A new Mike Davis book, a new completely over-the-top lengthy histrionic attack on Davis from the establishment.
Until recently, the sperm of UC Irvine professors was not among the many subjects covered in the pages of The Guardian, one of England’s leading daily newspapers. But there it was in John Sutherland’s Sept. 30 column: “Tell Me Lies About Iraq: Politicians, generals and authors are all fighting the fiercest battle of all-to make us believe their side of the story.”
Despite the column’s title, no politician’s statements are scrutinized. No general is mentioned. And the examination of authors is limited to one: UC Irvine history professor Mike Davis.
Sutherland accuses Davis of aligning himself with the forces of darkness by using his new book, Dead Cities: And Other Tales, to poison the public debate in the U.K. over a “preemptive” war against Iraq. “The Iraqi lie factories are in full production,” Sutherland writes. “Davis has his product out early.”
This is strange because Dead Cities isn’t about Iraq. But then Sutherland isn’t actually attacking Davis for anything he has written about Iraq. Instead, he’s infuriated by something Dead Cities reveals in passing about the late, great Winston Churchill in a chapter on the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Sutherland is so upset he uses 14 of the column’s 15 paragraphs to attack Davis as a scholar and a person, in a way that is remarkable for its sneering disregard for the truth and for its incompetence.
Davis says Dead Cities is a study of “‘the radical contingency of cities,’ as well as the Urban West.” One of the book’s “dead cities” is the German Village, whose remains still stand at the Dugway Proving Ground. The U.S. Army Air Corps constructed the German Village during World War II to determine the best way to bomb Germany. “Best” in this context means “most destructive,” and “Germany” means “German civilians.”
And this is where Churchill enters the story.
Winston Churchill was an enthusiastic proponent of bombing civilians, as Davis amply documents. Specifically, Churchill was a proponent of bombing poor and working-class neighborhoods. The “mansions of the Nazi political and industrial elites” were off-limits because, as Davis neatly puts it, “this risked retaliation against Burke’s peerage”-that is, the British aristocracy and landed gentry, including Churchill’s own family. Middle-class neighborhoods were considered poor targets because the space between the homes made it harder for bombs to produce maximum damage. But the crowded conditions of working-class neighborhoods were perfect.
