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Calculations of the death-toll from the Anglo-American bombing of Dresden in February 1945 have varied widely, but never ceased to be dramatic. Figures suggested have ranged from 35,000 through 100,000, and even up to half a million at the wilder fringes of speculation.

It is easy to see why. Dresden was a magnificent city of three quarters of a million people, its population further swollen by hordes of anonymous refugees from the Eastern Front. Its historic heart was destroyed in one apocalyptic night by aircraft armed with more than 4,500 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs. This devastated area amounted to around 13 square miles (34 square kilometers).

The firestorm that destroyed Dresden's architectural treasures and so much of its civilian population became a byword for the horrors of modern warfare and a stain on the Allies' claim to have fought a "good war" against Nazism. This was a truly catastrophic event to which only very big numbers seemed able to do justice.

Now, more than 60 years later, it seems we must lower our estimates. After four years' work, an impressive commission of German historians this week filed its report on this issue, and it seems that even the lowest figure so far accepted may be an overestimate. Drawing on archival sources, many never previously consulted, on burial records and scientific findings -- including street-by-street archaeological investigations -- plus hundreds of eye-witness reports, the "Dresden Commission of Historians for the Ascertainment of the Number of Victims of the Air Raids on the City of Dresden on 13/14 February 1945" has provisionally estimated the likely death-toll at around 18,000 and definitely no more than 25,000.

These conclusions, to be elaborated on in a full report due out next year, are convincing. However, despite the eminence of the commission's experts, including Germany's most distinguished historian of the air war, Dr. Horst Boog, they will be controversial, especially in Dresden itself. Many of those who lost families, homes and loved ones in the catastrophe have found dignity and meaning in the sheer magnitude and dark grandeur of the event, and to see the Dresden casualty figures reduced from the hundreds of thousands to more "normal" (though still horrendous) levels seems incredible, even insulting.

And there are the political distortions. The Nazis were the first to exaggerate the number of victims for propaganda purposes, and the communists were liable to push the numbers up during the post-war period, in order to discredit the Anglo-Americans, who had been the Soviets' allies until 1945 but were now their Cold War enemies. Finally, neo-Nazis in modern Germany conjure up dizzyingly high figures running into the hundreds of thousands, while at the same time playing down or denying the World War II mass murder of the Jews and the Roma and Sinti, hoping thereby to convince their fellow-citizens that the Allied bombing of Germany was an even worse "holocaust" than the actual one.

Hence the commission's establishment in 2004 was opposed by many in Dresden and its work has since been subject to political chicanery. That it has finally issued its report seems something of a miracle. And that its members have courageously and doggedly followed the logic of the evidence, knowing the unpopularity it may bring, speaks strongly for the integrity of the historians involved.

So can we say "case closed"? Almost certainly not. Many Dresdeners, understandably, cling to their memories and traditions even in the face of historical evidence. The far right will undoubtedly persist with a line of propaganda central to its aim of undermining the democratic German state and rehabilitating the Nazi past. For all these people, interpretation of the Dresden death-toll will likely remain an article of faith rather than a matter of fact.

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Death Toll Debate: How Many Died in the Bombing of Dresden? - SPIEGEL ONLINE - International

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The question of how many people died in the World War II Allied bombing of Dresden has been politically charged for decades. Now, a commission of historians has said the real total could be much lower than previously thought. But the debate likely won't go away.

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Did NASA Just Admit Aliens Have Visited Earth?

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Vietnam War, (1954-75), a protracted conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, against the government of South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. Called the "American War" in Vietnam (or, in full, the "War Against the Americans to Save the Nation"), the war was also part of a larger regional conflict ( see Indochina wars) and a manifestation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies.

At the heart of the conflict was the desire of North Vietnam, which had defeated the French colonial administration of Vietnam in 1954, to unify the entire country under a single communist regime modeled after those of the Soviet Union and China. The South Vietnamese government, on the other hand, fought to preserve a Vietnam more closely aligned with the West. U.S. military advisers, present in small numbers throughout the 1950s, were introduced on a large scale beginning in 1961, and active combat units were introduced in 1965. By 1969 more than 500,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China poured weapons, supplies, and advisers into the North, which in turn provided support, political direction, and regular combat troops for the campaign in the South. The costs and casualties of the growing war proved too much for the United States to bear, and U.S. combat units were withdrawn by 1973. In 1975 South Vietnam fell to a full-scale invasion by the North.

