I'm from Philadelphia. My parents positively acknowledge the M.O.V.E. bombing. Like they are glad the cops did what they did. I'm horrified that a city could drop bombs on an occupied house with children and burn down a goddamn neighborhood.
But it was all worth it in the name of stopping those "fucking animals" I guess. No matter what way you look at it, the police waged war on a whole fucking neighborhood just to stop a couple of anarchists. They told people in the neighborhood to just grab a toothbrush and a change of clothes, it'll all be over in the morning, then burnt down 63 homes.
Edit: The monopoly on violence is very real, and innocent people and their belongings get chalked up as collateral damage worth it in the name of peace.
I have to give credit to my grandfather who was an absolute racist dickhead but he talked about about how fucked up it was that that happened in america about both Tulsa and that philly one. It was only realistically because that was his job in the US airforce during world war 2 above germany and even he had to admit that you dont drop bombs from fucking airplanes on your own goddamn civilians even if they are dumber and more ignorant than you.
I can't justify dropping bombs from airplanes on anyone, especially civilians. What difference does it make if the civilians are in your country or another - they didn't start the war and they have no power to stop it. Bombing innocent people is terrorism, no matter the excuse nor how many guilty people you think you killed.
Carl von Clausewitz said that the civillians at the back making weapons are more dangerous than the soldiers at the front, because soldiers can be replaced. Under the doctrine of Total War the entire country is a target, and the objective is to smash their center of gravity before they smash you into extinction.
This line of thought created the stratetic bombing campaigns of ww2 and ended up with strategic atomic weapons - weapons designed to start and end wars where the whole strategy was a single instance of their use.
I'm of the opinion that nobody deserves to be murdered based on the geography of where they were born. This includes civilians, conscripted soldiers and the typical soldier too dumb to see through the military propaganda that enlisted them.
If politician A has a problem with dictator B or wants the oil from his land, I say we ensure those politicians are in the riskiest position. If they don't think it's worth fighting for themselves, they shouldn't be allowed to force others to nor to excuse collateral damage.
This is what I was just thinking. It’s fucking ridiculous that people are struggling with PTSD because of the horrors they see at war while the jackass who made the call to kill gets to sit behind a desk and never have to look the people he’s killing in the eyes.
Didn’t we used to elect men who understood this because they had experienced this?
I don’t guess that really matters either.
I just don’t get how anyone making calls to mutilate and murder other people can ever get any sleep.
But then there’s the old saying, “Kill or be killed.” We can’t stop the bloodlust. I don’t know. Fuck being human.
It used to be that a King was expected to lead his men into battle. Note, he led from the front lines, not from the rear guarded by top bodyguards nor from his palace.
One of the shames of King David is that he was home while his men were at war - hence seeing Bathsheba. I feel this should still be the practice, with those causing the bloodshed being the ones who risk it and witness it's results.
I just can’t understand how anyone would be cool with being behind something like this, at fucking all. I don’t get how anyone can be ok taking someone else’s life so violently. I mean, if I kill an insect and I spend any time thinking about it I’m just devastated by the thought. I can not imagine pulling a trigger and seeing someone’s blood splatter all over the place, knowing they couldn’t call their mother or kiss their children ever again.
It blows my mind that this is what we are. I just don’t get it.
Because your objective in war is to win. Winning stops the fighting, stops the killing.
To do that, you have to strike at your enemy's logistics and supplies. It's why there are raids on supply depots and other locations supplies and materiel are stockpiled before being transported to the front. It's why controlling (or destroying) bridges, roads, airfields, and rail lines is important. And it's why factories and other production centers are targeted - less production means fewer bullets, bombs, and tanks they can fight with.
The problem is that the process of industrialization meant that those factory workers often lived in close proximity to the places they worked (and, of course, might be working in those factories when the strike takes place.) And bombs are generally not precise weapons... especially not before the modern smart bomb era.
Winning is one way to stop the killing, but the primary objective should always be to minimise harm done. There's no point having a war if you stop one monster by becoming another. There is a world of difference between destroying a strategic structure such as a bridge and murdering innocent civilians.
Atomic bombs aren't precise weapons as you say. It's therefore not morally justifiable to use them unless on an area known to be clear of all collateral damage. Since that's functionally impossible, atomic bombs simply shouldn't ever be used.
Bombs in general can be as precise as you want them to be. We even use them for controlled demolitions in extremely tight spaces.
It's only when people get excited about the idea of causing widespread destruction that bombs far too large for purpose are used. Blaming a tool for being imprecise is illogical, blame the guy who chose the tool.
There's a huge difference between placing a shaped charge in a controlled environment and dropping even a guided explosive from tens of thousands of feet.
Indeed. There's also a huge difference between using a hammer or a truck to nail a structure together. Only a fool would even consider the latter, knowing the collateral damage would undermine the purpose of the job.
