Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Ollie and Tibbets

Sadly this has nothing to do with some cute little cartoon characters. It is about a mass murderer and his greasy apologist.

The mass murderer is the recently deceased Brigadier General Paul Tibbets who piloted Enola Gay, the plane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and vaporized 140,000 innocent Japanese (not to mention the flood of deaths that followed from radiation sickness). Tibbets is quoted as saying that he never lost a night’s sleep over his atomic handiwork. Nice guy.

The apologist is a creepy little neo-con called Oliver Kamm who bears a frightening likeness to the 30s horror film actor Bela Lugosi (check out his picture – the fangs must have been air-brushed).

Still this is not about Kamm’s unappealing physical appearance. Rather it is about his equally unappealing (and I am being very charitable) politics and the repulsive way he exploits one of the nastiest episodes in human history. (Incidentally the petulant Kamm insists that he is not a neo-conservative and refers to himself instead as a Militant Liberal. After wading through a handful of his turgid posts, however, you will soon realize that he suffers from political dyslexia. He is in fact a Liberal Militarist, shorthand for those who champion violence in the pursuit of “noble causes”, all from a safe distance of course.)

Kamm went so far to post a fawning piece in which Tibbets is eulogized not just as the man who without question helped bring the Pacific War to an end but more subtly as a crusader against “totalitarianism”. It doesn’t take a genius to spot Kamm's true motive an he tries to draw a parallel with his own “principled” stance against Iraqi “totalitarianism”. If the annhililation of hundreds of thousands of people in the name of civilization qualifies one for militant liberal sainthood, then surely those neo-conservatives/militant liberals who stood up to the evil Baathist regime without resorting to nukes have earned their places in the choir of angels.

All that remains is to erect a glorious statue to Bomber Tibbets alongside the one of his soul-mate Bomber Harris which already adorns the Aldwych entrance to the City of London, to be unveiled by Kamm and his fellow ghouls from the Henry Jackson Society.

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PS. If you think I am being too hard on Tibbets, then have a gander at this interview, especially the final paragraphs in which he makes it very clear how he would handle terrorism:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,769634,00.html

This man had no compunction about murdering civilians.