Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!

A beautiful city existed sixty-eight years ago and it saw its last figment of life on a day like this, today. It still exists today, somehow.  This was a gorgeous place,  known to the world of back then as "The Florence of the North". This nickname suggests how stunning this city must have been. It still is. I've been there myself and one can't but be full of awe as one strolls along its charming alleys and contemplates its silhouette. Its name was, of course, Dresden. Even its name evokes elegance, cosiness and a world that no longer exists.

Dresden was what art is for many human beings, namely, a refuge. Maybe this was the reason why Friedrich von Schiller wrote the worldwide famous "Ode to Joy", in a little "Häuschen" in Dresden.
Beauty, in its conventional  understanding, seems to be  a powerful element that makes us believe that at the end of the day everything will be all right, however gruesome or pitiful our situation may be.  That was Dresden for hundreds of thousands of people, because whether Viggo Mortensen and his hollywoodian friends like it or not, the Germans of back then were people too and accordingly, amid a hellish scenario, they took refuge in one of the last bastions of hardcore beauty in Europe. Even the simple naive argument that "Dresden was a beautiful city" was the soundest for people to not think that the city could experience a mass scale air bombing.

Alas! how gullible we can be! Beauty is the one fast-dying thing in our dimention, in particular, the beauty that man can create. We believe it may last. It may but how much of it is left nowadays? We make beauty pay for our sins and for the sins of others. We kill the refuge of beauty our fellow man can fly to, because ugly places  can be no refuge for the human soul. When Dresden died, it did so in the gruesomest and lowest way. A totally defenceless city,  brimming with women, children and elderly, engolfed in what later became a massive fire storm that the incendiary bombs produced, embracing the city centre and dragging people in their thousands to its very core. A diabolic sadistic feast only seen in Hamburg in 1943, when  about 50 000 people died in like manner. An alleged proof that conventional bombing can be more devastating than nuclear bombing, at least in terms of number of victims. As for Dresden, the number of casualties would never be thoroughly determined. This leads to the major crime for mankind. Not being remembered for being the defeated, demonized, ridiculed. A couple of centuries ago the illustrous Madame Roland uttered the words that form the title of this entry standing before the guillotine at the Place de la Révolution in Paris; words that strike today's politicians as an annoying buzz which puzzle them and leave room for them to think of themselves as some throng of criminals.

The destruction of Dresden, and to a wider extent, the attempt to obliterate most German cities, was not just an act of war against the enemy. It was an act against the civilian population, against a people who were engaged in war against those who had previously humiliated them in likewise gruesome degree, a war against their art. It was a self-rightous act of "saviours" against "sinners". The air raids even had quite suggestive names such as "Operation Gomorrah", and "Thunderclap", evoking the divine punishment fallen from heaven against the sinners. And what the ones down there in the inferno had to pay for having dared to face up against the corrupted world of back then,  which  lives up to this day, was literally a burning in hell... them, their art and their beauty.