And “now”, as that not-very-nice-man John Cleese always used to say… “for something completely different.” Tomorrow if I am not mistaken is the 65th anniversary of the raids by RAF Bomber Command and the USAAF on Dresden, for which the poor Western Allies (unlike Stalin who demanded them) got to carry the can, and got to be made to feel really shitty and ruthless and cruel, for six decades and more. We can by now probably all agree that this actual raid was not strictly necessary:  the war was effectively over, apart from clearing up the already-ample rubble, burying the corpses, trying and sentencing the villains, re-connecting up the Mains Services across Europe, and getting a functioning Market Economy running again.

But Stalin, bless the evil little bugger, wanted and demanded a show of “shock and awe”, loosely coupled to a less-than-needful wish of his Armies to have all enemy comms in front of them obliterated. He couldn’t range artillery that far  – be there ever so many Soviet “Artillery Divisions” (which there were) –  and his air force never quite had the heavy-lifting capacity ours did. So he got what he wanted: Roosevelt the scoundrel loved him anyway, and nobody was listening to poor old Churchill by then. The ally that bought the time in the first place, to form a coalition of allies, was by then regarded as the least important, and moribund, with a crumbling Empire to boot.

The result was the consigning down-the-memory-hole of chaps like this one in the video below. There has never even been a campaign medal for RAF Bomber Command, which suffered about 48% fatal casualties, around 56,000 men – a higher percentage even than the Merchant Navy.

The whole sorry episode should be a real object lesson to peoples who have some vestigial abillity to appoint and dismiss their governments.

You people all around and around, including us here, ought to be bloody careful who you vote for – you might get tyrannical psychotic murdering messianinc megalomaniacs, masquerading as caring liberal social democrats. I’m not saying quite out loud that Obama is one of that crowd, but you Americans who come and watch this page should tell your compatriots that they were not really thinking straight when you/they voted for him en masse, now, were you. He’s never been anything in his life except a gauleiter, after all – and look what a society surveilled by gauleiters brought to its people…

There’s not much time left here for us to avoid it.