I saw a bunch of women with white aprons on, standing in a wooden tub with upright staves. They were on an ocean like Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod with something hanging over their heads. Under the picture it said 'blitzo_oblivion'.
"Winkin, Blinkin and Nod one night, Sailed off in a wooden shoe..
| Blitz Taken from the German word Bliztkreig ('lightning war'), this was the British name for the Luftwaffe's sustained night attacks against their cities from August 1940 to midway 1941. |
I saw a portrait of a man, dressed all in black with a hat and clothes on from the 13th Century. He was surrounded by a spiral.
Main Entry: obliv·i·on
Pronunciation: &-'bli-vE-&n, O-, ä-
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin oblivion-, oblivio,
from oblivisci to forget, perhaps from ob- in the way +
levis smooth -
Date: 14th century
1 : the fact or condition of forgetting or having forgotten;
especially : the condition of being
oblivious
2 : the condition or state of being forgotten or unknown
It is possible to review the history of WWII as the sequencing and escalation
of targeting civilians as much or more than military objectives under the
assumptions that terror would break the enemy's will to fight.
The first purely and truly massive civilian targeting by Allied forces devastated
Hamburg in Germany in a succession of night bombings by combined US and British
bombers. In those raids, post-raid estimates show that maybe 80% of housing
was destroyed along with upwards of 50,000 to 80,000 lives and untold injuries.
These raids in 1942 also revealed the first widely studied firestorm conditions
within which winds combined the inferno into hurricanes of fire sweeping
the city and producing temperatures estimated at 1,000 F. or higher which
acted like incinerators and totally sucked breath and life and physical being
into new dimensions of oblivion. In a few nights of one bombing campaign
relatively early in the war, more death and destruction was reaped on one
German city, Hamburg, than during the entirety of the Nazi devastations on
all of Great Britain throughout the war.
In Europe, the massive targeting of civilians carried out by Allied forces
failed to break the German civilian will or to collapse morale in any meaningful
way. The culmination, in Europe, of firebombing cities was Dresden rather
late in the war. Those raids, on a city previously spared, showed that
conventional (what a term!) weaponry of that time was capable of levels of
destruction only barely exceeded by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki efforts shortly
to follow.
In terms of barbarity, it is clear in retrospect that Allied forces in pursuit
of their aims, our aims, took the lessons of Guernica and learned nothing
except how to be more barbaric, if possible. And over the succeeding years,
technology has expanded the capacities and capabilities of ever-renewing
militaries to be ever more barbarous, however clinically, in pursuit of whatever
objectives may have been or are involved in whatever conflicts were or are
of the moment. The successions from Molotov cocktails through napalm to the
near nuclear destructiveness of fuel bombs is linear and exponential.
Rinpoche notes: "We are living on a planet with no top and
no bottom, in space which has no beginning or end. So isn't it easy to see
it all as a dream?"
From;
http://www.swans.com/library/art7/mgc040.html
11-11-01 - DREAM - It may have been Sunday. I was inside a large house which had a + intersection in it. It seemed that people drove to the house from the 4 directions and when they met at the intersection, everyone stopped to have church together. This was not a formal church, nor were these people from the same religion, it was out of dire circumstances that perfect strangers stopped to pray together.
I had a Bible or a prayer book in my hand, as did everyone else, but each person carried their own version, so the service started hesitatingly.
I had a schedule in my hand as well. People were going to be called on to speak from a variety of religions and that part was scheduled.
After the service they were going to show a film of the Blitz from WWII.
A telephone rang at the back of the room behind me. The call was for a guy who was up near the front. As it was, he was already on the phone and talked on his cell phone and the regular phone at the same time. That took him out of the speaking schedule so that left one less thing to do in the service.
I went upstairs for a minute. Upstairs, people were in the darkened bedrooms, making love, oblivious to what was happening downstairs. They stopped making love to ask what was going on.
When I told them about the church service and the movie about the Blitz, they quickly got dressed to join the others downstairs.
I woke up, got up, went to the bathroom and went back to sleep and found myself back in the church service with the schedule of speakers in my hand.
End of Dream:
I also had a dream about Nobody wanting Peace later on. This also talks about the Blitz.
Despite their outstanding qualifications and record of service, the “girls” during World War II continued to be treated like “second-class soldiers” after the war. Now, one of their number urges us to recognize the sacrifices and contributions these unsung heroes made for our country.
