[Peace-discuss] Terror bombing

[n.dahlheim at mchsi.com]

Terror bombing instigated by the U.S. during WWII certainly should have stood as a war crime.  Hamburg 
to Dresden to Tokyo may have killed upwards of 700,000 people---the atom bombs killed another 
350,000.  Well over a million people killed from incendiaries and nukes-----sound like genocide?  I'd say 
so....  It just didn't have the cool, icy mechanism of the concentration camps where undesirables and Jews 
were cooked---nearly 1 million in Auschwitz alone!  
   And the world keeps turning, whatever kind of comedy or tragedy is being written here upon the backs 
of this tortured, miserable race of man.
           Nick


----------------------  Original Message:  ---------------------
From:    martin smith <send2smith at yahoo.com>
To:      peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Norman Mailer obit
Date:    Wed, 14 Nov 2007 06:18:47 +0000

>   THE MEDIA memorialized Norman Mailer after his death last week with accolades 
> about his stature as a literary giant, two Pulitzer Prizes, larger-than-life 
> celebrity persona and reputation as an egotistical curmudgeon. But the substance 
> of his ideas and his life beyond the image and the awards got little attention.
>   Mailer grew up in a working-class family in Brooklyn. His life was shaped by 
> his service in the Army in the Philippines and during the Second World War, and 
> the disaffection he felt. He identified with the 1950s beat counterculture and 
> 1960s antiwar movement, both in his writing and as a participant in social 
> protests.
>   Mailer’s political engagement came through in non-fiction books like Why Are 
> We in Vietnam? Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, which 
> combined journalism with his own highly personal reflections as a 
> participant-observer in the tumultuous protests of the antiwar movement.
>   Also missing from many mainstream tributes to Mailer was any acknowledgement 
> of his disturbing streak of sexism. Mailer cultivated a “macho” image and 
> declared himself an enemy of the women’s liberation movement. In his rants 
> against feminism, he attempted to justify opposition to birth control, and he 
> blamed the struggle for equality for destroying the “mystery” of sex.
>   EACH OBITUARY did at least mention The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s first and 
> most important novel. It is one of the great antiwar classics in literature and 
> a book that speaks to all activists committed to ending the brutality of wars 
> for empire.
>   Yet The Naked and the Dead is barely known today outside of academic 
> circles--because it challenges the standard assumptions about the Second World 
> War as “the good war,” and unmasks the hidden motives of U.S. involvement.
>   The Naked and the Dead is the story of a suicide mission by a reconnaissance 
> patrol that is ordered to assess a Japanese rear position on the island of 
> Anopopei. If the soldiers survive and return, General Cummings plans to send out 
> a company for a surprise attack, a daring tactical move that would likely lead 
> to his promotion.
>   However, from the beginning, the mission is fraught with problems. Lt. Hearn, 
> the newly assigned platoon commander, has no field experience; Wilson, married 
> with a daughter, has contracted a painful case of gonorrhea and can barely 
> function; and anti-Semitism directed at Roth and Goldstein divides the platoon.
>   Other obstacles develop as tensions mount between Lt. Hearn and Staff Sgt. 
> Croft over leadership of the platoon. Fatalities, a near mutiny, exhaustion and 
> finally a furious hornets’ attack cause the mission to be aborted.
>   Nakedness is a theme throughout the work. Mailer, in his distinctive realist 
> style, undresses the characters and reveals the material conditions behind their 
> motivations and fears.
>   Mailer shows how the grunts in Staff Sgt. Croft’s platoon elected to join the 
> Army not out of a patriotic fervor to fight fascism, but because of dire 
> circumstances and the lack of opportunities at home. As Gallagher, an Irish 
> Catholic from South Boston, bragged to one woman, “I’m tired of my job, I’m 
> getting’ a better one...Something big...I’m on my way, I’m going places.”
>   Others have joined the military to escape. Red, for example, grew up in a 
> company-run mining town in Montana and lost his father in a mining accident. He 
> decides while working at a flophouse to join up rather than get married.
>   Similarly, Martinez, a Mexican American from San Antonio, gets Rosalita 
