{"id":388858,"date":"2018-12-12T14:17:08","date_gmt":"2018-12-12T13:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/war-anniversaries-and-lessons-never-learned\/"},"modified":"2018-12-12T14:17:08","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T13:17:08","slug":"war-anniversaries-and-lessons-never-learned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/war-anniversaries-and-lessons-never-learned\/","title":{"rendered":"War, Anniversaries and Lessons Never Learned"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_107853\" style=\"width: 520px\" 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\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"411\" 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\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 510px) 100vw, 510px\"\/><\/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&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/12\/12\/war-anniversaries-and-lessons-never-learned\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 wrenching painting, WW2 offered up worse: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-388858","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}