By George Fowler - The Barnes Review
A half century has passed since february 13-14, 1945. Overnight, one of europe's
great meccas of art and culture, a city that had become a hospital center
for german, american and british wounded, that housed many thousand allied
prisoners of war, and that had become a haven to refugees fleeing the red
army, was bombed into oblivion. But the perpetrators of one of history's
great outrages were to receive the laurels of glorious victory rather than
a place in the war crimes dock.
After nearly three years of unremitting Allied air offensives against Germany's
civilian population, plans for the destruction of the open city of Dresden,
incinerating at least 135,000 people, took shape on March 30, l942. However
the seeds of such inhuman hate had long since found fertile soil at 10 Downing
Street and within the White House.
Lindemann estimated that every 40 tons of bombs "dropped on built-up areas" would "make 4,000 to 8,000 people homeless." This report to the PM stated: "In l938 over 22 million Germans lived in 58 towns of over 100,000 inhabitants, which, with modern equipment, should be easy to find and hit." Hastings concluded that Lindemann "Hoped to create a nation of refugees, and no doubt also a good many corpses under the rubble, although he was too genteel to say so."
Prior to the report's dispatch to Churchill, a February 143, l942 Air Ministry directive to Bomber Command from Air Vice Marshal Sir Norman Bottomly contained the following Valentine's Day message:
"You are accordingly authorized to employ your forces without restriction . . . (operations) should now be focused on the moral of the enemy civil population and in particular, of the industrial workers."
On February 22, while Churchill was staying at the White House, it was decided that Air Marshal Arthur Harris would leave his post as the head of the RAF delegation in Washington (an assignment he had held in neutral America beginning June 12, l941) to head Bomber Command. This fateful reassignment would team Harris with a PM of kindred instincts in one of Western history's most costly and ghastly undertakings.
Four days later the Germans bombed Rotterdam. From northern German airfields some 100 Heinkel III bombers were poised to attack remaining resistance zones in the city. However, surrender negotiations with the Dutch government were in progress. The raid, planned for 1500 hrs. (3 pm), was ordered postponed after takeoff on a flight of about 100 minutes to target areas. The Dutch government had been stalling during negotiating session. German terms were finally agreed to five minutes before the time set for the attack.
In his l963 book THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN David Irving noted that
"Ninety four tons of bombs had been dropped . . . By comparison, close to 9,000 tons of high explosives and incendiaries were dropped on the inland Ruhr port of Duisburg during the triple blow of 14th October l944."
With Germany's bombing of Britain following France's surrender, strategic targets were singled out and hit with a high degree of accuracy. But on the night of August 24, l940 (the main London targets being the vital East End dock-shipping-industrial areas), the target was the oil storage depot at Thames Haven. A navigational error led to the bombing of parts of the East End, the City and St. Giles.
The bombing of central London drew the immediate retaliatory response of the Royal Air Force. The following night it bombed Berlin, with slight effect. This enraged Hitler, who issued a command that may have cost Germany victory. He ordered that the Luftwaffe switch its attacks to London and away from RAF installations and radar sites. This allowed the severely depleted Fighter Command a short but much needed period to regroup.
The Luftwaffe's incredibly costly (most particularly in terms of seasoned pilots and crew) London "Blitz" is dated from September 7, l940 to May 16, l94l. Luftwaffe figures show that throughout this period 24,177 tons of bombs were dropped during 71 major attacks on London and other areas of industrial concentration, such as Hull, Liverpool and Manchester. The British calculated that, by the end of l940, 13,399 Britons had been killed in raids.
The German raid ranking with Rotterdam in terms of propaganda value was the bombing of Coventry in November, l940. In bombing this industrial city Coventry's Cathedral was nearly demolished. Pictures of its ruins filled America's newspapers and newsreel screens. In his l975 book THE FIRST CASUALTY (the title evidently taken from U.S. Sen. Hiram Johnson's 1917 observation that "The first casualty, when war comes, is truth."). Philip Knoghtly noted that the LONDON TIMES editorialized on the "butchery at Coventry . . . The wanton slaughter by a people pretending to be civilized who, it would seem, kill mostly for the joy of destroying." Of this Knightly wrote: "Coventry was actually a legitimate military target, one of the keys to the British war effort" containing such plants as the Standard Motor Co., the British Piston Ring Co., and Kaimler motor works and Alvis aero-engine factory.
