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Bombing Quotes

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Bombing Quotes

“Maybe this is necessary. Maybe there will be hope when Bush's bombs stop falling. But she cannot bring herself to say it, not when what happened to Babi and Mammy is happening to someone now in Afghanistan, not when some unsuspecting girl or boy back home has just been orphaned by a rocket as she was. Laila cannot bring herself to say it. It's hard to rejoice. It seems hypocritical, perverse.”

“How peculiar it feels to speak about health care in America taking care of people’s health while our government bombs the limbs off children in faraway lands. And starves and imprisons not a few of them at home. How odd that it seems not obviously known that true health care must mean, at minimum, deliberate non-harming of anyone?”

“Darkness. The door into the neighboring room is not quite shut. A strip of light stretches through the crack in the door across the ceiling. People are walking about by lamplight. Something has happened. The strip moves faster and faster and the dark walls move further and further apart, into infinity. This room is London and there are thousands of doors. The lamps dart about and the strips dart across the ceiling. And perhaps it is all delirium... Something had happened. The black sky above London burst into fragments: white triangles, squares and lines - the silent geometric delirium of searchlights. The blinded elephant buses rushed somewhere headlong with their lights extinguished. The distinct patter along the asphalt of belated couples, like a feverish pulse, died away. Everywhere doors slammed and lights were put out. And the city lay deserted, hollow, geometric, swept clean by a sudden plague: silent domes, pyramids, circles, arches, towers, battlements.”

“It's the whistling," Laila said to Tariq, "the damn whistling, I hate more than anything." Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. When it started, their heads snapped up. They listened to the whistling, forks in midair, unchewed food in their mouths. Laila saw the reflection of their half-lit faces in the pitch-black window, their shadows unmoving on the wall. The whistling. Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by an expulsion of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared for now while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke, there was a scrambling, a bare-handed frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what remained of a sister, a brother, a grandchild. But the flip side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn't.”

“You can spread an ideology only by bombs. Either by real bombs or love bombs (manipulation).”

“That's the thing about war: it's never enough to disable the buildings, to blow holes into their middles; instead, they're hit over and over again, as if to pound them to dust, to disintegrate them, to remove them from the earth, to deny that families ever lived in them. But people did live there. And they needed to return, even though there was nothing left to return to except forbidding piles of broken concrete and cable wires sticking out of the heaps like markers of malevolence.”

“In 1969 the Khmer Rouge numbered only about 4,000. By 1975 their numbers were enough to defeat the government forces. Their victory was greatly helped by the American attack on Cambodia, which was carried out as an extension of the Vietnam War. In 1970 a military coup led by Lon Nol, possibly with American support, overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, and American and South Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia. One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War. The decision to bomb was taken by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and was originally justified on the grounds that North Vietnamese bases had been set up in Cambodia. The intention (according to a later defence by Kissinger’s aide, Peter W. Rodman) was to target only places with few Cambodians: ‘From the Joint Chiefs’ memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians. The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT; the overall programme was given the name MENU.’ Rodman makes the point that SUPPER, for instance, had troop concentrations, anti-aircraft, artillery, rocket and mortar positions, together with other military targets. Even if relatively few Cambodians were killed by the unpleasantly names items on the MENU, each of them was a person leading a life in a country not at war with the United States. And, as the bombing continued, these relative restraints were loosened. To these political decisions, physical and psychological distance made their familiar contribution. Roger Morris, a member of Kissinger’s staff, later described the deadened human responses: Though they spoke of terrible human suffering reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: 'capabilities', 'objectives', 'our chips', 'giveaway'. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men… They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereo-types. On the ground the stereotypes were replaced by people. In the villages hit by bombs and napalm, peasants were wounded or killed, often being burnt to death. Those who left alive took refuge in the forests. One Western ob-server commented, ‘it is difficult to imagine the intensity of their hatred to-wards those who are destroying their villages and property’. A raid killed twenty people in the village of Chalong. Afterwards seventy people from Chalong joined the Khmer Rouge. Prince Sihanouk said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger created the Khmer Rouge by expanding the war into Cambodia.”

“As melancholia replaced the jarring of my invention, I sat. Unable to breathe in the smog I had created, unable to stand on my betraying legs, unable to howl at the heavens over my sordid soul. In this inferno, I became paroxysmic, my self-hatred, superparamount, numbness dulling the agony of such a devilish act, An iron curtain fell upon the surrounding world, or at least what I had left of it to be owned by the laconic eclipse. All the angels fled, disowning my prayers, the lurid world backed away, leaving me forsaken and detached, I could no longer hear the bombings, hear them fall, my own fabrication, only the dead air that came after, the intense silence. Cynical and paralyzed, I realized I had purloined a portion of Hell and given it to the unwilling Earth, Punishing those I had no right to punish, judging those I had no reason to condemn, destroying cities I had never set foot in. This is how I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds.”

