Some rightwingers are horrified that Obama is going to stop in Dresden. Last night Michael Savage featured a guest reporter who warned about the “anti-Anglo-American” implications. We don’t know what he’ll say, but how dare he even go there? He must know that some Germans wrongly see the bombing of Dresden as an atrocity. He must really be embarrassed of America if he’s willing to be seen publicly in this enemy civilian city from more than six decades ago. An American president must never be friendly to a place famous for being devastated by America and its allies, no matter where or when the conflict was. That appears to be the reasoning. So it goes.

The radio voice was furious. Why couldn’t Obama pick another major German city? (The Allies of course destroyed over a hundred German cities before Dresden, but the commentator didn’t seem to acknowledge that.)

Here I thought the war party was insensitive to foreigners’ lives for ethnic and racial reasons, and perhaps there’s some of that, but it appears that U.S. nationalism renders all foreigners, even the Germans, as The Other and as killable gooks. Even decades after the war, the liquidated Enemy is not to be humanized. Americans are the only humans with full rights (except against their own government), with British and Israelis close behind.

On the other hand, didn’t some of the right defend Reagan when he said conscripted Germans were also victims of the Nazi regime? Surely if that was not too inappropriate, neither should be the idea that civilians incinerated at Dresden were victims who should be remembered; and surely simply setting foot in the city is not in itself “anti-American.” For a powerful dramatization of the horrible event by the great figure in American literature, Kurt Vonnegut, who was a POW in the city that was bombed by his side, see Slaughterhouse Five.