The British had known of Germany's intent to bomb Coventry due to an early intercept of Germany's ENIGMA code system by way or its ULTRA codebreaking device. But Churchill vetoed interception of the Luftwaffe attack for fear that it would tip the Germans to the fact that their main code had been broken. Thus Coventry entailed a double deception on the part of the British. But this did not deter Churchill from ordering "Operation Rachel." This was the codename for the December 12, l940 Bomber Command attack on Mannheim. On the PM's direct order it was to be a reprisal for the considerable damage done to Coventry and the first occasion in the relatively brief annals of air warfare that an entire city was to be the deliberate target of attack.
From: http://www.nidlink.com/~aryanvic/Dresden.html
The blackout began two days before the war
began. Under blackout rules, everyone had to cover up their windows at night
with black material. This was to make it difficult for german bombers to
find their target in the dark.
The street lamps were turned
off and often people bumped into one another. Traffic accidents were common
because car headlights had to be blacked out, and deaths from drowning increased
as people fell off bridges or walked into ponds.
During 1939 and the start of 1940 hardly any bombs were dropped on Britain. But Hitler planned to invade Britain. In September 1940 the germans started to bomb Britain's cities instead of RAF air bases hoping that Britons would panic and surrender. This period was known as The Blitz. As soon as the aircraft were spotted in the night sky, air raid sirens sounded to warn everyone that an air raid was coming. Some families would run down to a communal brick or concrete shelter in their street. Others sheltered from the bombs at home in their cellars or underneath a table or the stairs. Families with shelters in their gardens could hide in there. These were usually damp and dark and made from corrugated iron. they were known as Anderson shelters.
After the Raids
As soon as the raid was over a siren sounded the "all clear" and people went outside to survey the damage.
Some found their homes flattened. Others found dead or injured relatives and friends. The Germans showered Britain with bombs, fire bombs and delayed action bombs. This kept the police, the fire fighters, bomb disposal men, ambulance drivers and ARP wardens very busy. As the war continued people became used to this carnage and adjusted their lives where possible continuing "Business as Usual".
NEWS
6-9-2002
Where Jordan stands on the impending blitz on Iraq
Western reporters visiting the region never seem to tire of asking what the economic impact on Jordan of the anticipated US war on Iraq is likely to be. Perhaps their underlying motive for posing the question is to ascertain why Jordanians are so strongly opposed to Washington’s plans for military action.
What they don’t seem to want to comprehend is that the Iraqis, Jordanians, Palestinians and other Arab peoples are part of a single nation, the Arab nation, and that an attack on Iraq would thus be an attack on every Arab. We would stand against it regardless of considerations of economic profit or loss, whether short-term or permanent.
Nevertheless, there is nothing wrong with pointing out what the economic consequences for the kingdom of Jordan of a war on Iraq would be. Nor is there anything wrong with us having economic interests in Iraq. They would be severely damaged in the event of war, which once initiated would prove protracted, destructive and bloody. And we Jordanians are entitled to want to safeguard those interests.
The first thing that comes to mind is Jordan’s near-total reliance on Iraqi oil. Jordan obtains all its crude and petroleum products needs from Iraq, without paying for them in hard currency, or indeed in any currency. Iraq provides Jordan with a grant equivalent to around half the value of the imported oil, which it deducts from the total cost. The other half is paid for through barter arrangements, exchanged for Jordanian goods and services.
Which leads us to the second main effect of war: The cessation of Jordanian exports to Iraq. Iraq is Jordan’s biggest customer, taking some 20 percent of its exports. Jordan’s manufacturing industry is particularly reliant on the Iraqi market and would be hardest hit. Iraq also uses Jordan’s port of Aqaba as a transit point for some of its imports from other countries, helping employ some of its spare freight and docking capacity. Iraq-bound cargoes are off-loaded there and then transported overland on Jordanian trucks. A war on Iraq would thus deal a major blow to the Jordanian transportation sector.
The tourism industry would also face paralysis as one of the indirect effects of war. It is hard to imagine hordes of tourists flocking to the Middle East in the midst of a devastating conflict.
In addition to the enormous economic damage that Jordan stands to sustain, there is the potential security and political fallout that could affect the stability that the kingdom enjoys. No one knows what role Israel will end up playing in the prospective armed hostilities, or how Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government may try to exploit the war. It might use it to carry out a mass expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan. Or it could participate directly in military operations, which would probably mean using Jordanian territory or air space to reach Iraq.
