canmom:class-struggle-anarchism:After it was founded in 1918, the brave RAF got straight to work
canmom: class-struggle-anarchism: After it was founded in 1918, the brave RAF got straight to work, indiscriminately bombing and machine gunning civilian protesters from the air in India The fight against fascism in WW2 was a relatively brief period in the RAF’s 100 year history, and they even managed a few war crimes during that. The RAF’s day job, the thing they’ve spent the best part of the last 100 years doing with no end in sight, is dropping bombs on the middle east in the service of British imperialism. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape”. – Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris Transcript of the pictured newspaper article: Planes used to fight rioters in India Lahore and Amritsar Are Placed Under Martial Law as Revolt Grows SIMLA, India, April 17. - Airplanes were used to-day in coping with the disorders that have broken out in the Pubjab. A mob attacked a passenger train in this district and wrecked the railroad station at Gujranwala. Air-planes were sent from Lahore and the mob was bombed and subjected to machine-gun fire from the air. Considerable unrest still exists in Delhi and Lahore. The Commissioner for the district has appealed to the leading men to use their influence for the reopening of the shops. Otherwise, he announced, the authorities would take action. Martial law has been declared in the districts of Lahore and Amritsar. It is stated that the Governor General is “satisfied that a state of open rebellion against authority exists n those districts.” The trials of those violating regulations under martial law will be held by a commission which will be similar to those prescribed by the Defence of India act. This article was written in the New-York Tribune on April 18, 1919 (cited here, along with a lot of other reports). That bombing is connected to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, when British soldiers sealed a square during a large gathering, then shot thousands of rounds into a crowd of of Indian people, killing and injuring about 1500-2000 people over the course of about ten minutes and stopping firing only when they ran out of ammo. The RAF, meanwhile, was also used in other brutal acts of colonial suppression such as destroying the Dervish state and then crushing the Iraqi and Kurdish rebellions in 1920. ~National hero~ Winston Churchill ordered the use of bombing in those cases, as well as advocating for the use of chemical weapons in India. In the end those particular chemical weapons were instead - again, on Churchill’s orders - heavily used against the Bolsheviks from 1919 during the Russian Civil War, during which the British and other Allies supported the White Russians after the Bolsheviks made peace with the Germans. The linked article says the chemical shells used on the Bolsheviks were delivered by aerial bombing, so I guess that’s another way the RAF (or their precursors) ‘served’. -- source link