 Comencem, doncs, després d'aquesta apertura de l'Ajuntament. Let's continue, then with our session, with a friend and great colleague. We're very happy that he's been able to be here with us and that it's gonna bring a new perspective, que és la creació literària i literatura. Si no ho coneixes, Keith Lowe és l'altre de diversos llocs en la Segona World War. En 2007, va publishar Inferno en les bombes de Hamburg durant la Segona World War, començant en 1943, i en Hamburg, perquè té molts canals, els bancs, no sé si has vist, els xaltres i els bancs són grans estructures concrets. Hi ha ciutadans, en dins, i sculptures. I anem a parlar d'això, durant aquestes sessions. En 2012, va publishar Savage Continents, que va ser sobre l'Europa després de la Segona World War. I, recentment, va publishar Prisoners of History, en què reflecteix en bombes en la Unió Europea, i també monumentes a la guerra. I, potser, l'últim lloc pot ser sobre els avatars en el sud de l'Europa i la mediterrània i l'art. I els llocs han estat translatats a més de 20 llengües. I hem convidat ells per l'espeix, i per escoltar les reflexions molt interessants, com a algú que és un gran comunicador, vam veure en la llibertat europea de l'Europa, dos dies fa, i ell va parlar de la importància d'aquest espai de memòria durant la Segona World War, i de la importància per la nostra societat current, no només d'un punt turista, però també de la importància de reclamar d'entrar en aquest espai. Bona tarda. Moltes gràcies, Jordi. Ok, doncs, Segona World War, bé, vaig començar una mica més tard. És una raó de la natura humana, que, com que trobem una nova tecnologia, la primera cosa que fem és posar en compte com usar-la per aturar una altra. A l'anàlisi del XXI, quan el món era encara molt exigent sobre l'invenció d'aeroplanes, el novel·le de la novel·la de la ciutat, H.G. Wells, va escriure un llibre sobre com els aeroplanes serien usats per agafar la guerra. El seu novel·l diu la història de, estranyament, un atac germà a l'America, que sortia de degenerar a un conflicte global. Però alguns dels seus descriptions són quals és el llibre. Per exemple, aquí és el discreta de la bomba de New York, en el seu llibre. D'acord, ell diu, que s'ha assabentat la ciutat com un fill que s'assabotarà les ciutats de brick i card. A l'anàlisi, ell va deixar ruins, i les conflagracions, et vas cens any també. A l'anàlisi hem anat al응ant la ciutat, però la ciutat va turbine. Allò va reduir, ok?, és una llum robust, i va mana, i va cantar fins a Ark perność.town i la nostra� van estar gaudits. Tenia already i vaig Voiceover i es va posar. que no va passar fins a 1911, quan els italiens bombaven els truques d'Ottoman a Núrcia d'Africa, però, de clar, els efectes d'això no eren iguals, el que els H.G. Wells va descriure. La tecnologia era encara molt primitària. A l'1ª World War, no hi havia una cosa tan gran que bombava. L'estat britán pionejava la pràctica d'anar i, a més de les línies franques, a bombar el ràdio germà, el aeròntic germà, i tal. Però, en realitat, el seu sucess was pretty limited. I els germans també fos zeplins i aeroplanes al costat d'allò a Londres, a bombar a Londres. Però, les bombes, a més de la mena de dama, no tenien una diferència a la guerra. A més a més, militari theoristes d'aquesta manera coneixen que això era una revolució. Per què concentren els teus esforços en el fons de la batalla quan aeroplanes poden avançar al fons de la batalla i destruir les línies de la sèrie d'aquestes? En realitat, per què s'obliden amb l'armi a tot quan poden completament bypassar algun armi amb aeroplanes? Des de la First World War, militari theoristes d'aquesta manera van ser molt excitats per aquest potencial de bombar-se com un armi. Aquí hi ha tres de les més influències de les persones del 1920s. Hi ha, en realitat, unes diferències més grans entre les quals cada d'aquests men s'ha pensat. Però s'ha acabat de dir que, en el 1930s, les seves pensions eren més o menys coalesçades en una teoria de bombar generalment acceptada. No hi vaig anar en detall, perquè no tenim temps. Ara, la més important part d'aquesta teoria de bombar estratègica és la desgràcia de la batalla. Ara, per la primera vegada en la història, pots bypassar la batalla. Pots volar al centre d'una nena, a les xarxes, les ciutats, els parlements, i pots atacar-les a la seva màquina. Les aspectes físiques són molt obvius. Pots usar bombar a destruir l'esforç de les nostres enemes. Però hi ha una cosa molt important, espiritual o psicològic a l'esforç de tot això. Perquè bombar és tan precis, és tan violent, tan overwhelming, pot ser utilitzat a destruir els meus enemes moral, pot ser utilitzat a shockar-los a la submissió. Aquest és el que els americans diuen, shock-en-or, durant la guerra d'Iraq. S'ha adreçat perquè era una cosa nova, però és una altra idea. A partir d'aquesta idea, bombar ha estat l'últim weapon. It can win wars all on its own, according to this theory. Because when your enemy knows that you can strike them anytime, anywhere, why would they carry on fighting? Of course this theory worked on a small scale when it came to fighting rebellions in the British Empire or in Libya or Ethiopia, if you're Italian. But the first time it's going to be tested in Europe on a large scale was during the Spanish Civil War. You're going to be hearing much more about that from people who know more about it than me, so I won't say any more about that now. Instead I'm going to talk to you about the Second World War, which was really where bombing finally became the weapon that all the theorists and the science fiction novelists dreamed that it would be. The Second World War began with a promise by all sides not to bomb civilians. Right at the beginning of the war, President Roosevelt appealed to both sides to renounce the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian populations and both the British and the Germans ostensibly agreed. But of course this promise was almost immediately broken. When the Germans attacked Warsaw in 1939, they bombed it indiscriminately as a way of shocking and owing the Poles into giving up. In 1940 they did the same thing in the Netherlands, especially Rotterdam. Rotterdam is actually quite an interesting case because when the German troops arrived there, they issued an ultimatum to the defending forces. They basically said, give up now or we will bomb your city. This is exactly what soldiers did during medieval times. It's Genghis Khan, but with modern technology. Now the British also promised not to act like this. They actually began the war by attempting to bomb only very specific targets and avoid hitting civilians. The problem was that they weren't very good at it because in order to hit a specific target you have to be able to see it, of course. That means flying by day in a big, slow plane full of bombs. And it also means taking your time over the target. As a consequence, they were very easy to shoot down. So in the first few months of the war, British bomber forces were decimated by the German defences. So in the end they stopped bombing by day, as you would. And they began bombing by night instead. Now they couldn't see their targets. And as a consequence, their accuracy was absolutely appalling. Actually, the RAF conducted a report in 1941 into their accuracy and they discovered that only a third of the bombs that they dropped actually hit within five miles of the target they were supposed to be aiming at. So that's how bad the accuracy was. As a consequence, in 1942, they gave up trying to bomb any specific targets at all. They just bombed whole cities, hospitals, factories, houses, everything. They just bombed everything. It was easier, simpler, more efficient. Meanwhile, the Americans joined the war. When they arrived in 1942 in Europe, they started. Just like the British did, they had high ideals about not bombing civilians. And unlike the British, actually, throughout the war, they continued to bomb in daylight so that they could see their targets properly. But the reality of it was that, by 1945, their accuracy was not much better than that of the British. This is partly because of the weather. What's possible in the clear blue skies of California is not so possible over the cloudy skies in Germany, for example. It's also partly because of a very human emotion, fear. It's very hard to be accurate when your hands are shaking because Messerschmitts are attacking you on every side and flackers coming up from underneath. So American crews became a bit notorious, really, for dropping their bombs too early before they quite got to the target so that they could get out of there as quickly as possible. So you see, in the end, more or less, we all bombed fairly indiscriminately during the war. British, Americans, Germans, all of us. And we justified it to ourselves with the hope that, at least we were shortening the war. I do want to stress that the intentions were kind of good behind here. Military men aren't always monsters. They genuinely thought that their bombing would end the war early. And, of course, if you end the war early, you're actually saving lives. But this is not how it looked to people on the ground. So I want to turn now to those people because, you know, the whole theory of bombing, particularly the British theory, depends on how civilians will react to bombing. Can we destroy the emeral? Can we shock and awe them into giving up? Now, to explore this, I want to talk about a single bombing operation, the one that I know best, the bombing of Hamburg in the summer of 1943. Hundreds of cities were bombed all across Germany in the Second World War, but the reason I want to concentrate on Hamburg is that, you know, this was the ultimate bombing event. This was the biggest, the most successful, and also the most horrific. What happened in Hamburg was what the British were trying to achieve in every German city that they bombed. So I want you for a moment to try and imagine that you are there in Hamburg in the summer of 1943. The war, still a long way off, really. It's almost a thousand miles away and they're out on the Russian front somewhere. Hamburg hasn't suffered much, really, from the war yet. For example, it hasn't really been bombed in the last year. And though the air raid sirens do go off very regularly, they don't really seem to mean very much these days. So this night, this Saturday night in the summer of 1943, when the air raid siren goes off, your first emotion is likely to be one of irritation. You're tired, you're annoyed, you don't think anything's going to happen. All you want to do is go back to sleep. But let's say for the sake of argument that you, you know, you get out of bed, you go to the air raid shelter, you don't bother hurrying because you don't really think anything's going to happen. In fact, you only really start to feel worried when you hear the drone of the aircraft up above you. And then suddenly the whole sky is lit up in what looks like green and red fireworks. These are what the Germans call the Tannenbaum, is what they call it, a Christmas tree, because they're sort of breathtakingly pretty. But what they actually are, they're the target markers, which the lead aircraft drop so that all the aircraft which are coming afterwards have something to aim at. Well, now for the first time you're beginning to feel a little scared, so you bundle your way into the shelter and you find yourself a seat. This is what most air raid shelters in Hamburg look like. Jordi mentioned that there are one or two really big central shelters with two meter thick concrete walls. But most shelters actually aren't like that, they're smaller, they're community shelters, they're built in the basements of people's houses usually or just underground. They're quite small. Now I've come across hundreds of descriptions of what it was like sitting in air raid shelters like this in Hamburg during the bombing and they are uniformly awful. Many people describe the sound of the bombs which was deafening and the feeling of the walls of the shelter swaying under the force of them. Inside the shelters, it's pure pandemonium, people are screaming, they're praying, children are crying, but what seems to magnify the terror of it all is the fact that very often the electricity generators gave out during an air raid, so this is all going on in darkness. One woman I came across described the physical feeling of what it was like to have a high explosive bomb fall nearby. She said that the really sickening thing was not the, it wasn't the sound of it, it was the change in the air pressure which seemed to sort of suckle the air out of her lungs while all the walls are juddering around her. So imagine if you can what it's like sitting there in pitch darkness surrounded by all this deafening noise while the whole shelter is shaking around you. What scares you most is the noise, the explosions, but actually that's not the most dangerous thing that's happening here. Far more dangerous than the explosive bombs are the incendiaries. All bombing people, the British in particular who ran sort of experiments about this in the early 40s, discovered that what causes the most damage in any bombing raid is not the explosions, it's fire. The reason that they drop the explosives is not to blow up buildings, it's to blow out the windows and to knock holes into the roofs which allows air in and that helps the fires to spread more efficiently. So while the explosives are important, it's the incendiaries that are the main weapon. During that week, over one million incendiaries were dropped on Hamburg alone. That's more than one for every man, woman and child in the city. Now of course, down in your shelter, you don't know this, but dozens of the things have just fallen on your apartment block, just as they have on all the apartment blocks for miles around. So while all the explosions are going on, these incendiaries are quietly setting fire to everything. So you're sitting there, you're surrounded by pandemonium for about 45 minutes, but it seems much longer to you, of course, because you've lost all sense of time. But then at last, the shelter falls silent and at this point you're probably feeling quite relieved, the raid is over and you've survived. But in reality, your problems are just beginning, because soon you can smell smoke. It's coming from somewhere, you don't know where, and the bunker warden comes around with his torch and he tells you that the house is on fire and everybody's got to get out. So you all file over to the door to leave the building and what happens next is kind of beyond imagination, really. When the people stepped out of their shelters on the night of 27th of July, they were confronted by a vision that can only be described as hellish. Here they saw for the first time that it was not just their house which is on fire, it's the whole street and the next street and the street after that. In fact, the fires were so huge that there was just one of them, just one fire covered four square miles. That's a single fire, with lots of other fires dotted around them. Now, a fire which is that big doesn't just burn, it does a lot more than that. Heat, as we know, rises and on that night, there was so much hot air rising above the city so quickly that it sucks in more air from the surrounding areas which blow in to fill the vacuum behind it. This new air brings new oxygen, which helps the fires to burn brighter and fiercer. So you end up with this sort of chain reaction where the fires are getting hotter and hotter and the winds are getting stronger and stronger until the whole city is like a furnace with a hurricane-force wind blowing through it. So when people came out of their shelters, when you came out of your shelter, you didn't only have the fire to contend with, you also had these hurricane-force winds, which are so strong that they can blow a grown man off his feet. There are plenty of testimonies of firemen who went to try and fight the blaze, who had to get down on their hands and knees and crawl against the force of this wind. Parents literally had children blown out of their arms and sucked into the fire. Trees, telegraph poles were toppled by the force of this wind. And of course, the wind is full of sparks. That's the whole point. That's how things get... the fire spreads. Some eyewitnesses actually describe this as being like in a snowstorm, which set fire to their hair, to their clothes, to everything. So as they're running for cover, they have to continually put out their clothes to stop themselves from burning to death. It was a matter of pure luck, whether they, whether you, survived or not. The people who did survive were generally those who found their way to a big, wide open space like a park, or who dived into the canals. But even here, they weren't safe because, of course, many of the canals had oil spilled onto them. So the surface of the water is burning just like everything else. And so we see H.G. Wells' description back in 1908. No longer seems like mere fiction. With hindsight, it feels a little bit like some kind of prophecy. 45,000 people died in Hamburg during that week alone. This is a picture taken by Eric Andres in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. Here's another. The city itself was, of course, utterly destroyed, especially the northeast of the city. Here's a picture of what Hamburg looked like just after the war. You can see it's nothing but empty shells of houses here. Almost a million people became refugees overnight in Hamburg that July. And, of course, they took their stories with them as they fled to all kinds, all other parts of Germany. For a moment, actually, it almost seemed as if the dreams of all the military theorists would come true. For a moment, it looked as if Germany might give up. But, of course, as we know, Germany refused to give up. They carried on fighting for almost two years after this event, until... It's basically another picture of Hamburg which just shows a landscape of rubble and ruins. I mean, it is of Hamburg, but it could have been of any city in Germany. Now, the problem is... How do you remember events like this? I mean, how is it possible for us today to remember this kind of horror without making ourselves mad with grief or with shame, actually? It's a really difficult question, especially in Britain, because, you know, we British don't want to remember ourselves as monsters, you know? We think of ourselves as the heroes of the war. Part of this is the fact that we... What we were fighting was such an image of evil. We defeated the Nazis, the Hitler, the perpetrators of the Holocaust. These are the monsters. And this was just our weapon to try and defeat them. So we can't really say that we're the monsters, but we can't really say that we're the heroes either, I don't think. Ah, but we want to. So instead, we just forget. We simply forget what we did. We pretend it never happened. If you ask any British person about the bombing of Germany in 19... Well, between 40 and 45. You know, many people will remember Dresden. You know, we will even apologize about Dresden. But that's the only concession we will make. You know, most people in Britain have never heard of the bombing of Hamburg. Even though it was more than twice as bad as what happened in Dresden. Twice as destructive and twice as destructive in terms of casualties as well. You know, that's Dresden. Hamburg, we don't remember. We forget about Lübeck and Rostock and Würzburg and Fort Simon and all the other 200 cities and towns that we destroyed. We have no concept of these things really in Britain. How we do remember the war... Well, this is one example. This is a statue of the man who masterminded the bombing of German cities. Arthur Harris, the head of RAF Bomber Command. This statue was raised in the 1990s. I think it was 1992. Outside a church in central London. It kind of remembers Harris as a hero. At the time when this was unveiled there were some quite strong protests by British people. His statue was... it was daubed with red paint. There was graffiti sprayed on it and so on. But actually the protest very quickly faded away and he continues to stand there. A hero outside this church with no mention whatsoever of what he did to German cities. Here's another memorial in London. This one was actually built quite recently in 2012. It shows a typical British bomber crew as they would look when they returned from a mission. And they're standing inside this kind of classical building. It's almost like it's a temple and they're the gods who are standing inside waiting to be worshipped. On the wall there is an inscription saying that more than 55,000 airmen were killed flying these missions. So they're not only heroes, they're also victims. They're martyrs to the war. I don't want to be too disparaging because everything that this memorial says is true. These men were heroes. It took real courage to fly night after night in a plane not knowing if you're going to ever make it back home again. They were also martyrs. I mean, 55,000... That's... More officers died in bomber planes than officers who died in the trenches in the First World War. It was a huge sacrifice they were making. So all the things that this monument says are true. But just as important are the things that the monument does not say. There's no mention here of the 600,000 german civilians that they killed in places like Hamburg. There is no mention of the 75,000 French and Dutch and Belgian civilians that they also killed. I mean, these were people who, you know, they're supposed to be our allies. We're supposed to be liberating them, not bombing them, but we bombed them too in order to win the war. Nobody in Britain remembers these things. The historians forget that we bombed our allies during the war in the name of winning the war. And memorials like this, which could be an opportunity to remember such things, actually deliberately avoid remembering them. Now let's turn to the Germans. Well, how do they remember the tragedy that they suffered? Well, again, this is a really difficult question, i no ho sé. I imagine themselves as the victims of the war when they were the nation which began the war and, in fact, specifically, began the bombing war. If you look at the memorials in Hamburg, most of them are incredibly modest, really, I think. This is a memorial in the northeast of the city. This is a memorial outside a shopping centre, but it doesn't take pride of place. It stands right in the middle of the road. The road is five lanes of traffic on one side and five lanes of traffic on the other side. It's very different from the big grandiose memorial that the British have to their bomber crews. It's kind of almost apologetic, really, in the middle of this road. The inscription, properly there, some of it's cut off, but it only mentions 370 dead in one of the shelters nearby, not the thousands of others who also died in this area. There's no condemnation here of the British airmen who killed them. Instead, actually, the condemnation is of fascism. The inscription also says never again fascism nor war. Now, if the British don't really remember what happened and if the Germans can't allow themselves to remember what really happened either, what do we do instead? Well, the answer is that we institutionalise our forgetting. The solution we've come up with is really quite ingenious, I think. We follow H.G. Wells' imagination that the bombing war was like a kind of apocalypse. The Germans, as we probably all know, call 1945 stundernull, loosely translated into English as year zero. It's almost as if the whole of history before 1945 has been erased and we're starting again from scratch. Year zero. Internationally, we do something a little bit similar, actually. When we think back to the 20th century, we imagine the Second World War as a kind of rupture in the middle of that century. The world before 1945 was sort of destroyed and replaced with a new world. It's a very comforting image of death and rebirth, like the apocalypse followed by the new Jerusalem, if you like. I don't think it's a coincidence that many of the monuments to the bombing war all around Europe are actually Christian monuments with this sort of idea of death and resurrection built into them. All around Europe, for example, churches were destroyed by the bombing during the war. Many of them have been deliberately left as ruins. This is one in Hamburg, the Nikolai Kirche. There's a permanent memorial here to the bombing, and there's a sort of information centre in the crypt, but what really strikes you is the ruin. It's the end of something. This is the end of a civilisation on display. Here's the equivalent in Berlin, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Here we can see the old destroyed church standing right next to the new rebuilt church. Here we can see the apocalypse and the resurrection standing side by side. This is the British version of the same thing, Coventry Cathedral, and once again you can see the ruin of the old church standing there and right next to it, the new modern caring world is represented by the new cathedral. Now, the emphasis of all these places is a very sort of Christian rebirth-resurrection. Coventry Cathedral, actually, has been instrumental in forging links with lots of places all around Europe which suffered the bombing and other horrific events during the war. It's created a sort of international network of forgiveness and reconciliation. And the emblem of this network is the cross of nails. This is a crucifix made from the medieval roof nails, which were found in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral after the bombing had taken place. They found them in the rubble, polished them up and made them into these crucifixes. So here we've got Christianity and bombing combined in a single image. I just want to finish up by saying it's not only the Christian world that does this. I want to finish by saying that the atomic bomb is kind of remembered in a very similar way. We can see ruins preserved just like the old churches in Europe to remind us of the apocalypse which took place here, the ruins of the old civilization. In the museum nearby we can also see clocks and watches that stopped at exactly the time when the bomb exploded. So here is the even time itself was brought to an end by the bomb. Once again 1945 is this rupture, a moment when everything came to an end and we had the opportunity to reset our clocks. All around these ruins in Hiroshima and the museum where these artefacts are displayed all around there are new roads, there are new memorials new world. And what's the main characteristic of this new world? Well, we only need to look at all the monuments that are in Hiroshima. Here's one of them. This is the Children's Peace Monument. There are dozens of others in the park outside the museum in Hiroshima. There is a peace can. There's a flame of peace. There's a peace bell. There is a peace clock tower. There's a pond of peace. The museum is called the peace memorial museum and the park is called the peace memorial park and if the message hasn't got through yet the road which leads you to this sort of new paradise is called Peace Boulevard. There's no condemnation here of the Americans dropping the bomb just as there was no condemnation of the RAF dropping the bomb in Hamburg. Quite the contrary in fact. The bomb in the museum in all the inscriptions and all the memorials when it's referred to it's almost as if it were a natural disaster you know falling from the sky like an act of God. So the message is the same as it was in Germany. The old bad world has been destroyed completely and a new peaceful world has been reborn. It's a kind of beautiful message, a noble message, a necessary message but it's not history. This is how we've chosen to remember the bombing because we can't really bring ourselves to remember the ugly messy reality about what really happened. So, thank you very much. Thank you kids. We have time for a few brief comments. Especially questions but make them brave and splendid. Same thing to... I'm sorry, my English is not... So I'm coming from Berlin and I'm growing up in the GDR in East Berlin and as I remember that we are always remembered this bombing during the war there's some kind of Anglo-American force to break on us. So you see in the GDR in the East Germany and that's part of the Cold War time now the members remembering on the wars that is their war. There's an imperialistic war that has nothing to do with us. So therefore it's very interesting that even in Hamburg they write on fascism. No more fascism because that's their point of view. We are the heroes we are fighting together with the Soviet Union. We are on the bad side of the world, of the humanity. That's just for... I'm sorry. Just a thing to assemble to your presentation was kind of great. I'm sorry. Okay, yeah, thank you. Of course the memory in the East of Germany is very different from that of the West. I concentrated on Hamburg but I imagine memories are slightly different all across Dresden, for example. Well, thank you for your presentation. I would like you to explain a bit more the discussions and the issues that publicly appear before the opening of the memorial in London that you show us for the aircraft men. If I'm not wrong, even the Dresden you visited London before the opening and publicly asked not to be unveiled or something like this. Can you please explain? Yeah, okay. Yeah, there was a lot of... I was going to say there was a lot of controversy but actually what surprised me was the lack of controversy that was in Britain about this. In the run up to the opening of this memorial in the sort of the five years or so before it was built and inaugurated there was a campaign by British newspapers to create a memorial for our bomber boys, because there was this idea that they had been remembered badly by history that they were the heroes who were never recognised because the ideas behind bombing are dodgy to say the least particularly