Governing from the Skies Quotes

“As spaces of promiscuous proximity, often lit poorly if at all, where existential fear suddenly was converted to the euphoria of being still alive and no longer having anything to lose, bunkers were also places of uncontrolled sexual encounters. The concern to discipline sexual conduct seems to have played a greater role in Great Britain than in Nazi Germany. Contrary to an idea born in the 1950s, according to which Nazism was marked by sexual repression, the anti-bourgeois dimension of the Volksgemeinschaft implied certain possibilities of sexual liberation.37 The British ‘people’s war’, on the other hand, was based far more strongly on a community founded on the bourgeois family and the need to repress sexual deviance, imputable both to women and the lower orders. As a clear sign of the particular role played by the family, the British authorities were initially against the idea of collective shelters, fearing that, in this mixing of classes, bourgeois virtue might be contaminated by the bad habits of the ‘lower orders’, leading to moral dissolution followed by a challenge to the social order. The middle classes were thus encouraged to build shelters in their gardens, which had the additional advantage of privatizing part of the costs bound up with air-raid precautions – something unthinkable in Germany, where the collective ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft was paramount.”
― Thomas Hippler, Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing

“When the well-disciplined soldier emerged from the mud of the trenches, he let himself be led to an anonymous death, meted out on an industrial scale. If an element of heroism could be recognized in this, it was simply on account of his capacity to slavishly endure the dehumanized horror, when the mutilated bodies of the veterans and the minds destroyed by trauma haunted a Europe fascinated by the spectacle of its own decline. The Arab warrior, on the other hand, was as capable of hatred as he was capable of love; his explosions of anger could follow his most magnanimous gestures. For him, war was still romantic, an ‘excitement’ whose tragic outcomes he accepted as a fatality inherent to life. In short, the Arabs were different from us, so different that ‘they have no objection to being killed’, as Hugh Trenchard, head of the RAF general staff, explained to the sensitive souls of the British Parliament.49 Arabs loved war precisely because it involved a confrontation with death, and as opposed to the effeminate Europeans, they did not make the flabby distinction between combatants and non-combatants. If you thought about it properly, not bombing them would almost amount to insulting their values.”
― Thomas Hippler, Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing