Which side caused more destruction? The Nazis destroyed most Polish cities, along with Coventry, and Rotterdam. The Allies destroyed most German cities, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. I know the Soviet wreaked quite a bit of havoc as well, but my main concern is between the Allies and Nazis. After all, this is what you learned in American high school history, the “good” guys versus the “bad” guys.
The Germans destroyed 1.700 cities and towns in the Soviet Union.
All numbers regarding war destruction and casualties should automatically be held in suspicion. They are invariably either vastly exaggerated or ridiculously minimized, depending on who suffered the losses and who’s reporting them. And the technologies that have generally improved the historical record in every other area of life - printing presses, telephones, etc. - have been little help in creating accurate records of war. Look at the invasion of Iraq. The Pentagon has taken a highly active role in controlling all news emanating from Iraq. The iraqbodycount.org website lists 112,000 as the high estimate of verifiable deaths in Iraq since 2003 but journalists on the ground have reported that many deaths certainly go uncounted and the death toll may be much closer to a million.
Destruction of an entire city is a wanton act of orgiastic violence. The Marine Corps destroyed a great deal of the city of Fallujah in its grotesque “Operation Phantom Fury” in 2004 but nobody except maybe the Code Pink types even so much as batted an eyelash. The cycle of caveman brutality goes on unabated because it is enabled by the credulity and moral bankruptcy of the masses. How many times have you overheard some armchair-testosterone-jock conservative say “let’s just drop a nuke and turn the whole damn place to glass and get it over with”? The power of the neo-conservatives to lay waste to whole cities rests squarely on the disgusting stone-age morality and hypocrisy of these people in society.
Clayton -
""How many times have you overheard some armchair-testosterone-jock conservative say “let’s just drop a nuke and turn the whole damn place to glass and get it over with”? “”
Once would be too, many, but I actually hear this crap all the time. Not just from neocons, either. As one can judge from events of the past several years, the totalitarian left has no problem with heavy-handed state violence.
The poor statistics also greatly complicates the problem of explaining to people the utilitarian folly of a warfare state. They think almost 9,500 US casualties since september 11th 2001 is a good thing, because they are comparing it to vietnam and the civil war. So dont even bring up the estimated 110,00 to over one million iraqi dead. Thats a scoreboard to many americans.
"So dont even bring up the estimated 110,00 to over one million iraqi dead. "
This part has always bothered me. The US media usually report just American deaths. Non-Americans do not matter. They are just collateral damage.
People are people. They are no different than you or I. Upon traveling extensively, you note not so much the differences among others, but the striking similarities. They have a family to feed and bills to pay. They get emotional. They feel pain, joy, sorrow, and pleasure. I have even traveled to countries that are considered “rogue” states. I think Americans have their head stuck in the sand. They need to wake up and see the real world.
A lot of people went through a lot of hell and mass destruction - I don’t think there is much use in concerning ourselves with much abstract socio-political questions that we were not involved in. People gained power, lived, died, and prospered - not ideas; not communism, fascism, progressivism, capitalism, etc…who cares.
Until de-Stalinization of the mid 1950s the Soviet Union minimized its own losses claiming it had lost no more than 7 million people in the war. Between then and the mid 1980s it failed to show an interest in closely examining its losses and as a consequence substantially underestimated its death toll as having been “more than 20 million”. It was not until further liberalization of the mid 1980s that real work was begin to put into it. The number arrived at then and most often quoted today is 27 million, albeit that may still be too low.
The figure of 1.700 cities and towns is a mid-1980s number. Do you have a better estimate, or is the extent of your objection that we can never know anything?