Splinters

Below is the letter I wrote to the TLS in response to this review by Daniel Johnson of three recent books about the WWII air raids on Germany. The link goes to an extract that will soon go offline. And it's the unextracted part that worked me up thus:

Dear Sir,

Daniel Johnson is right to dismiss the "moral equivalence" between the air war on Nazi Germany and the "Shock and Awe" campaign against Saddam's Iraq. One was an attack on a nation with the highest military spending in the world, bent on global expansion and threatening to succeed. The other is an attack by the most expensive military force in world history on an impoverished country with no apparent means of defence. How on Earth can they be the same?

Johnson is also right to praise WG Sebald for showing that the leading figures in post-war German literature were not "coming to terms with the past" as they claimed but conforming to the prevailing tendency of "fraudulence and moral cowardice". And who would disagree that this failure to acknowledge properly "the mistakes of the past" always threatens to lead to such history's recurrence? In my more recent experience, however, Germans for the most part have taken this to heart; indeed they are passionate about history. One of Sebald's great achievements as a novelist was to make palpable the tragic depths beneath the banal surface of everyday life. The uncaptioned photographs in his books emphasise what is forgotten and perhaps unreachable. If this is what Johnson means by breaking down "the barrier between fact and fiction" then he is right again. By becoming engrossed in Sebald's narratives, the reader is compelled to imagine, even if this is ultimately, and necessarily, unsatisfactory.

I wonder, with Sebald, how much we are able to appreciate history that doesn't directly affect us ? particularly, and pertinently, the history of crimes committed by our fellow countrymen against our apparent enemies? Is it a surprise that so many Germans are reluctant to make the effort to understand the gravity of their nation's crimes, preferring instead to reopen the "festering sore" of the air raids? Johnson condemns this as it contributes to the current "flood of anti-Americanism" in Germany. He concurs with Sebald that the Germans are "blind to history and lacking in tradition", but in doing so he reveals who is really blind.

UN sanctions imposed on Iraq with the insistence of the US and UK governments led, according to one conservative estimate, to at least 350,000 child deaths in Iraq between 1991 and 1998. Denis Halliday, director of the UN Oil for Food programme in Iraq, resigned his post and referred to the sanctions as genocide: "a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq." His successor Hans von Sponeck resigned for the same reason. Meanwhile, Madeleine Albright of the Clinton administration called it a "price worth paying". Apart from the deaths, civil society was destroyed. Iraqis had to rely on the tyrant to survive. It meant he was strong enough to rule his unstable nation yet too weak to attack his neighbours, just as Washington and London liked it. Without sanctions, Saddam would not have lasted so long.

Lately, to promote yet another bloodbath, journalists like Johnson have helped break down the barrier between the fiction of "weapons of mass destruction" and the fact of public anxiety and disgust at people like Saddam.

Finally, let's us not forget the time before 1991 when the late Iraqi regime was a valued friend of the US and UK. This "despite" the devastating war with Iran, the gassing of the Kurds as well as the murder and torture of opponents, including the British journalist Farzad Bazoft (all of which were used to justify the attack). In the aftermath of Bazoft's execution, Daniel Johnson's newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, responded with an editorial equating investigative journalism with criminal espionage. In other words, Bazoft deserved it.

Perhaps this earlier example of "false moral equivalence" serving contemporary political expedience proves that leading figures (and associate editors) in the British corporate media continue to conform to their own tradition of fraudulence and moral cowardice. Meanwhile, the public, using new media out of the control of such corporations, has glimpsed uncaptioned images revealing the tragedy of this criminal war.