The human costs of the long conflict were harsh for all involved. Not until 1995 did Vietnam release its official estimate of war dead: as many as 2 million civilians on both sides and some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war. In 1982 the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., inscribed with the names of 57,939 members of U.S. armed forces who had died or were missing as a result of the war. Over the following years, additions to the list have brought the total past 58,200. (At least 100 names on the memorial are those of servicemen who were actually Canadian citizens.) Among other countries that fought for South Vietnam on a smaller scale, South Korea suffered more than 4,000 dead, Thailand about 350, Australia more than 500, and New Zealand some three dozen.

Vietnam emerged from the war as a potent military power within Southeast Asia, but its agriculture, business, and industry were disrupted, large parts of its countryside were scarred by bombs and defoliation and laced with land mines, and its cities and towns were heavily damaged. A mass exodus in 1975 of people loyal to the South Vietnamese cause was followed by another wave in 1978 of " boat people," refugees fleeing the economic restructuring imposed by the communist regime. Meanwhile, the United States, its military demoralized and its civilian electorate deeply divided, began a process of coming to terms with defeat in what had been its longest and most controversial war. The two countries finally resumed formal diplomatic relations in 1995.

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Vietnam War | Facts, Summary, Years, Timeline, Casualties, Combatants, & Facts

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Vietnam War (1954-75), conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. It was part of a larger regional conflict as well as a manifestation of the Cold War.

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Modernism 				
Form (conjunctive, closed) 		
Art Object / Finished Work 	
Creation/Totalization 	
Presence 				
Centering 				
Genre/Boundary 			
Paranoia 				
Origin/Cause 				
Grand Narratives	

Postmodernism 
Antiform (disjunction)
Performance/Happening
Deconstruction
 
Dispersal
 Hyper-Text/Intertext
 Schizophrenia
 Difference-Différance/Trace/cINDERS
Partial nARRATIVES

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Modernism 				
Form (conjunctive, closed) 		
Art Object / Finished Work 	
Creation/Totalization 	
Presence 				
Centering 				
Genre/Boundary 			
Paranoia 				
Origin/Cause 				
Grand Narratives	

Postmodernism 
Antiform (disjunction)
Performance/Happening
Deconstruction
 
Dispersal
 Hyper-Text/Intertext
 Schizophrenia
 Difference-Différance/Trace/cINDERS
Partial nARRATIVES

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Taylor Swift - So It Goes (Official Audio)

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Or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death

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Or The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade

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“… each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message – describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.” (Vonnegut, Five 64)    

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“… each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message – describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.” (Vonnegut, Five 64)    

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W.H. Auden — September 1, 1939 (read by Dylan Thomas)

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Fredric Jameson on Postmodernism:

“the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject…”

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Fredric Jameson - From modernism to postmodernity

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The Addictions of Sin: W. H. Auden in His Own Words (6/6)

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One of the books that Lily had brought Rumfoord was The  Destruction of Dresden, by an Englishman named David Irving…” (153)

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World War II was more than three years old when Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and other Allied leaders met at Casablanca in January 1943, but the decisions made there would shape the rest of the war in Europe.

During the conference, Allied leaders settled on a policy of unconditional surrender and agreed on a strategic bombing plan to bring the Axis to its knees.
Read more: What it was like in the room when Nazi Germany finally surrendered to end World War II in Europe
For the US, bombing would focus on daytime raids against strategically valuable targets - factories, ports, military bases, and other infrastructure involved in the war effort. For the British, who had suffered during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, the air war would target German cities with nighttime raids.

In the following months, numerous German cities would crumble beneath the onslaught, but perhaps the most heinous destruction was in Dresden, a historic city in southeast Germany.

Dresden had avoided the destruction wreaked on major urban centers like Berlin and Hamburg. But on February 13, 14, and 15, 1945, more than 1,200 British and US heavy bombers dropped nearly 4,000 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the city.

The intensity of the bombing devastated the city's historic center. The fire that raged during the bombing made superheated air rise with such force that it created a vacuum on the ground, ripping trees out of the ground, sucking people into the fires, and suffocating those spared the flames.
Read more: How Soviet troops taunted the Nazis during their final drive to Berlin in World War II
Roughly 25,000 people were killed, many of them civilians and refugees, and more than 75,000 buildings were destroyed. The scale and ferocity of the bombing, so late in the war, has led many to believe the attack was a war crime.

Below, you can see some of the devastation wrought by Allied forces 74 years ago:

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74 years ago, Allied bombers obliterated one of Germany's most beautiful cities - here are 18 photos of the bombing of Dresden

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World War II was more than three years old when Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and other Allied leaders met at Casablanca in January 1943, but the decisions made there would shape the rest of the war in Europe.

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I survived the bombing of Dresden and continue to believe it was a war crime | Victor Gregg

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Victor Gregg: As a prisoner of war held in Dresden, I still suffer the memories of those terrible events and my anger refuses to subside