THE BOMBING OF DRESDEN

If it is not celebrated, the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden will pass unnoticed and umremarked upon in England, and this fact should not surprise anyone who is familiar with the British character. For a sizeable proportion of the population, twentieth-century history can be reduced to three important events, the Allied victory in the two world wars, and the English football team winning the World Cup in 1966. However, there have also been attempts to draw a broader picture of 'our' national struggle against Germany. For instance, Ian D. Colvin in his book The Unseen Hand In English History states that: "the Hanseatic League, according to its own agent in London, at one time held England 'under its thumb.' And the revolt against this German domination was only brought to a successful issue, after a struggle lasting three hundred years, in the reign of Elizabeth. That great Queen headed a National Party which expelled the German, and established the economic and, therefore, the political independence of England."

The idea that the expulsion of the Hanseatic League from the British Isles marked the conclusion of a three hundred year struggle between England and Germany is patently absurd, because it was only after the Corporation of London established itself as an independent power that the English developed a distinct national identity. However, once a national character had been forged, the notion that liberty was something peculiarly Anglo-Saxon quickly took root among all classes of society. In the eighteenth-century the favourite slogans of the London mob were 'Wilkes and Liberty' and 'No Popery! No Wooden Shoes!' Wilkes was a populist politician of the time, while Popery and wooden shoes were considered foreign, and thus became symbols of tyranny.

This identification of liberty with English traditions has evolved over time, and since World War II has been fused with xenophobic sentiments to transform 'anti-fascism' into a major component of the national character. As a consequence, there is almost complete consensus about the belief that anything is justified in the fight against Nazism. It follows from this that there is no need to discuss the moral implications of bombing Dresden, because as an episode in the war against fascist tyranny, the activities of Bomber Harris and his airmen are beyond reproach. This also explains why the British left was paralysed when confronted with the Falkland and Gulf wars. The enemy regimes appeared to be fascist, and so the crimes the British ruling class perpetrated against Argentinean and Iraqi civilians were fully 'justified' as part of an 'anti-fascist' intervention.

The bulk of British people appear not to know that the Dresden raid resulted in a higher body count than the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. However, even if it was widely accepted that Dresden was a clear cut case of one entrenched ruling class terror-bombing a civilian population groaning under an even more reactionary regime, many British people would still feel the raid was justified as an integral part of the struggle against fascism; after all, the Nazi dictatorship was, if one believes the average Anglo-American 'historian,' the product of 'a perverse German attitude towards the democratic process.' Anglo-American debate about Dresden has not yet evolved to a point where it is acceptable to suggest that the indiscriminate bombing of residential sections of the city by the Allies was a war crime. The major English language work on the subject remains The Destruction Of Dresden by far-Right historian David Irving, and his 1964 text is quite rightly viewed as an opening salvo in a campaign by a motley crew of reactionaries wishing to rehabilitate both Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Gill Seidel in The Holocaust Denial: Antisemitism, Racism and the New Right, deals with Irving's work in a way that is not only typical of the British left, it simultaneously represents the mainstream of political and historical opinion in England: "The importance of Dresden is the argument it rehearses, echoed elsewhere on the ultra-right... On the scale of war crimes, the bombing of Dresden looms large. It must be considered in the same light as the excesses of the belligerent pro-Nazi powers... The figures are disputed, Irving uses German sources for the number of Dresden victims, but it is a grossly inflated figure. The figure has been refuted in a scholarly work by Gotz Bergander, Dresden im Luftkrieg (1977), and, in fact, has since been retracted by Irving. We are invited to ask what right the Allies had in judging other war crimes. In short, it is an argument of relativism which makes a moral or political judgement impossible... The Destruction Of Dresden is a persuasive book, but in the context of Irving's other writings and other arguments in circulation, it is highly ambiguous."

Seidel is, of course, correct in suggesting that Irving's activities are motivated by a hidden, and hideous, agenda. However, it is also necessary to question the utility of an ideological 'anti-fascism' that in practice reinforces the hegemonic position of an entrenched ruling class, while simultaneously inhibiting protest against the senseless slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians caught up in homicidal wars. This type of critique is unacceptable in mainstream British politics, and is considered particularly offensive by the left. For example, the Trotskyite Robert Clough in his book Labour: A Party Fit For Imperialism, documents more than a hundred years of British 'socialist' politicians betraying the interests of the working class, and yet he devotes only a few paragraphs to the Second World War: "the outbreak of war gave Labour a new importance. The militarisation of labour would need the co-operation of the trade unions and the Labour Party; they were therefore drawn into the Churchill coalition of 1940. Labour's support for the coalition was to prove unconditional, despite the manner in which it prosecuted the war: securing British imperial interests first (the Middle East and the Mediterranean), before committing the resources necessary to defeat German fascism in mainland Europe."

Rather than criticising the terror-bombing of civilian populations, most of the British left thinks the political establishment was unnecessarily slow in its use of fire-storms to raze residential areas of German cities. In fact, it is Anglo-American liberals, rather than leftists, who are most likely to express qualms about the bombing of Dresden. The best known example of this is probably the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut. However, Vonnegut's refusal to lay the blame for the Dresden inferno at anybody's feet means that he fails to address most of the issues raised by the attack. No doubt, this stance is partly the result of the novelist being a prisoner of war in Dresden at the time of the bombing, something which made it particularly difficult for Vonnegut to reconcile the tragedy with his humanism. Both this, and the fact that the book is a work of science-fiction with a plot revolving around time-travel, has prevented the novel exerting any real influence on public opinion in England.

In Britain, only the two extremes of the political spectrum are willing to address the issue of the Dresden terror-bombing, and they have been completely marginalised. On the one hand, the reactionaries of the far-Right claim that the lesson to be learnt from both Dresden and Coventry is 'no more war amongst brothers,' and this position is inextricably linked to a full-blown neo-Nazi programme. On the other hand, those groups and individuals influenced by the ideas of the Italian left-communist Amadeo Bordiga who view 'anti-fascism' as a bulwark of the liberal state, have developed a critique of terror-bombing that avoids the ambiguities and contradictions which make the far-Right's posturing on this subject so patently absurd.

Issue 2 of the ultra-leftist journal Authority featured the headline 'Anti-Fascism At Work', beneath this there was a cartoon of an RAF raid on a German city and a text that read: "thousands of commonwealth citizens, both black and white, died fighting for British imperialism. They resolutely abandoned any solidarity they may have had with German, Italian or Japanese workers and collaborated in the war effort. When Nagasaki marked the triumph of democracy, they were assured their share of the spoils of war..." Britain is a democratic country and as long as 'anti-fascism' remains an effective weapon of the liberal state, those individuals on the left who wish to discuss Dresden as a war crime will be marginalised and vilified, but not imprisoned.

Commissioned by the German news monthly Konkret circa 1994 but not run

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