“Since almost all of the men were on active duty with the military, very few were available to serve with the Home Guard or as Air Raid Wardens. There were absolutely none assigned to our section, so we had to check our own homes for any unexploded incendiary bombs. Conditions were frightful and complaining didn’t help. Being on the verge of having a nervous breakdown, one of the women in our building cried incessantly. All of us tried to comfort and help her, but we had our own problems and could do precious little to calm her. Suddenly huge shattering explosions changed everything! Three bombs fell very close by. They exploded on our side of the street, causing our entire house to be shaken to its very foundation. The explosions were so severe that we thought the window casings would burst, causing the roof to cave in! When the “All Clear” sounded, we dug our way out and discovered that the bombs had hit the three houses right next to ours.”

“And there goes that siren again,” grumbled Mr. Clay, putting down his paper. “Just as if we haven’t got Christmas bells, or carolers, or a goose to stuff, we must have an air raid, too!” This mild tirade was so unlike Mr. Clay that everyone in the room stopped to look at him. “Oh, get along with you all,” he ordered, waving his hands. “The boys have convinced me to take the night off, and look where it’s going to land me – the Anderson shelter!” “It’s going to be a tight squeeze,” Jozef admitted with a boyish grin. “What you call cozy, yes?” put in Jedrick mischievously. Mr. Clay grunted. “Very cozy.”

“They came here on Sunday, 30th June, 1940, after bombing us two days before. They said they hadn't meant to bomb us; they mistook our tomato lorries on the pier for army trucks. How they came to think that strains the mind. They bombed us, killing some thirty men, women, and children - one among them was my cousin's boy. He had sheltered underneath his lorry when he first saw the planes dropping bombs, and it exploded and caught fire. They killed men in their lifeboats at sea. They strafed the Red Cross ambulances carrying our wounded. When no one shot back at them, they saw the British had left us undefended. They just flew in peaceably two days later and occupied us for five years.”

“Our grief is not a cry for war. "That's how New Yorkers feel," the driver said. "They know what bombing looks like, and they know the hell it is. But outside New York, people will feel guilty because they weren't here. They'll be yelling for revenge out of guilt and ignorance. Sure, we all want to catch the criminals, but only people who weren't in New York will want to bomb another country and repeat what happened here.”

“And a ton came down on a coloured road, And a ton came down on a gaol, And a ton came down on a freckled girl, And a ton on the black canal, And a ton came down on a hospital, And a ton on a manuscript, And a ton shot up through the dome of a church, And a ton roared down to the crypt. And a ton danced over the Thames and filled A thousand panes with stars, And the splinters leapt on the Surrey shore To the tune of a thousand scars.”

“Of course the people in the metro didn't see a thing!...what a joke! petrified ratlets! but they'll still come out to refute me! make claims!...that nothing got bombed!...squished! powdered! that the firmament was calm, and me, I imagined the whole thing! chrysanthemums, sprays, roses! why, there's no more any such thing as sky-hooking shrapnel than there is anal ice cream! it's all in my mind! hallucinations and bullshit! what a crook! but I repeat and reassert! shrapnel and fiery lace stretched from one end of the horizon to the other! with lots of glow-worms mixed in...and dancing purple fireflies...”

“The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.”

“I don’t know why everyone is still trying to find out whether heaven and hell exist. Why do we need more evidence? They exist here on this very Earth. Heaven is standing atop Mount Qasioun overlooking the Damascene sights with the wind carrying Qabbani’s dulcet words all around you. And hell is only four hours away in Aleppo where children’s cries drown out the explosions of mortar bombs until they lose their voice, their families, and their limbs. Yes, hell certainly does exist right now, at this moment, as I pen this poem. And all we’re doing to extinguish this hellfire is sighing, shrugging, liking, and sharing. Tell me: what exactly does that make us? Are we any better than the gatekeepers of hell?”

“Killing in the name of religion defines someone who is ignorant and actually void of religion. God does not condone terror. To kill innocent people to make a political statement is like shooting a dove to say hunting is wrong.”

“Outside events can change a presidential campaign, a president, and the history of the nation: the Iranian hostage crisis, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the downing of the helicopter in Mogadishu, Somalia, the suicide attack on the USS Cole, and, of course, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”