left wing people were remembering them in a bad way. So the right wing press were trying to put across this idea of British airmen being kind of like the victims really that needed to be taken out of their victimhood and celebrated as heroes. I mean it was quite ridiculous really because it was the case in the 1970s that the bomber forces were remembered in this sort of way as like perpetrators of an evil. But during the 1980s and 90s they were kind of rehabilitated and in Britain we realised that it was a normal it was part of the war they weren't doing it for sort of bad reasons they were doing it because it was necessary and horrible it's a complicated thing so it became much more nuanced idea in the 1990s but then newspapers like The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph sort of stirred up this idea of victimhood and we're not remembering our heroes properly I don't really understand why. Other people around Europe especially in Germany reacted badly to this as you can imagine so who are really the victims here and what made it particularly irksome for people in Germany especially but also all around Europe this was 2012 when this monument was opened this is the year of the Olympics the whole of the world is coming to London in a celebration of international sport and so on we're remembering we'll remember our dead but we're not going to remember any of yours it's quite a sort of insular thing which we've seen this insularity of Britain expand towards Brexit and so on over the years I mean that's probably a very long rambling answer to your comment but yeah it was controversial elsewhere kind of wasn't for some reason thank you very much for a very interesting talk something else that we in Britain like to forget is that this bombing war we had practised it in the empire Italy as well had practised bombing in the empire and in Ethiopia and through the 1920s and the 1930s Britain and other countries learned punishment bombing as a strategy if there was an uprising in somewhere in the empire in Iraq in Africa you bomb villages as punishment and it works and this was never controversial at the time there was no international outcry and after the Second World War Britain returned bombing empire and so on un controversial again it is only controversial when it's white people under the bombs arguably so there is many many layers of this heritage and these arguments and it's very interesting so thank you again for your talk yeah I absolutely agree with that during the 1930s especially on the free pay of police in the empire rather than sending a whole army there to keep police forces to keep down any disturbances all you need is one or two planes to drop bombs on people and the protests stop so it was a cost cutting measure as much as anything else produce terror and stop any uprisings it's quite brutal thank you very much for your presentation no, no. Thinking very much about everything you say about the world, everywhere, is almost you are giving the principle thing that everywhere they say just forget it. It's like no one wants to talk about that, after maybe one century, now, here and in Barcelona, and everywhere is the same, forget it. It's like no one wants to talk about this situation, la real història, què és el que passa? No comunicar amb les persones que han fet la guerra. Per què? És terrible. Perquè ningú sap exactament què passa. D'acord. I d'acord. D'acord en el món. No parlo amb aquests persones, perquè són l'oposic. Bé, crec que és millor just saber què passa. Perquè, com que dius en l'oposic de la teva xarxa, la nova tecnologia és quina és l'alternària. I estem en aquest món. D'acord. D'acord. No hi ha ningú en xarxa, d'acord amb les seves xarxes, d'acord amb les seves idees sobre què passa. N'hi ha ningú que veu què passa. I què penses? Bé, moltes gràcies. D'acord. N'hi ha ningú que no vulgui sentir descomptat. Així que just ignoren-lo. I no només el descomptat, sinó que és pànting. Les persones que han patit, no volen recordar-ho gaire. No és sorprès que... que les majories memorials, com les holocaustes i altres, no van ser immediatament després de la guerra. Van venir després, en les setmanes i 80s, hi havia una imatge de memòria d'aquestes coses. 30, 40 anys després, només després d'un lloc de temps, que ens demanem que estiguem i pensem en el que ha passat. Bé, com a víctimes i també com a perpetrators, o fins i tot, els heroes volen celebrar-los. Directament després de la guerra, hi ha monumentes de heroes. The monuments to more shameful things, more difficult things don't start to appear until much later. So, with the terrible things which happen today, I think the same thing will happen, you know. It will be there, in the back of our minds, we all know it, but we don't necessarily talk about it, remember it, concretise it in things like monuments and so on. Well, thank you, kid. We are closing here, we have a coffee time now. Thank you for your speech and welcome again, soon in Barcelona. Next May, I think. Thank you.