{"id":721,"date":"2005-02-13T02:18:55","date_gmt":"2005-02-13T02:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:00","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:00","slug":"dresden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=721","title":{"rendered":"Dresden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today marks the anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden<\/a> by the British Air Force.<\/p>\n

Like a lot of people in the Anglosphere – more than will likely admit it – I first learned of it by reading ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ in high school.<\/p>\n

The short version is that British strategic bombers used a combination of high explosives – to create kindling – and phosphorus – to ignite it- to create firestorm that killed half a million German civilians.<\/p>\n

The direct military role of Dresden (and Cologne and Hamburg, which were equally treated) was limited, and the question of why Air Marshal Harris and Churchill chose to do this remains a significant issue for historians. <\/p>\n

And for us, as we consider the issues around the ‘scope’ of warfare in the modern age.A long time ago, I wrote a paper about the interplay between social forms, the level and cost of technology that was generated by and could support those social norms, and forms of warfare. I pointed out that most societies seemed to cluster in scale at the level that optimally supported their then-preferred means of warfighting.<\/p>\n

And that we tended to oscillate between a tribal mode of war, in which wars were typically either symbolic or total, and a ‘Westphalian’ form in which the wars engaged only the military and political leadership and explicitly tried (with varying degrees of success) to leave the peasants alone.<\/p>\n

I think that we idealize the Westphalian style of war; we imagine it to be boundable in law and custom, and somehow able to keep the rage and fear that are inextricable from war out of the picture.<\/p>\n

But I do think we are slowly moving – for a variety of reasons and with a variety of impulses – toward a system which at least makes some effort to manage what war is. We haven’t come very far.<\/p>\n

That’s why General Mattis’ comments<\/a> made me wince so deeply. I’ve met Gen. Mattis, shaken his hand and sat with him and discussed what he hoped to do when the 1st MEF returned to Iraq. And it was clear to me that he ‘got it’; that he was going to stop the bad guys and defend the good guys – who included the brutalized Iraqi people.<\/p>\n

I had no doubt that he was a warrior, and all warriors have some germ of Genghis Khan in them, some desire to see their enemies trampled underfoot, their cities brought down amid tears.<\/p>\n

But he knew, I felt then, how to place that impulse in context, and I continue to believe, based on the performance of his Marines, that he knew how to place that context into action, even when faced with a brutal enemy.<\/p>\n

I think he slipped when he spoke, and while I disagree with Patterico<\/a> and don’t believe an official reprimand was remotely called for, I do believe that a general officer ought to know better.<\/p>\n

And the reason for that is worth remembering today, on the anniversary of Dresden.<\/p>\n

We need to look at it and not see some lesson about the moral culpability of the West and how we’re as bad as the Nazis, or any other brutal regime – as opposed to some idealized nation which has never existed. Instead we should see the lesson of what total war looks like, and what we need to struggle hard to avoid.<\/p>\n

We need to be reminded of what we’re capable of and what we need to sacrifice to avoid being driven to do. We should be ashamed of Dresden. We have dirty hands<\/a> because of it, and an obligation to use those dirty hands to do better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We need to be reminded of what we’re capable of, and what we need to sacrifice to avoid being driven to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}