Since earliest childhood I have disliked scarlet roses for Saint Valentine's Day. Too many of my relatives and their friends died in the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines and in the Liberation of Manila by the Americans.
There are also a couple of massacres in the Philippines I never want to forget or even put behind me in which members of my clan died shot to bits and beheaded.
Saint Valentine's Day has always meant, for me at least, a time of reflection and remembrance of things gone awry. Romance has always come second or third. It is a state of madness which fortunately most of us who grow into wisdom eschew. We have been so Hall-marked and brainwashed that you are not worth a bloody farthing unless someone, even a convict or a loser of a lover or a husband sends you a bouquet of blood red roses.
My husband is sensitive to these things. I usually receive masses of orchids in every color and shade. The Italian Riviera has been drenched with rain and snow this winter so many yellow , orange and salmon colored roses have yet to bloom.
Lest we forget the Holocaust that was Dresden the Dazzling on February 13th and 14th, 1945. Since some apologists are claiming the numbers are inflated, how about this? Between the night of 13th of February and the 14th the Allies - that would be the British and the American bombers spewed out 35,000 incendiary bombs on a civilian, refugee and hospital city. The number of dead range between 3 to 650,000, depending on whether you are British, American, Neo-con or Zionist.
Members of my clan, some of whom were devout Jews living in Dresden burned to death. If you have read Bubi's Funeral, a chapter in The Indomitable Lucrezia from the Fray Paco books you will remember that Bubi's paternal grandparents were Judean bankers from Hamburg, Halle and Dresden. Our kin never experienced the horrors of a concentration camp. They had a mansion in Dresden called Schloss Ariadne. Yes. You guessed it. Composer Richard Strauss was a frequent visitor, hence the name. Nothing was ever heard or known again from any of our kin.
More human beings died in Dresden than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. I question the nuking of those two cities. Tokyo, like Dresden had been firebombed day and night relentlessly. Supposedly, the Americans went atomic to "save American lives."
Bollocks!It was done in an attempt to frighten the psychopathic Stalin, who never cared a whit for any human being and already had the secrets of the atomic bomb thanks to inumerable urbane and handsome gay British moles from Cambridge, to say nothing of fervent Communists like Harry Dexter White, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's closest Advisor.
There are those who claim that Dresden was tit for tat for Coventry. Hold your stampeding cows!
That is pure propaganda. Coventry had munitions factories and even stretching the truth till it bursts like a balloon; no more than 600 people died.
"You must understand that this war is not about Hitler or the National Socialist - but against the strength of the German people which is to be smashed and crushed once and for all,regardless of whether it is in the hands of Hitler or a Jesuit priest." Prime Minister Winston Churchil
as quoted in 'Winston Churchil - His Career in War and Peace," written by Emrys Hughes. You'll find this quote, never disputed by Churchill on page 145.
This is nothing new to a growing number of politologists and historians. Churchill had a visceral hatred of all things German. Could his massive pomposity have possibly masked a searing inferiority complex vis-a-vis German Kultur, Science and Technology as well as Gemutlichkeit?