Jordan’s relationship with Iraq is of a strategic nature. That is why it has remained relatively stable under varying political conditions and despite successive changes of regime in Baghdad. The two countries went as far as forming a federal union in 1958 and an economic union in the 1980s.
The recent spate of reports in, and leaks to, the Arab and Western media claiming that Jordan is colluding with America’s coming campaign against Iraq, or placing its territory, air space, and military bases at the disposal of US forces for an attack on its neighbor, smack of an attempt to sabotage the special relationship that exists on both the official and popular levels between the two countries.
These reports were designed to discredit Jordan as a fellow Arab country bound to Iraq by close ties; the Jordanian people who have always stood by their Iraqi brethren; and the Jordanian regime which draws its historic legitimacy from a revolt aimed at liberating and uniting the Arabs; and its constitutional legitimacy from rallying the support and expressing the will of the Jordanian people.
Jordan’s relationship with Iraq survived the violent Iraqi military coups of the 1950s and 1960s, and has gained in strength over the past quarter of a century. The awareness of both peoples of the importance of the relationship will ensure that it also survives the latest attempts made to undermine it.
Indeed, their efforts already seem to have backfired. The campaign to sabotage Jordan’s ties with Iraq provided Amman with an opportunity to demonstrate how resilient they are, to reaffirm Jordan’s opposition to aggression, and to rule out any possibility of Jordan being used as a vehicle for attacking a fellow Arab people who have stood by us in the toughest of times.
Before these trial balloons were launched, some commentators were casting doubt on the strength of the Jordanian-Iraqi relationship. But the bursting of those balloons led to the rehabilitation of the relationship, and delivered a direct response to those behind the leaks. Their aim was to lure Jordan into meddling in the internal affairs of another state to contribute to destabilizing the region. What they got was a categorical affirmation that this is absolutely out of the question.
There can be no doubt that the war-drum beaters in the Pentagon would like Jordan to cooperate with them and facilitate their task of battering Iraq. But they wanted to ascertain what Jordan’s response would be before asking it, and they have been sent a loud and unequivocal reply.
Were those bogus and damaging leaks to the press, one wonders, an early sample of the output of the Pentagon’s new strategic deception bureau?
Fahed Fanek is one of Jordan’s leading economic and media consultants. He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star
US-UK Air Might Knocks out Iraq’s Air Force-Air Defense Front Lines
DEBKAfile’s Military Sources.
September 8, 2002
The importance of the massive US-UK air raid over Western Iraq Friday night, September 6, cannot be exaggerated. Although the Bush administration is bidding hard for broad international support for the US offensive against Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, DEBKAfile’s military sources report that, since last month, a combined American-British air blitz has been proceeding to systematically knock out the first line of Iraq’s air force and air defenses.
This week, the limelight moves to New York, where President George W. Bush prepares to address the UN General Assembly Thursday, September 12, the day after ceremonies marking the anniversary of the terrorist atrocities that struck New York and Washington. He is expected to give Saddam Hussein the option of accepting UN arms inspectors unconditionally or facing action against him, as well as warning unsupportive governments that American will go ahead on its own. Sunday, September 8, British prime minister Tony Blair, on his return from seeing Bush at Camp David, declared “total determination” to deal with Iraq.
US and European diplomats in New York are working on a joint draft resolution to put before the General Assembly, calling for a coercive UN inspection force to go into Iraq escorted by an international military force and be given a deadline for establishing finally whether or not Iraq has developed weapons of mass destruction. However, Iraqi spokesmen have already rejected UN arms inspections without the lifting of sanctions, while Arab League Secretary Amr Mussa, has declared the whole Arab world supports Iraq’s position. On Saturday, September 7, he said no Arab government would brook outside interference in Iraq, even by the world body.
The diplomatic flurry and the White House bid for support at home effectively post-date the start of the US offensive against Iraq, which took place three months ago - not with a bang but by cautious, prefatory steps. Unlike the softening-up air blitz against Afghanistan’s Taliban and al Qaeda last year, US forces have been quietly filtering into Iraq (as DEBKAfile informed its readers). To date, American and allied Turkish special forces have gained control of some 15 percent of Iraqi soil – mostly in the north. They are poised at a point 10-15 miles from Iraq’s two northern oil cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, together with pro-American Kurdish and Turkman paramilitary groups, with no Iraqi force in the way of their advance, if ordered to occupy the two towns.
