Friday, November 16, 2012

Seventy Five years later, has Death and Il-Health finally allowed a post-Modernist look at WWII to receive a fair hearing ?

Does Hamburg '43 still sizzle ?
All the grownup men who made the decisions to send tens of thousands of teenage boys off to die on German city bombing runs have long since gone to their rewards.


But the teenager bomber crew members still alive today seem resolute to go on defending the decisions of people like Bomber Harris, if only in order to preserve their own role in the bombing as something history and their grandchildren will still judge as honourable and worthy.

But every week more fall silent , due to death or il-health and one can hope a person can begin to ask probing questions without powerful media publishers and loud political senators baying for one's hide.

In Canada ,in 1982 and 1992, major controversies broke out over histories that questioned the received version of the roles of WWII Canadian war ace Billy Bishop and of Canada's bombing efforts over German cities, such as Hamburg in 1943.

 These protests were led in 1982 by WWI veterans in their eighties and in 1992 by WWII veterans in their seventies and eighties.

Now very few civilian children are left anywhere in the world who can remember anything of WWI firsthand.

Soon protest over the Allied actions at Hamburg will have to be led by a handful of surviving veterans of the raid in their frail nineties.

Eight years worth of 75th anniversaries of WWII...


The 75th anniversaries of the Munich Agreement , of Kristallnacht and of all the tense months leading up to WWII are coming up in a few months and a lot of modernist histories will be newly published, basically ringing variations on a theme that has been playing steadily since September 1945.

But I think it it is long past due time that a post Modernist take on both the least contested and the most controversial events of WWII
receive some publishing space.

I plan to publish some myself  in the years between September 2013 and September 2020 , as the 75th anniversary of WWII events slowly unfolds over the next 8 years.......

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