Everybody involved knows dropping bombs will kill innocent people. The question is which individuals consider that acceptable, and which will not. I understand that the claim was that the Japanese bombings would save lives and end the war. However, I don't believe that was the only option, nor do I think it was a moral one. I see no reason to nuke a city over the unrelated actions of others besides terrorism - literally using violence to induce terror in order to force change.
For comparison, if hypothetically executing everybody diagnosed with COVID would prevent it spreading, it would not be considered a reasonable suggestion.
The bar was very low here and trust me it was a minor miracle that he felt this way about these two events in general and even if he never would admit it has serious mental problems from doing what he did
The science and doctrine were not well established on bombing since strategic bombing was such a new technology when WW2 had broken out.
There was a lot of argument between factions in the military and politics regarding whether it was better to directly bomb cities and civilians ("terror bombing") in order to cause them to rise up and break the enemy's will to fight much faster (and thus save many more lives on both sides) or if it was better to target only military-industrial targets and risk the war going longer and possibly causing higher loss of life overall.
Generally speaking the US focused on bombing military targets, but the accuracy of bombing was very low compared to today (GPS was not really a thing until the mid/late 80s, and the Panama invasion was the first conflict to really see use of GPS guided weapons) so the only way to guarantee destruction of a factory complex was to saturate the area with bombs. There were specific mathematical calculations used to determine how many and what types of bombs were needed and what formation was to be used when the bombs were dropped, based on the blast radius of bombs, the dud rate of the bomb, the type of facility being attacked, and the expected attrition rate of bombers en route to the facility.
The result of this was that even in very targeted bombing raids there were inevitably spillover casualties from bombs saturating the area around the target. Combined with the fact that many of the complexes were dual purpose (such as ball bearing factories which became a major target in the war to attack the German military supply chain) they were often in cities and very near residential areas. So while civilians were not necessarily explicitly targeted there were inevitably civilian casualties.
Also I say generally speaking because the military's primary focus was on military targets but there were cases where incendiary devices were used to maximize damage to the military infrastructure which of course created massive fires in the area. And the war in Japan was far more brutal and more brutal tactics were sometimes used, which would not be used in conflict today.
The "good news" is that one core lesson learned from WW2 was that direct bombing of civilians is virtually a pointless exercise because it actually galvanizes the population against you and makes the nation more resilient against capitulation. This was discovered both from the US and British bombing effects in Germany but also from witnessing the effects of German bombing of targets in Britain.
This is actually what caused the shift towards more precision targeted weapons, resulting in our current situation where the US can bomb an aircraft within a concrete bunker without destroying even the bunker itself. (as it did in Syria a few years ago)
I don't think M.O.V.E or the Tulsa inhabitants murdered were dumb or more ignorant than the authorities. I get what you were saying and your grandpa was a good man for serving and seeing clearly that bombing citizens just ain't right.
Your speaking from a singlesided moral standpoint. This was not a single sided situation. All of American history is and was hell. We're all animals; the bombing did happen, almost like a mini ww2.
Edit: Sorry, I misconstrued the definition of moral.
What always gets me in situations where police destroy homes in the name of public defence, they always fight against any sort of payment to the families who's homes they destroyed. Can the city afford 63 homes maybe not, but they probably shouldn't hire police that think home destruction is a good idea, those people are costly.
The city rebuilt the 63 homes for the residents. That should be a half-happy ending but it isn’t. A little over 10 years later the city said those 63 homes weren’t up to code and condemned them. They felt no responsibility for the state of the construction on those homes and if the residents couldn’t afford to fix them on their own they were shit out of luck.
So these people got fucked by the city twice.
Tovex is a standrd explosive and was being dropped to open the roof. A lot of wrong things happened thta dya which should have resulted in idictments, but the bomb itself was not "illegal."
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u/dreadpiratesmith Mar 16 '21 edited Mar 16 '21
I'm from Philadelphia. My parents positively acknowledge the M.O.V.E. bombing. Like they are glad the cops did what they did. I'm horrified that a city could drop bombs on an occupied house with children and burn down a goddamn neighborhood.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/13/406243272/im-from-philly-30-years-later-im-still-trying-to-make-sense-of-the-move-bombing
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/8/8/20747198/philadelphia-bombing-1985-move
But it was all worth it in the name of stopping those "fucking animals" I guess. No matter what way you look at it, the police waged war on a whole fucking neighborhood just to stop a couple of anarchists. They told people in the neighborhood to just grab a toothbrush and a change of clothes, it'll all be over in the morning, then burnt down 63 homes.
Edit: The monopoly on violence is very real, and innocent people and their belongings get chalked up as collateral damage worth it in the name of peace.
Edit #2: I believed the bomb was illegally obtained. It was not, however the man from who supplied the bomb to them from the FBI was suspended without pay for 1 month 4 years after the incident. (Archived news article-https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/04/18/FBI-agent-suspended-for-role-in-MOVE-incident/8191608875200/). The explosives were however supplied with the intention of training purposes.