities contributed little to the German defeat. It's an arcane subject matter but I studied this in the past, and learned two things. Bombing civilian populations tends to increase the general populations will to resist. At the same time, it represents a waste of resources because the weapon systems and organizational effort, logistics and so forth, so dedicated would have been better applied to attacking military targets directly. At the end of the German war campaign, much of the industrial infrastructure was still largely intact. Go figure.
The much more extensive fire bombing campaign against Japan, could possibly be used as an example, because urban areas were known to be made primarily of wood structures which burned fiercely when ignited with incendiaries. However, I have not seen any studies on whether this had any effect on their war production. One argument was they removed the workers making and providing military supplies (by killing them all). A similar argument was made concerning Germans. Curtis LeMay justified it this way, in words to this effect, "the side that kills the most people, wins." That is simply not true.
Bombing civilian areas is primarily a terror tactic. Revenge (technically reprisal) was the motive when Churchill adopted the indiscriminate night bombing of German cities. It was also felt there would be less bomber losses if night bombing took place. I got quite a bit of this info from Ellsberg's book Doomsday Machine, but I did see earlier studies on this subject years ago. Nuking cities is just the next logical step from this kind of massive slaughter. You could say, well I'm destroying this bridge or that factory, too bad 100,000 people (civilians) and all their infrastructure, hospitals, schools, etc., will be destroyed in the process.
As Ellsberg says no great immoral leap there in targeting Japan in WWII to Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, we were already killing people in the hundreds of thousands. What we were doing, fire bombing civilians, was already pure evil.
So this is what the Israelis want, going back to WWII practices? I thought the protocols to the Geneva Conventions for the protection of civilians entered into after WWII were an effort to condemn these lapses. Justifying the outright slaughter of civilians leads to rationalizing that nuclear exchanges are justifiable in war. It's insanity. This is particularly worrying in a scenario where a small country with nuclear weapons feels an existential threat would justify such a response, say Israel in the case of a war with Iran.
Matthew Hoh had good presentation on the risks of this war spreading yesterday. It's one of the few I've watched lately because the subject matter literally makes me feel ill.
If you have the time, it's worth a look.
Thanks for the EBs Joe. I read just about all the articles of interest.
語必忠信 行必正直
evening soryang...
well, i suppose that it makes sense that israel reverts instinctively to the tactics of wwii since the injury that defines it as a nation reached its peak then and the formation of its state was considered to be a part of the remedy. in a sense, israel as a nation seems stuck in the thinking prevalent in wwii and cannot seem to progress beyond it. meanwhile it's biggest ally reveres wwii as "the good war" and would love to continue its legacy.
Right JS, the "good war"
This Japanese American historian, born during WWII in Japan, who later became a US citizen has an interesting discussion of the end of the Pacific War. He comments on the putative continuity of LeMay's firebombing campaign on Japan, and the use of the atomic weapons. He notes the role of revenge on the US motivation. FDR had originally opposed "strategic bombing."
What role did the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Soviet entry into the war play in Japan’s decision to surrender in the Pacific War? Conversations with Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
North Korea met with the Curtis LeMay experience as well during the Korean conflict, sustaining an estimated 2,000,000 deaths from strategic bombings, and to this day has a "never again" perspective. They've made it clear they will use nuclear weapons pre-emptively if they are attacked conventionally.
Viewed from this WWII perspective, maybe NATO countries should be relieved that Russia isn't "losing" the Ukrainian war.
語必忠信 行必正直
What went wrong after WWII
was that only the losers were ever held to account for war crimes. No one on the winning side was even so much as reprimanded. This left the general impression that winning was the most important thing, and that it didn't matter what you did to make winning possible as long as you actually won. (In other words, winners get away with everything, losers get nailed.)
Not at all a good message to leave to posterity...assuming you care about posterity.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
Yes, that's the major point
Thanks for emphasizing that TheOtherMaven. Hasegawa's (rather lengthy) interview tells how he rather late in his career arrived at that very point that you just made succinctly. Initially, he was an advocate of nuclear arms control. Now he advocates abolition. I have no idea how we are going to get there. I feel the US has retreated even from the arms control framework.
Thanks for your observation.
語必忠信 行必正直
In Japan...
The winners cut deals with the losers and not only did individual war criminals walk, but were facilitated in going on to re-establish much of the pre-war order, albeit somewhat limited by having to work within the US-drafted constitution.
The founder of the (still) ruling Liberal Democrat (it is neither) Party, Kishi Nobosuke was imprisoned in Sugamo Prison with other Class-A war criminals for a year or so. He had been, in the latter part of the war, in charge of the labor system, big parts of which were slave labor. But cut a deal w/the US, founded the LDP and went on to become prime minister, implementing the US-Japan security treaty in 1960 in the face of massive protests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anpo_protests
The US also protected the members of the notorious Unit 731 who had sacrificed numerous prisoners, mostly Chinese but also some POW's in horrific experimentation for biological warfare and other areas of interest.
While industrial and military targets were attacked, the fire bombings of Tokyo and other cities were clearly targeting civilians - in Tokyo and the city where I live, which was also targeted - the bombing was timed and in a pattern such that strong spring winds would carry the fires through densely constructed residential areas of flammable wooden structures.
In my city, thousands were killed (about 6000 probably) in a single night, in Tokyo probably 100,000.
Don't know what you could call those *but* war crimes.
One thing regarding the atomic bombings that even knowledgeable Japanese tend to regard positively is that it helped force a quick end to the war, when there was strong sentiment in the military leadership to continue to fight (this even after the atomic bombings). That not only avoided a lot of further suffering, but averted the imminent Soviet occupation of Hokkaido. The USSR, having declared war on Japan upon Germany's surrender and taken control of Manchuria, Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands was rapidly moving to take Hokkaido as well but the Japanese surrender forestalled it.
Hamas support - by Israel?
Here's one that *should* give pause to the most rabid Palestinian haters - who insist it's the Palestinians who don't want peace, are refusing peace deals, etc.
It seems that the Israeli right - Team Netanyahu (some of whom are even more xenophobic and wacked than he is) have been for years *supporting* Hamas' control of Gaza. And why would they do that? Well, to forestall the W. Bank and Gaza both coming under control of the Palestine Authority and Israel being forced to conclude a real peace agreement:
From 2019:
https://www.972mag.com/israeli-right-hamas-gaza-palestinians/?utm_source...
Not to mention
the United States Central Command is in Qatar, where Hamas is supported.
Zoom in on Qatar in the site below.