Contribution of Strategic Bombing to the American Way of Life

pynchonoid pynchonoid at yahoo.com
Mon Sep 22 16:45:50 CDT 2003


9-22-03: Culture Watch

The Artist Who Asked About the Contribution of
Strategic Bombing to the American Way of Life

By Mike Davis 

Mr. Davis is the author of City of Quartz, Ecology of
Fear, and most recently, Dead Cities: and Other Tales
among other works. 

The artist Marcos Ramirez aka ERRE, whose Tijuana
studio is a mere fifty yards from the nearest border
patrolman, spends a lot of time staring across la
linea at the strange culture on the other side. He
likes gringos well enough, but sometimes is scared by
our sublime ignorance of our own history not to
mention those of our neighbors. 

For example, how many of us ever bother to think about
the contribution of strategic bombing to the American
Way of Life? As Ramirez points out, the air forces of
the United States have dropped billions of bombs in
the twentieth century and have killed, by the most
conservative reckoning, more than two million foreign
civilians. Most, of course, were Asians, including
over half a million Japanese incinerated by two atomic
bombs and in the B-29 firestorms that burned their
cities to the ground. Another million were Indochinese
killed by B-52 carpet-bombing. There were also one
hundred thousand or more Koreans in the Korean War,
and probably that many Germans as well as surprising
numbers of innocent Italians, Rumanians, and other
accidental World War II-era Europeans.

We should add to this black ledger at least ten
thousand non-combatant Iraqis in two Gulf Wars, a
thousand Afghan villagers and maybe five hundred Serbs
as well as a few Libyans and Sudanese. In the Western
Hemisphere, Presidents Harding and Coolidge sent
biplanes to bomb rebellious Nicaraguans, Dominicans,
and Haitians during the golden age of Dollar
Diplomacy. Later the CIA bombed Guatemala 1954 and
Cuba 1962. We bombed Panama in 1989 and are still
bombing rural areas of Colombia today. 

[...] "It is amazing that a piece like this is so
universally considered offensive. After all, the
billboard only itemizes events that in their time were
celebrated as victories and praised as just causes.
Are people outraged because a Mexican artist has
bothered to highlight this history? Or do I perceive
an underlying shame?" [...] 


...continues:
<http://hnn.us/articles/1694.html>

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