Inaccurate ending
In the actual bombing, the next day when the survivors came out to look for other surviors or to flee the city, the Americans strafed them in their mustangs with machine gun fire.
Why was this left out I wonder?
Perhaps because the reality of the strafing runs is a contested moment, given recent research. Götz Bergander and Helmut Schnatz have done investigative work, and offer substantial and credible documentation that there were no strafing runs, saying that there was a misunderstanding of the circumstances. According to the extras on the Dresden DVD, the Bergander book was one of their references.
shareThis is what you call holocaust denial (real holocaust of Dresden, that is).
shareNo, to be strictly accurate, you ought to call it "revisionist history". When new details surface, and are examined, and found to be truthful, one must reconsider events in a new light. Isn't that what your David Irving would suggest we do with WWII history? Examine the facts and come to new conclusions?
It's not as if anyone is denying that the firebombing of Dresden took place, nor is anything saying that it wasn't an extraordinarily brutal event. We can even have civilized debates as to whether it should be considered a war crime. However, if we cannot prove that there was deliberately strafing, maybe we should used the word "alleged" when discussing it.
When allies deny their warcrimes, it's "revisionist history" and that's OK - when anyone denies the outright lies present in the holocaust hoax, it's wholesale "denial".
shareWhen the Allies deny their war crimes, it's called "a subject for debate". There are a great many people who argue from both the Allied and the Axis positions on whether Dresden was a war crime. The agreement and disagreement comes from historians who care about the historic record rather than simply being nationalists.
Irving's work on Dresden would be much more highly respected by more people if he hadn't been somewhat questionable in his interpretations and if he hadn't been so expressly racist in his other works and interviews. That sort of thing makes one suspect his motives.
If someone denies a detail of the Holocaust and they have real evidence, that evidence becomes incorporated into the body of history that people agree on. If their research is shoddy, if they have less than pure motives, and if they use words like "hoax", we tend to call it denial. Serious historians tend to use somewhat less deliberately provocative language; they let their facts and theses stand for themselves.
That's not how it works now though, is it?
What happens now is that you get a daytime TV show on which Holocaust denier and a survivor or a historian get the same amount of airtime and debate whether the Holocaust took place. And people with no historical knowledge or interest watch and assume there is some sort of equivalence between the weight of evidence on both sides. And then instead of historical fact, the Holocaust becomes a pseudo-legitimate source of debate because people out there are debating it and taking sides. This is how we end up with Intelligent Design taught in schools and vaccine boycotts.
Never mind the fact that there is zero integrity on one side of the argument, those hours have got to be filled somehow and hysterical polemic gets the job done.
When Austria first decided to make Holocaust Denial a crime I felt a liberal's inward twinge of disgust at the assault on free speech, along with a lot of other people. Having since heard from a lot more Holocaust deniers, I'm now in favour of stringing them all up. Well, not really but my attitude has completely changed.
Holocaust denial is deranged lunacy not rational debate. And it's highly offensive to the surviving primary sufferers and the descendants of those who were its victims.