A comment on Skippy's blog got me angry when I researched my answer, which ended up being much more aggressive than initially intended, about the use of the flesh-searing white phosphorus weapons and a new "improved" napalm on the city of Fallujah back in 2004.
Oo-oh a fire is sweeping
Down our street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost its way...
War. Children.
I read of the chemical effects of white phosphorus on skin and muscle tissues...
Humans burn; mothers combust; children incinerate; sisters carbonize; fathers catch fire; babies smoke...
All through the 20th century, this INTENTIONAL burning of civilians has been escalating.
Shut up with your fucking lame excuses!
Shut the fuck up with your bullshit about stopping more deaths by killing people, about arming for war in order to bring peace. It's all fucking crap and you know it.
Just shut the fuck up, warmongers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned to the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurling it in front of his feet. Tha angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings and he can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.
-- Walter Benjamin, Thesis on the Philosophy of History
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4 comments:
I have a Paul Klee hanging on my wall. I find it incredible nobody remarks about it. (Philistines)
No, really, they don’t even see it, or more like it doesn’t catch their imagination.
That worries the hell out of me. To me that’s the equivalent of people seeing black clouds and wondering why you’re wearing rain gear, or something like that.
I guess what I’m trying to say is you’d have to stick white phosphorus up their holes to make it a topic worthy of discussion.
People I tell you; patience is one thing, but it’s beginning to wear thin with me .... may I say too.
Keep up the fight.
At the risk of throwing gasoline on an already blazing fire (bad pun alert)-there are reasons to use White Phosphorus. They all have to do with making it easier for the consumer of the weapon-the war fighter-to get the ordnance delivered accurately and more importantly quickly and reduce the vulnerability of the aircraft employing the weapon. They make illumination of the target easier at night-and like it or not, in a war like we waged in Iraq, it made it easier to get the insurgents to come out of hiding.
I've been in the back seat of fighter aircraft that dropped on flare illumination at night-it made life a lot easier, especially when you not operating on Night Vision Devices.
If it saved the life of even just one American-then I'm Ok with it. The real answer is not to go to war at all-but once you do, you go in full bore and get it over with.
It is what it is.
Also, white phosphorus was initially used BECAUSE it burns, causing severe injuries to slow down the enemy - the bright light and smoke are just a bonus, like the effects of viagra.
I am sure it works as I saw the vidoes from Gaza when the Israelis were dropping phosphorus bombs during the daytime, in the centre of town, on a what appeared to be hospital...
There was doumentary on Hiroshima this morning on one of the BBC channels...
I am reading through Human Smoke (it is a doumentary "novel", written as hundreds of factoids)
Also "Retribution - The Battle For Japan" - you might like this one. Truman was of the opinion that the fewer people left alive on Japan the better, and he didn't mean fighting personnel. After dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, there had been no clause to allow a deferrment in the dropping of the next bomb... Interesting...
(Tha Aussie soldiers in the late stages of that war were not well presented "Bludgers and Mopping Up" - this stings quite a bit as that is when my father was fighting in Borneo.)
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