This book is a gift of decent, intrepid scholars who have dared to piece together the unbearable picture of enormous human death and suffering of civilian populations subjected to massive bombing in many countries in the 1930s and in World War II. These authors have the moral and intellectual authority to call human civilization to task for these crimes of genocide and hellish suffering. Their provocative, iconoclastic comparative analysis is likely to offend many readers with its conclusions that another project of mass killing had features in common with the Holocaust and that the Allied strategic bombing campaigns warrant being described as genocidal.
I do not envy the authors the criticisms they will receive from Holocaust scholars, centers, and institutions. I am also taking the position that the authors have made an important error in their choice of the metaphoric tool Holocaust as the symbolic machinery through which they wish to imprint on our civilization their important and valid assembly of information and interpretation of the murderous actions of governments in strategic bombing and total war. The authors argue persuasively that the underlying matrix of murder-enabling dynamics that has led government after government to make choices to kill, maim, and brutalize millions of innocent human beings in total war includes many of the same dynamic process factors in the mind collective that made the Holocaust possible. But I believe that that they go too far in the extent of their comparisons between the Holocaust and strategic bombing.
It is highly unconventional to criticize authors in a foreword to their book as strongly as I am doing. However, my criticism in this case also issues from my genuine convictions as to the excellence and significance of this work, to which I agreed, indeed am honored, to write the foreword. In effect, I say that I and many others are too small to join the authors in the greatness of their perception; and yet I also say that they have been somewhat insensitive to the symbolic wounds and needs that many of us have at this point in history, including those like myself who are fully in agreement with their basic thesis.
There is still another major ethical issue that this important book raises, which is whether in the battle against an intentionally genocidal power, genocidal mass murder of civilians is justified not as an outcome of a prejudicial-annihilatory policy but as an aspect of total war.
Part of me is seriously offended at the thought or suggestion that there should have been any turning back from overwhelming retaliation against both the government and people of the nation that committed the Holocaust against my peo-