The massive US-UK air raid last Friday, September 6, by 100 fighter-bombers, reconnaissance and air tanker craft against the Iraqi air base cluster known as H-3 and the al Baghdadi air installation was Strike Number Two against the first line of Iraqi air and air defense command structures, the tactical prelude to any US offensive. It was also the first blow to systems for delivering Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
Strike Number One was carried out on August 5, when American and British bombers and fighter craft demolished the Iraqi air command and control center at al-Nukhaib, in the desert between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, 260 miles southwest of Baghdad. This strike disposed of Iraq’s southern air defense line and left central Iraq including Baghdad vulnerable to US air, missile and ground attack from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain.
Strike Number two last week completed the destruction of Iraq’s air defenses in the west, leaving the Saddam regime exposed to attack from the south, the southeast, the west and the north, as well as a US troop presence actually inside northern Iraq.
DEBKAfile’s military sources sum up American tactical gains in Iraq thus far:
A. Hitting the H-3, site of the bulk of the ground-ground-missile batteries and air defense installations threatening Israeli, Jordan and US Eastern Mediterranean forces, as well as al Baghdadi, cleared the way for US special forces to begin heading across the border into Iraq from the West. Nothing now stops them from reaching as far as Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s tribal stronghold northwest of Baghdad, where the Iraqi ruler is believed to be hiding underground with his family and top officials. There too he has concentrated the bulk of the loyal units of the Iraqi army.
The first mission for the US units crossing in from Jordan will be, according to DEBKAfile’s military sources, to capture the bombed air installations and prepare them quickly for the use of US air force units and for more US and Jordanian special forces landings.
H-3 is designated their jumping off base for the next stage of the campaign.
B. Since August 5, the way for an American advance into Iraq is also clear from the south.
Therefore, the general contours of the next US steps begin to take shape:
1. A combined US-Turkish force, backed by local groups, will complete the capture of northern Iraq and its oil cities.
2. The combined US-Jordanian force will advance on Baghdad and Tikrit.
3. The heavy military and armored units massed on the Kuwait-Iraq frontier will advance north in two heads – one forking off to the east and heading for Basra, while the other makes for the Shiite towns of Najef and Karbala on the Baghdad highway.
C. Our sources report that the air strike against H-3 and al Baghdadi destroyed some of Saddam’s ground-to-ground missiles, reducing the missile threat to Israel, Jordan and US East Mediterranean forces, though not eliminating it. Also destroyed were some of the Czech-manufactured LA-29 trainer planes sighted at al Baghdad in recent months, with aerosols fitted to their wings that are capable of spraying poison substances on the ground like anthrax. Some of the LA-29 have been adapted for kamikaze missions.
D. No less important politically, DEBKAfile’s military sources stress, is that some of the US assault craft took off from and returned to the Saudi Prince Sultan air base, 35 miles northeast of Riyadh, as well as from Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar.
As DEBKA-Net-Weekly reported in its last issues, the Bush administration is resolved to brush aside the public objections of Saudi leaders to the use of the kingdom’s bases against Iraq. American generals do not propose to heed the public declarations of rulers of lands where US bases are located, but to use them according to American military exigencies.
BUSH 14-DAY BLITZ TO TOPPLE SADDAM
A TWO-WEEK lightning war to topple Saddam Hussein in just 14 days is being planned by US President George Bush.
Pentagon chiefs have told him that just two weeks will be all they need if they hit the evil Iraqi dictator hard enough.
They believe that his forces would quickly cave in allowing opposition groups to take over the country.
Intelligence shows the Iraqis are now worse equipped than during the Gulf War and morale is rock bottom.
Crack British SAS troops and US special forces would play a key role at the outset, knocking out Scud missile sites. The biggest fear is that Saddam would use Scuds to launch a chemical or biological attack on Israel the moment the Allies went in.
A defence insider says: "Once he knows he is finished and has nothing to lose he'll use the most deadly weapons in his arsenal."
The Allies believe a swift defeat is essential or they will risk a worldwide Muslim backlash.
In his Christmas message yesterday, Mr Bush said: "Our entire nation is thinking of the men and women in the military. They stand between Americans and grave danger."
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