Saturday 22 February 2014

Material for an interesting pub conversation

A Femen activist/self-publicist in Dresden had the nerve to appear topless in public with the slogan "Thanks Bomber Harris" daubed across her torso, but somehow lacked the nerve to show her own face while doing so (which sort of defeats the object, doesn't it?).



I don't see what's so offensive about "Thanks Bomber Harris", the people in Bomber Command were just doing what the official UK government had asked them to do, they helped defeat the Nazis, and by and large we should be grateful towards them.

Discuss.

13 comments:

Lola said...

I suppose she is thanking Bomber Harris for contributing to the liberation of her country from the Nazis so that she is safe to appear in public to demonstrate in the manner she chose.

Bayard said...

There is evidence that the policy to "unhouse" the civilian population of Germany by bombing their cities was partly Harris's idea. I also have been told by someone who remembers the bombing of Dresden, that that raid, in particular, was aimed against German civilians, because the existence of the Nazi death camps had just been made public in Britain.

Kj said...

Who says it´s offensive anyway? I think this a fine way to get the message across, more of it I say.

Steven_L said...

Looks like the other one is part of an 'anti IFA' group?

Have you had topless German women protesting at your place Lola?

Ian B said...

The build quality of these Femen exhibitionists is going downhill fast isn't it? The totty seems to be turning to tatty. Maybe it's tit for tat.

Anyway, the Jerries started it and enthusiastically bombed civilians. My great aunt had an inciendiary bomb land in her wardrobe.

Nothing to complain about. Harris did a good job of the job he was given to do.

Furor Teutonicus said...

At this point it was clear that the "Nazis" were already defeated.

THIS was merely an act of revenge against an innocent population.

(Three of my Aunties, at 13 <> years old lost their whole family, and sawit happen. Is any one here trying to say my Aunties were guilty of anything? If so, Name the place, name the weapon!)

Tim Almond said...

I think (and I feel the same in my post about Nazi concentration camp guards) that you can't really judge events in the past from the comfort of the 21st century.

It's like these anti-landmine fuckwits. Are they honestly saying that if we were faced with invasion that they wouldn't want the British army to be littering them on the shores of Kent?

Was it revenge? You're damn straight it was revenge. And I'll bet if you'd done a vox pop of the people in Britain about levelling Dresden they'd have probably been overall in support.

Mark Wadsworth said...

FT: "THIS was merely an act of revenge against an innocent population."

It wasn't even that, it was the UK/USA showing Stalin that they still cared about him.

And I've got relatives in Germany who lost relatives in the war, including in bombing too, I'm not sure if that has any relevance.

Lola said...

MW. Exactly. Such actions were part of the UK/US strategy to keep Stalin on-side - officially admitted or not. It was an extension of the 'Second Front'.
But you cannot judge then from now. I personally do not think the bombing was 'justified', but I wasn't there then. You could make the same arguments about Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Graeme said...

it is interesting that the casualty rates suffered by Bomber Command were higher than those inflicted by the "Donkeys" in WW1.

DBC Reed said...

Yes Churchill wanted to keep the Russians fighting so they would carry on losing several thousand men a day.Rather inconveniently the Russians developed tanks that defeated the Tigers at Kursk and started heading for Berlin.Still Churchill carried on the anti-Russian campaign after the WW2 by conspiring to start a Cold War with the Americans who had made it quite clear they wanted to end the Commonwealth proto Common Market based on Imperial Preference in the so-called Atlantic Charter.

DBC Reed said...

Nobody's leapt to the defence of Churchill so I will carry on.The key is the Hess flight where the only plausible explanation (since it was accompanied by a definitive
knock-out air raid on London)is that Churchill agreed via Hess to let the Nazis finish off Russia with Barbarossa without us nipping across the Channel and disrupting their efforts from the West i.e without opening a Second Front.
I was told this as a fact by genuine old-style Jewish Communists (in the Dublin Castle in Camden) who were somehow associated with Lefties I vaguely knew who believed in a Socialist British Empire and saw WW2 as knife in the back job by the Americans to grab our Imperial Preference markets-- a view most eloquently shared, and then some, by Enoch Powell, strangely enough.
A lot of strange shit went on in WW2.Does anybody know what happened to our gold reserves shipped from South Africa to the USA aboard USS Louisville ?

DBC Reed said...

See above.Unbeknownst to me that horrible oaf Peter Hitchens is dealing with the strange case of the USS Louisville in his horrible paper at the moment.As is so often the case with horrible oafs ,when they stumble across something righteous, Hitchens expresses himself with a clarity and trenchancy one can only admire.