Re: <nettime> Harbouring terrorists: A lesson from history

[Tjebbe van Tijen <t.tijen@chello.nl>]

Dear Janos

I hope you will pardon me for making a major point out of a minor remark
in the text you posted in which you rightly made the link between the
terrorist airplane attacks in the USA and the start of World War One by a
bomb thrown by hand in Sarajevo in 1914.

I had also the name of Sarajevo on my lips when I saw the almost life
broadcast of the NY events...  another fuse is lighted...

My feeling is that the way of coalition making at that time (Entente)
inflated whatever tension there was at that time... dichitomizing nations
into big camps and thus preparing the slaughtering grounds of war...

Recently Sadam Hussain called the Gulf war "The Mother of All Wars", which
might explain why in response we do now get offered "THE NEW WAR". Such
slogans are there to confuse us, to disassociate the past from the
present. And we need the past so much to be able to face the present. The
First World War which is mentioned by Janos Sugar in his article was
called "The Great War" and of courser only decades later, rebaptised The
Second World War, hence our collective fear for a Third one and so on...

Now on one not unimportant issue raised by Janos Sugar I have some
comments, and that is that the death toll and how the balance shifts
through time from military to civilian victims.

First of all Janos gives a number of victims of the First World War which
has no ground, or is it a typing mistake, or are also wounded calculated?

" It was a long and cruel war, with close to a hundred million casualties,
most of them civilians."

 ... "most of them civilians"?, as far as I have understood these events,
it is the other way around, most of them military. Which is logical as
most of the big battles were fought by armies at both sides in trenches,
having machine guns, heavy artillery and in some cases poison gas... also
many soldiers were not directly dying in combat but just got ill in the
terrible conditions of the trenches...

What has been a good source for me over three decades but of course not
anymore up to date is Gill Eliots's "Twentieth century book of the death",
published in 1972, which is one of the few non-biased and careful attempts
at bookkeeping of death by human violence. Eliot mentions a number of
military death in the First World War between 8,5 and 10 million (of which
1 million dying of dissease). Civilian death is estimated between 0,8 to 1
million, but of course massive disruption of social structures has caused
maybe many more millions dying of what is sometimes called 'demographic
death', but that number is always very very diffcult to estimate. But when
these numbers may be too low in some people opinion it might be 3 to 5
million more indirect civilian death, but that is about it, NOT a hundred
million!.

-- Single battles lasting weeks had an enormous death toll, like Verdun
(French 377.2312; German 337.000) and at the Somme (French 200.000;
British 420.000' German 450.000), in total 1,75 million military death
just of two battles. (Alistair Horne "Death of a generation" 1970). --

With the Second World War the balance shifts. When -at a macro level- one
does not put the murdering of Jews as a seperate case and adds this number
of 5 to 6 million to the civilian death, then we can speak of am equal
toll of soldiers and civilians, each group 10 million, twenty million in
total.

The overal picture of human death by human violence tended to be that of a
pyramid with at the top the one's killed directly by heavy weapons and and
the base the one's killed indirectly by illness, hunger, displacement and
other disruptions of social structures. It has always been more easy to
measure the top of the pyramid as estimating the base, which often seems
to float in an ocean of insecurity and iceberg like size speculations can
not be avoided there.

We seem to get soon some reasonably exact numbers of the death toll in the
airplane attacks in the USA (compared to other instances of mass violence)
and the range will be between 5 and 6 thousand. Which is, with the
exception of the atomic bombs on Japan, a very high figure, inflicted by
just three airplanes.

For instance the bombing of Rotterdam by the Germans in 1940, which laid
the complete inner town and several neighbouring areas in ashes, counted
in the end 'only' 800 so and so death (right after the bombing there were
very high numbers ranging from 12 to 20 thousand). The later carpet-
fire-bombings of Germany and Japan by the British and Canadian and
American airforces during the Second World War needed each time hundreds
and sometimes even thousands of airplanes to kill tens of thousands people
in a single big raid (a rough estimate is that between 700 and 800
thousand people died in those aerial bombardments).

Important is to look back at that part of recent history and to understand
that the shift from military to civilian targetting has one of its roots
in what many of us have learned to be the struggle for freedom, the
struggle against the barbarism of the Third Reich and the Japanese
Imperium.

One can hear the same debate as at the end of the Second World War, if the
effective economic blockade of Japan was not sufficient, if the fire
bombing of Tokyo in the spring of 1945 (between 100 and 150 thousand
death) was not already the defeat of that nation, and if the use of the
atomic bomb was maybe not needed, or mayber had quiet another future
aim...

..the same debate now, wheather or not an economic blockade of those
states harbouring terrorist groups might not be a better weapon, then a
military attack with the unavoidable, or some would say covered up killing
of civilians.

I know many people who do not like or refuse to discuss the numbers of
death, who find it unethical or do get emotional and say they can not
differentiate between such enormous figures... anything beyond one or
ten...

My plea is to be precize... yes dig up each bone... count all the skulls,
sample all the DNA remains of what once were human beings, and when you
want revenge, keep at least the real number of your 'own victims' in mind.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 counted some two thousand
military and at the most 50 civilian death (several ones by their own
misdirected anti-aircraft fire). The American retaliation was a
hundredfold that number, and certainly not only Hiroshima and Nagasaki..
Most of them were civilian death... designated as 'economic targets' .Were
not all Japanese working for their war industry? It was Henri Kissinger
who suggested immedeately after the recent airplane attack that America
should remember the way it re-acted on Pearl Harbour.

One would wish (cynical) that the primitive form of revenge, an eye for an
eye, would be at the basis of the policy of those who have been elected as
the government of the United States, so we would see "just" 5 thousand so
and so alleged terrorists killed... but one fears it will be worse when
reading the repeated slogan on American television, not:

AMERICA'S REVENGE

but

AMERICA'S NEW WAR

The outrage over the mass murder of 5 thousand people in New York and
Washington, is a good sign. The endless world wide showing of all details
of human suffering and material damage makes one hope that we may have
learned something, as so many more people, so much more human habitat and
culture has been violently destroyed only decades ago, without such a
massive public reaction.

But when this public outcry, when this humanist response will be diverted,
corrupted in yet another military overkill action, nothing will have been
won, and we let ourselves 'mentaly' be thrown back to the historical stage
of a bomb being thrown at one of the heirs of the Austrian-Habsburg
empire, Francis Ferdinand, to Sarajevo in 1914 and the subsequent events
that soon went out of control.

We can see daily how the carriers of these humanist opinions are at the
same time being pushed and pulled by war monger forces... it is scarry to
see the oscillation between these two extremes.. it shows us how fragile
this 'humanist attitude' is, how easy it is to go back to tradfitional
'big stick' politics, how difficult to prevent this last option from
happening.

We have a lot more to do to be more then mere targets or recruits in
whose-ever war...

Tjebbe van Tijen




Tjebbe van Tijen

Imaginary Museum Projects (IMP), Amsterdam

Background information on:
http://people.a2000.nl/ttijen/Index.html





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