Phillip Knightley Quotes

George was referring to the brutal realities of war (during the First World War).

One of the predictions of the oncoming war with Germany.

Germany had invaded and occupied much of Europe. These two fronts accounted for the majority of the German casualties. The Germans not only violated the Geneva Convention and the Laws of War repeatedly, but as you can see from this quotation, it was deliberate policy. Keitel was tried and hanged after the war. See {621438} .

At this point, the horrors of the German concentration death camps were generally known by the world press. This quotation shows the denial that the Irish Free State was in about the German Nazi atrocities. The 6-county Nationalsits were the Irish counties in Northern Ireland that did not join the Irish Free State and so far as the Catholic Irish were concerned, the Catholics of Northern Ireland were a persecuted minority undergoing oppression and that was not they believed morally different from the murders of millions of Jews, Gypsies and handicapped people in Europe. If the Free State Irish publicly admitted the difference, they would morally have had to join the allies and De Valera was totally opposed to that. Over 70,000 Irishmen and women rejected the moral stand of their government, and volunteered for the British Army to the great distress of the Free State leaders like De Valera. See {639722} for his personal denial of reality.

There is disagreement amongst historians as to whether or not the atrocities attributed to the retreating British troops were actually true. There are two other possibilities. First, this report was made only a week after the battle itself and less than that since the alleged atrocities would take place as the British retreated. There were certainly all kinds of rumors with information passed from person to person with no modern means of documentation. The Provisional Congress may have sincerely thought that all the events occurred but they may have been the result of inadvertent exaggeration. Then there is the possibility that in order to fire up the Americans to join the war, some or all of the atrocity reports were deliberately fabricated. It would only take two or three delegates to agree on such a strategy and they could “confirm” each other’s accounts of the happenings. Of course it might all be true. However, as the British retreated to Boston where they had reinforcements, they did not have a lot of time for malicious atrocities. All along the route, Minutemen, local farmers and townspeople continued the attack against the British. By the time the British soldiers reached Boston, 73 British solders were dead and 174 more were wounded. In war truth does not have the respect that it usually does. See {626632}.

Belsen was one of the largest German Death Camps where almost a million Jews, Gypsies, dissenters, and non conformists were gassed and burned in WWII.

The day before, Helms’ deputy testified about the high number of civilian casualties that American bombing of North Vietnam had caused.

The soldiers obeyed their orders and killed every man, woman and child they could find outside the city. They beheaded captured prisoners, bayoneted pregnant women and children. All civilian houses were burned, often with the people trapped inside.

This statement caused great consternation. NcNutt did try to explain that he was speaking personally and not for the Government, but there was a small proportion of America who had concluded that all Japanese should be killed. Such an concept which was unthinkable 5 years earlier was considered as a result of several factors: The Japanese had murdered many American prisoners of war. Killed millions of civilians throughout Asia including doing medical and weapons experiments on live human beings. They had practiced torture, compulsory prostitution and mass rape of conquered territories. At the same time, the Germans had tried to exterminate all the Jews and, with some Japanese help, did kill two-thirds. The concept of genocide had been introduced to Americans as the concentration camps were liberated. And American casualties in the Pacific had been heavy. Vengeance was desired by many. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of Americans never considered genocide seriously.

Wikileaks had just released 400,000 classified American documents relating to the Iraq War. Many accused him and Wikileaks of endangering the lives of not only soldiers, but Iraq civilians who might be identified as cooperating with the coalition forces by the released documents. The heart of the problem is that governments tend to use classification to hide embarrassing facts or policies that might be controversial as well as to protect legitimate national security secrets and sources and methods of information. The majority of the 400,000 leaked documents, when examined, were clearly not protecting any legitimate people or secrets but just staved off criticism or embarrassment; in many cases, there was no value to the contents and the maw of the censorship and classification process was applied indiscriminately to many documents. A much better argument than Assange made, can be gleaned from the vast number of WWII documents that America, England, France, Russia and others still keep secret, when the people who might have been protected have already died and the methods are long since obsolete.

Steinbeck also served as a journalist as did Earnest Hemmingway and other great American writers. In WWII there was a great deal of censorship and even more self censorship by the press. The result is that many of the U. S. military blunders were covered up on the grounds that it would not be good for the morale of the soldiers to know that their officers had made such tragic mistakes.

Bombing had reached the point where conventional bombing raids on industrial cities like Tokyo and Hamburg produced even more civilian casualties than did the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Tibbets’ view, through the lens of hindsight, was developed by many of the Allied servicemen who had been forced into war by expansionist and militaristic nations like Japan and Germany both of which placed much of their war material manufacturing capability in the midst of their otherwise civilian cities. Both brutally violated the laws of war and committed atrocities many times over before the allies began retaliating. There are still some who believe that it was wrong to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Some even feel that the mass bombing of Japanese and German cities in retaliation and in furtherance of the war effort was morally wrong. But at the time, the millions of casualties anticipated in the invasion of the Japanese mainland, persuaded virtually every American soldier and civilian that there was nothing wrong with use of the Atomic bomb, and many saw it as an absolute Godsend to prevent all the American and Japanese causalities that would have come otherwise. Many scholars remark on how it was virtually impossible to find any significant number of misgivings before or just after Hiroshima. Tibbet’s view was typical.

Under the Jay Peace Treaty for the American Revolution, the Iroquois were recognized as an Independent Nation. (5 of the tribes fought for the British and 1 for the Colonists which is why the Iroquois were one of the subjects of the peace treaty. In 1942. the Iroquois wanted to maintain their own sovereignty and so they made their own declaration of war in WWII. Then Iroquois men then enlisted in the American Armed Forces. The Iroquois had made their own separate Declaration of War in WWI as well.

The Lusitania was an American passenger liner that was torpedoed by the German U-Boats. Edith Cavell was a British nurse who was assisting all wounded in Belgium, and Captain Charles Fryatt, was an English Merchant Captain who when his ship was attacked by a German submarine, fought back and rammed and sank the sub. In each case the German behavior was contrary to the then norms of civilized warfare.

At first reading, this is just a common report of a German war correspondent riding along on a bombing mission. However what makes it a very important historical quotation is the description of the fires and the date. In WWII the allies firebombed Hamburg {624722} and Dresden, and were then accused by the Germans—and by some historical revisionists in the 21st century—of bombing civilian cities and using the firbombing technique where one huge conflagrant sucked the air out of the area and roasted even people in bomb shelters. However, it was clear that the Germans had started the bombing of civilian cities, but the firebombing was less clear. This quotation proves that it was the Germans who first broke the rules of war and that made the subsequent Allied use of the technique legal and for most people then moral.