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| Manchester was devastated by German air raids in WWII |
Some 77 years earlier, Manchester suffered multiple devastating attacks by Nazi war planes that killed nearly 700 people and injured over 2000 in two nights of raids alone, just before Christmas of 1940, according to an article in Wikipedia: "On the night of 22/23 December, 270 aircraft dropped 272 tons of high explosive and 1,032 incendiary bombs; on the second night, 171 aircraft dropped another 195 tons of high explosive and 893 incendiaries."
Targeted air raids, new in those days, have become the terror tactics of choice for combatants that can afford them. Other fighters may deliver their bombs by more primitive means, often in retaliation for devastating air raids that have destroyed their people, .
But the horror and the devastation inflicted are the same, no matter how today's powerful explosives are delivered or what the motives are behind their use. All bombing is unbelievably barbaric and terrifying.
When it comes to perpetrating this kind of terror, there is more than enough guilt to go around, but the US, the only nation in history to unleash nuclear weapons, has become known as the chief offender.
Just this past week the Independent published a report in which the Pentagon acknowledges that 105 civilians were killed in a single US raid in Mosul in March. While our Air Force may not deliberately target civilians as do terror groups like ISIS, the use of this means of warfare inevitably results in large amounts of so-called "collateral damage".
I am saddened by the fact that the US seems ever more bent on simply murdering extremists who are labeled as "terrorists" and "killers", without addressing the factors that produce the growing number of these "terrorists" who are bent on destroying us at whatever cost.
We have yet to learn that violence, in whatever form, inevitably results in setting off an unending crescendo of more and more of the same.
When it comes to perpetrating this kind of terror, there is more than enough guilt to go around, but the US, the only nation in history to unleash nuclear weapons, has become known as the chief offender.
Just this past week the Independent published a report in which the Pentagon acknowledges that 105 civilians were killed in a single US raid in Mosul in March. While our Air Force may not deliberately target civilians as do terror groups like ISIS, the use of this means of warfare inevitably results in large amounts of so-called "collateral damage".
I am saddened by the fact that the US seems ever more bent on simply murdering extremists who are labeled as "terrorists" and "killers", without addressing the factors that produce the growing number of these "terrorists" who are bent on destroying us at whatever cost.
We have yet to learn that violence, in whatever form, inevitably results in setting off an unending crescendo of more and more of the same.
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