Civilian targets in Ukraine have been mercilessly bombarded by Russian forces. Photo: Getty Images
Each generation thinks it is new to history. But what is history if not the present? It’s a chain of command and consequence. It throws up illusions of peace and progress.
Maybe it’s necessary to look at each new war, with its attendant atrocities and despatching en masse of human life, with new eyes. Otherwise, to think, ‘Ah well, here we go again’, extinguishes hope, sends the view of humans into the ditch, snuffs out the glimmer of faith in humanity. If the heart is not full, it cannot be drained.
So how to look at the bombardment of non-military targets in Ukraine by the Russian military? Depressingly, despairingly, there is nothing new in it. Except this: Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is not retaliating in kind. There are no bombs flying into Moscow, the Kremlin is not sandbagged. Ukraine is holding out, absorbing death and destruction, perhaps like a boxer, waiting for the other to quit exhausted.
It’s a terrible cost to bear.
The crushing of a country through bombardment into submission is a thread of history. To take the largest, most destructive example, in WWII, tens of thousands of civilians died in aerial bombing of their cities across Europe and into the Soviet Union, and into Asia.
In England and Germany, the death toll from such attacks was designed to break the civilian population’s spirit, thus the population being broken, the government of whichever nation would capitulate. At first, Britain did not target urban centres, it was only after Hitler took the war to the civilians of London, Belfast and Coventry that civilians became fair game by the British. Cologne and Dresden were reduced to rubble. It was a life and death struggle. The extent of the bombings created micro climates of death, firestorms; in Dresden, 25,000 people died (the targeting of the city has been the subject of condemnation and rebuttal).
Author Kurt Vonnegut (born a century ago, died 15 years ago) was caught in a cellar in Dresden during the bombing. The experience became the locus of his novel Slaughterhouse 5.
In the book, something wonderful and strange occurs:
“American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
“The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes…
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“When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
“The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.”
This was Vonnegut’s dreamscape, and the spine of his time-travelling satire. You can never go back.
Cities and towns have been reduced to rubble, civilians killed, since far before WWII. Immediately before the Spanish town of Guernica was the most notorious among several targeted cities during the Spanish civil war. Zeppelins were used in WWI to bomb towns. There were, of course, as always, lesser conflicts. All pale, however, in the shadow of two words: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
America had pulverised more than 60 Japanese cities as a precursor to plans to invade, but when the calculus of loss and gain was made, the US went for Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs dropped over the two cities. The death toll is estimated to be roughly 200,000. Some victims simply vaporised. Japan surrendered.
After the war, the US and the Soviets went on a path of mutually assured destruction, the number of nuclear warheads impossibly greater than what would be needed to annihilate the planet.
As Robert Oppenheimer said on witnessing his baby, the atomic bomb, being detonated at a testing range, quoting Hindu scripture: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
While this holds true for weapons of such massive destructive potential, it is also true for each small bomb, for surely it destroys a part of something or someone when it does its duty to its master.
The world is seeing that now in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin is, in the carnage he is bringing, the destroyer and creator. “Any people, and particularly the Russian people, will always be able to tell apart the patriots from the scum and traitors and spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths.
“I am convinced that this natural and necessary self-cleansing of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion, and readiness to meet any challenge.”
Everything that results from the invasion is, to him, worth it. It was Ukraine that was committing genocide in the Donbas region (a claim debunked). “The struggle we are waging is a struggle for our sovereignty, for the future of our country and our children.”
So, as always through history, all children are not created equally. That is the present for the kids of Ukraine.
