All my posts start with an "A"

The proud people of Hamburg did not ask for sympathy or pity. They accepted that there had been some reason for the Allies to try to level the city to the ground. But for Dresden, they said, there had been no excuse at all. - Alexander Mckee

This Mckee kid is one of the historians who argues that the bombing of Dresden was ethically unsound and even goes as far as to suggest it is a war crime (obviously not in this quote).

Personally I don't think bombing Dresden is a war crime. Although it certainly wasn't the most morally uplifting part of the war.

Book Order!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have ordered A.C Grayling's book,

Among The Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan

 and should arrive between Saturday and Christmas :). I can't wait to do notes on this soon to be addition to my ever going bibliography!

After thought

Sir I reckon suggesting that either,

a) Judging history should always be done contextually and with the ideals of the time kept in focus

or

b) Context can be in a sense placed aside in order to assess the event on today's moral fibre.

should  be involved in history of ethics as the ethics suggest an opinion on the validity of one's reasons for choices and hence a judgement.

I think......

Are Ethics History?

This post is not a plea to abandon Our morale codes, rather to discuss whether they belong in historiography.

well...... according to the father of history, Herodotus, history is:
 "... putting on record the astonishing achievements .... and more particularly, how they came into conflict."
So Herodotus believes that history isn't just what happened but how it happened. Ethics is all about context and as history is the most context driven science on the planet it surely the ethics of the time must be taken into context to even begin considering it a part of history. Why must ethics be kept in a contextual sense? Because the inventor of history Leopold von Ranke says:
"To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, ..... To such high offices this work does not aspire: It  wants only to show what actually happened."

My response to Sir

I have elected to study the bombing Dresden because it is hard to find books in Australia that talk about the bombing of Tokyo so if I focus Dresden and get as many books as I can, possibly from Glee Books. I am gonna look at the debate as to the validity of the raids.

Dresden

Hew Strachan argues in Strategic bombing and the Question of Civilian Casualties up to 1945 that "total war", "But between 1939 and 1945 total war acquired an additional meaning; it referred to the readiness to breach the principle of non-combatant  immunity, one of the keystones of just war theory." In other words he uses his outstanding depth of compassion to discern the fate of the innocent. Strachan then continues on with this style of lewd reasoning by stating that Arthur Harris' bombing campaign is strategically viable because it  held down men and materials at home instead of the Luftwaffe being in full force on the Eastern Front. He does overlook, however, that cratering of the various beaches of D-Day or the softening of 'Fortress Europe' would have saved countless lives in June especially at the rather bloody Omaha beach.


* Oh and I'm trying this whole sarcasm thing though I don't feel it is going t well.

Change of Pace

I am officially sick of going to libraries and not finding anything on the bombing of Tokyo, so I have decided to

change my subject to the bombing of Dresden and whether or not it was ethical to bomb it. *frowny face*