> pregnant and enlists. He ultimately finds himself reliving the racism he 
> experiences in the civilian world, as he weeds the officers’ yards and serves as 
> a houseboy at their parties.
>   After spending time on Anopopei and in the Pacific theater, many of the 
> soldiers begin to question the true motive behind capturing a desolate island 
> from the Japanese. As Red ponders, “Of course, they died in vain, any GI knew 
> the score. The war’s just t.s. [tough shit] to them who had to fight it.”
>   In a dramatic scene, one member of the platoon, Wilson, dies from a stomach 
> wound. Symbolic of the deeper feelings of loss and despair among many, another 
> platoon member, Ridges, weeps “from exhaustion and failure and the shattering 
> naked conviction that nothing mattered.”
>   Red expresses the feeling that many of the soldiers have come to hold about 
> the war: “What have I got against the goddamn Japs? You think I care if they 
> keep this fuggin’ jungle? What’s it to me if Cummings gets another star?”
>   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>   MAILER POINTS out the stark differences between the working-class troops and 
> their officers. As in all wars, “workers in uniform” must labor for generals who 
> are out for promotion and popularity, rather than protecting the welfare of 
> their men. “They slept with mud and insects and worms,” Mailer writes, “while 
> the officers bitched because there were no paper napkins, and the chow could 
> stand improvement.”
>   In particular, the character of General Cummings, with his silk monogrammed 
> handkerchiefs, represents the emerging military-industrial complex.
>   At one point, Cummings divides the meat rations to the unit so that half go to 
> the 180 enlisted men--and the other half to the 38 officers. Cummings explains 
> his grander purpose: “Break them down. Every time an enlisted man sees an 
> officer get an extra privilege, it breaks him down a little more...they also 
> fear us more...Every time there’s what you call an Army injustice, the enlisted 
> man involved is confirmed a little more in the idea of his own inferiority.”
>   Thus, Mailer lays bare the class realities that separate the officers and the 
> enlisted men and challenges the idea that all Americans were united for a common 
> cause.
>   In a series of dialogues between General Cummings and Lt. Hearn, Mailer 
> reveals the twisted ideology of the ruling class. “There’s one thing about 
> power,” Cummings explains. “It can flow only from the top down. When there are 
> little surges of resistance at the middle levels, it merely calls for more power 
> to be directed downward, to burn it out.”
>   This attitude, still prevalent among the generals and war planners to this 
> day, explains the mindset behind the atrocities committed by the U.S. and other 
> Allied powers during the war--such as the terror bombing of the German city of 
> Dresden, which killed more than 100,000 people, mostly civilians, and the atomic 
> bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed more than 210,000 people 
> instantly, with another 130,000 dead from radiation and illness over the next 
> five years.
>   The terror unleashed by the U.S. during the war is accepted today as a 
> necessary evil, committed in the goal of fighting fascism. Yet the U.S. had 
> deeper war aims. As General Cummings explains to Lt. Hearn about “the good war”:
>   For the past century, the entire historical process has been working toward 
> greater and greater consolidation of power...Your men of power in America...are 
> becoming conscious of their real aims for the first time in our history. Watch. 
> After the war, our foreign policy is going to be far more naked, far less 
> hypocritical than it has ever been. We’re no longer going to cover our eyes with 
> our left hand while our right is extending an imperialist paw. 
>   The General and policymakers like him are the product of a system that has 
> always created--and will continue to create--atrocities and war crimes.
>   If you’re looking for a brilliant novel that debunks the mythology of “the 
> good war,” read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. You’ll discover a book 
> that the Bushes, the Clintons and the Obamas, with their talk of potential 
> nuclear threats from Iran and Pakistan and an endless “war on terror,” would 
> prefer to bury.
>   --Martin Smith, Iraq Veterans Against the War
>   martin at ivaw.org
>    
>   
> 
> 
>        
> ---------------------------------
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