60 years of bombing civilians

[eridani]

http://hnn.us/articles/67717.html

The statistics stun; they also provide distance. They are impossible to take in, as abstract as the planning responsible for producing them. In Korea over a three-year period, U.S./UN forces flew 1,040,708 sorties and dropped 386,037 tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm. If one counts all types of airborne ordnance, including rockets and machine-gun ammunition, the total tonnage comes to 698,000. Throughout World War II, in all sectors, the United States dropped 2 million tons of bombs; for Indochina the total figure is 8 million tons, with an explosive power equivalent to 640 Hiroshima-size bombs. Three million tons were dropped on Laos, exceeding the total for Germany and Japan by both the U.S. and Great Britain. For nine years, an average of one planeload of bombs fell on Laos every eight minutes. In addition, 150,000 acres of forest were destroyed through the chemical warfare known as defoliation. For South Vietnam, the figure is 19 million gallons of defoliant dropped on an area comprising 20 percent of South Vietnam—some 6 million acres. In an even briefer period, between 1969 and 1973, 539,129 tons of bombs were dropped in Cambodia, largely by B-52s, of which 257,465 tons fell in the last six months of the war (as compared to 160,771 tons on Japan from 1942–1945). The estimated toll of the dead, the majority civilian, is equally difficult to absorb: 2 to 3 million in Korea; 2 to 4 million in Vietnam.

[Hannah Bell]

1. black book of capitalism: 4 to 7 million, just in 2 small countries.

[Orrex]

2. Some years back I read a novel that cited very similar figures

The book's implication was that the astonishing spike in tonnage had a racist (specifically anti-brown-people) motivation. At the time I found the argument unconvincing, but in any case the numbers are horrifying.

[JohnyCanuck]

3. "Surfing the Kill Chain"

I was minding my own business reading the funny papers when the wife sits down, clicks on the devil box, and there sat an interviewed multi starred general and into my brain forever burned these words: "We must always strive to have the latest technology to guarantee that we continuously have dominance of the kill chain." I find myself wondering what it must be like to live your entire life scheming to kill people. Laying awake at night worrying about the kill chain must be a real pisser.


SNIP

What kind of a nation do we live in where you are encouraged to buy tickets to the upcoming show in Las Vegas highlighting Unmanned Aircraft Systems?

"Hurry, hurry step right up where inside you will see the great successful Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) attacks on insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. This wonderful technology has forever changed the landscape of future aviation development in the department of defense. The Predator, Reaper and Hunter have shown unprecedented capability in pairing persistent surveillance with quick, precision strikes further adding to their value as integral assets on the battlefield. As a result, Department of Defense and the Services are forging ahead with UAS weaponization development from the near term Army SkyWarrior to the long-term Navy UCAS and everything in between including smaller and more effective weapons for unmanned aircraft of all sizes."

They want us to buy tickets to watch footage of people getting blown into chunks while swooning over the future of remote death in a box. Good Gawd Almighty this must be a bad dream from which I cant awake and I am not feeling very safe anymore. Something inside of me gnaws out question, "will these kill bots be circling our neighborhoods soon?" They call themselves defense, but with names like Predator, Reaper and Hunter does not constitute a defensive painting in my gallery. It has become so neat and tidy, with just a push of a button you can leave the cleanup of what used to be a village to someone who actually cared about those people. That way they have closure. And yet we marvel at why the world hates us. It just keeps getting harder and harder to be proud to be an American. If one cannot see the level of evil that we have loosed on the world, they must be living under the porch of a foreclosed home. How can we have a future when everything we create, all our breakthroughs and technology is driven by the desire to be on top of the kill chain?


http://tshtf.blogspot.com/2009/04/surfing-kill-chain.html