{"id":41551,"date":"2018-12-12T10:29:21","date_gmt":"2018-12-12T15:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41551"},"modified":"2018-12-12T10:29:21","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T15:29:21","slug":"war-anniversaries-and-lessons-never-learned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41551","title":{"rendered":"War, Anniversaries and Lessons Never Learned"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"headline\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/12\/12\/war-anniversaries-and-lessons-never-learned\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">War, Anniversaries and Lessons Never Learned<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"post_content\">\n<div id=\"attachment_107853\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-107853\" src=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/12\/1920px-8th_AF_Bombing_Marienburg.jpeg\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 510px) 100vw, 510px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/12\/1920px-8th_AF_Bombing_Marienburg.jpeg 510w, https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/12\/1920px-8th_AF_Bombing_Marienburg-300x242.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/12\/1920px-8th_AF_Bombing_Marienburg-768x618.jpeg 768w\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"411\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo Source NARA FILE #: 208-YE-7 | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered the Second World War. A war of horrors, it normalized the intensive, barbaric bombing of civilian populations. If the Spanish Civil War gave us Guernica and Picasso\u2019s wrenching painting, WW2 offered up worse: London, Berlin, Dresden to name a few, the latter eloquently described in Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s \u201cSlaughter House Five.\u201d Against Japan, the firebombing of Tokyo, and above all the revulsion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki radiated a foretaste of ending life on the planet.<\/p>\n<p>Reparations demanded from Germany had led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and a thirst for revenge.\u00a0 Thus Hitler demanded\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com.au\/history\/hitlers-greatest-revenge.aspx\">France\u2019s 1940 surrender in the same railway carriage<\/a>\u00a0where the humiliating armistice was signed in 1918.<\/p>\n<p>If the war to end all wars \u2014 its centenary remembrance a month ago \u2014\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/event\/World-War-I\/Killed-wounded-and-missing\">killed 20 million<\/a>\u00a0plus,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalww2museum.org\/students-teachers\/student-resources\/research-starters\/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war\">the successor tripled the score<\/a>.\u00a0 Disrupted agriculture, severed supply chains, fleeing civilians, starvation and misery; civilian deaths constituting\u00a0 an inordinate majority in our supposedly civilized world.<\/p>\n<p>One of the young men baling out of a burning bomber was George H. W. Bush.\u00a0 He was rescued but his crew who also baled out were never found, a thought that is said to have haunted him for the rest of his life.\u00a0 He went on to serve eight years as vice-president under Ronald Reagan and then four more as president.\u00a0 Last week he passed away and was honored with a state funeral service in Washington National Cathedral.<\/p>\n<p>His legacy includes the first Iraq war and the liberation of Kuwait.\u00a0 While he avoided the hornet\u2019s nest of ethnic and religious divisions in Iraq itself, the war\u2019s repercussions led to the Clinton sanctions and the deaths of half a million children.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>War, Anniversaries and Lessons Never Learned Photo Source NARA FILE #: 208-YE-7 | CC BY 2.0 On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered the Second World War. A war of horrors, it normalized the intensive, barbaric bombing of civilian populations. If the Spanish Civil War gave us Guernica and Picasso\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[20493,5493,23448,2500,827],"class_list":["post-41551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-arshad-khan","tag-counterpunch","tag-george-h-w-bush","tag-history","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41552,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41551\/revisions\/41552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}