- Vicente Morín Aguado
On wars so human and so inhumane
HAVANA TIMES – The story of Georgy K. Zhukov has come to my mind. He was a Soviet field marshal, considered the military leader who commanded the greatest number of troops in history. Immersed in the fight to take Berlin, it pained him to find himself forced to face a small group of holdout Nazi fanatics, by fighting house-to-house, building-to-building, even inside the homes, with the Nazis, frequently blackmailing them with the use of civilians as shields to resist the sieges.
Under the logic of these confrontations, the attacking band – the one enforcing the siege – must risk a quantity of troops several time greater, in order to conquer the few who are inside. There are generally more casualties among those on the offensive, leading the siege than among those under siege, who desperately defend themselves from their places of hiding.
The decision to use artillery fire to completely demolish the buildings was painful.
Historians have harshly criticized Zhukov, as they have criticized and continue criticizing other military leaders, for example MacArthur in Japan. Well thought out statistics indicate that the deaths from the intense bombardments of Tokyo and other great Japanese cities represented many more civilian victims than those that resulted from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The only possible consolation for such cruelties is that today Germany and Japan are two democratic states, which fully respect human rights, have eliminated all the legal forms of discrimination, and are at the head of the world, as much for their economies as for their ranking in the UN Human Development Index.
And of course, their people and their leaders, now healed from the horrors, think in terms of human and social progress. The possibility of another Third Reich or Empire of the Rising Sun have remained well behind, in the past.
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