1) “…Despite claims of goodwill, infantry training left my comrades and I desensitized; how could we scream “ Kill them all, let God sort them out” on a regular basis and still believe that we were caring for the oppressed people of Iraq?…”
–Josh Stieber, “Iraq Vet to Congress: Don’t Cover Up Wikileaks’ Iraq Revelations,” Alternet, 10/22/10. Stieber is an Iraq war veteran whose company was featured in a Wikileaks video.
2) “Nuke ‘Em All–Let Allah Sort Them Out. — Bumper sticker seen on cab window of Ford F-150 pickup truck in Bozeman, Montana.”
–Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 261.
3) “Kill them all, the Lord will recognize His own.”
–Arnaud-Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, 7/22/1209, leader of an attack on supposed heretics in Béziers (in southern France)
4) “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
— unidentified U.S. major in Vietnam, quoted in a 2/7/1968 AP article by Peter Arnett, with varying titles, such as “To Save Town, Allies Had to Destroy It (Spartanburg [SC] Herald, 2/8/68, p. 1).
5) “…On the night of February 13, 1945, seven hundred and ninety-six Royal Air Force bombers unloaded more than twenty-six hundred tons of munitions over the city of Dresden, creating a firestorm that had the force of a hurricane. Thirteen square miles of the Altstadt, Dresden’s historic center, were consumed. During the assault, between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand people in Dresden were blown to pieces, immolated, or asphyxiated. There was nothing exceptional about the attack on Dresden….”
— from the abstract of George Packer, “Letter from Dresden: Embers,” The New Yorker, February 1, 2010, p. 33.
6) “…Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day. The Hiroshima prefectural health department estimates that, of the people who died on the day of the explosion, 60% died from flash or flame burns, 30% from falling debris and 10% from other causes. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness….”
— “Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Wikipedia.
Further notes:
4) The Vietnam quote has been subjected to doubt; see, e.g., Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier, p. 43.
A 3/23/04 New York Times article accepts the quote as genuine. For more background, see This Day in Quotes and Wikipedia.
5) The Dresden article says, in part:
“The Allies had been carpet bombing German cities since 1942…. They had learned, in part from the German bombing of Coventry, in 1940, that long-term damage could be more efficiently inflicted by wreaking havoc on the dense networks of city centers then by trying to pinpoint targets like oil depots or munitions factories. Far from trying to avoid civilian deaths, the British and the Americans designed their air raids to create maximum chaos, and by 1945 they had perfected the technique….”
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