Glacial Erratics

This is a response to Dave Winer's weblog entry:

A common response from across the ocean. Unlike the US, France and Germany know what war is like. There's the disconnect. Click here. Clue: That's not Germany or France.

Following "here" leads to a picture of the devastation in New York after 9/11. There is no doubt that was a tragic day, but it was not war.

There are many sources of information on the number of people that died in World War I and II, and they rarely agree. They do agree, however, that many million is far more than a few thousand.

Here's one that attributes 37,215,153 civilian and military deaths to World War II. Of those 4,200,000 were German and 563,000 French. US? 298,000.

Similar information is available for World War I. Grand total of 8,538,315 deaths. German: 1,1773,700. French: 1,357,800. US: 126,000.

9/11 was one day. While the event was the result of malicious intent, the degree of devastation was essentially a horrible accident.

In London, the blitz lasted from September 7, 1940 until May 11, 1941. On the first day 348 bombers and 617 fighters came in two hours.

Despite the tragedy, life still goes on for New York. That's good. Lot's of people are proud of New York and should be.

But. A one day terrorist attack is quite unlike several years of the two most killing wars ever. Wars that included events such as the holocaust. Wars that featured a new emphasis on killing civilians and efforts to break the spirit.

The US played a crucial role in both wars. Everyone knows the world would be a different place if the US had not gone to war. But the war wasn't in the US. It was elsewhere, across the ocean, in places like Germany and France.

My apologies to all the various people who remember a particular act of war that I've left out as the one that is most meaningful to them. If you have something to add, please feel free to leave a comment.