"...it was sanctioned by the governmental decision of february 1942 'to destroy the morale of the enemy population and, in particular, the industrial workers.'...an enterprise of the material and organizational dimensions of the bombing offensive, which by a.j.p. taylor's estimate swallowed up one third of the entire british production of war materiel, had such momentum of its own that short run corrections in its course...were more or less ruled out..." w.g.sebald, "on the natural history of destruction"____
"the essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. war is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise have been used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. even when weapons of war are nor destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without having produced anything that can be consumed...ultimately scrapped as obsolete never having brought any material benefits to anybody..." george orwell. "1984"_________
w.g. was born during the war and eric lived through it...contemporaries for a brief time they both understood that war involved destruction but took somewhat different tacks on the subject...w.g. ascribing it to institutional inertia and eric to an act of deliberate economic suppression of the masses to keep them from using any leisure time and material comfort to question the quality of their lives...as much as i admire eric i am going to come down on w.g.'s institutional inertia argument...but not without pointing out that civilians are always the target in a war and anything governments or military bureaucrats have to say to the contrary is rank and morally expedient bullshit...looking around at some of the people i know i see that they are sedated by their comfortable material lives and are usually only aroused when there is a power outage that cuts off the bears game when they are in the "red zone" or when the real housewives of whatever tawdry burg are up to no good...the consumerist utopia lobtomizes many for the benefit of the few ( and even eric's contention that scrapped obsolete, scrapped military hardware doesn't benefit anyone leaves out the manufacturer's cost plus overruns guaranteed profits [ honest abe would buy anything remotely germane to the army of the potomac and call it money well spent...a great innovator ]someone turned a buck )and generates unfulfillable expectations in a world that has access to media but not goods and never will because of the finite nature of the planet...resource substitution is the valium of economists and a complete lie or the product of intellectual dishonesty...either way...they are alchemists screwing around with the future...
