Tacitus, usually considered a thoughtful right-wing blogger, looks at the mob in Fallujah and asks, "can I call them barbarous savages now?," then blames an entire people: "If you don't think there's a direct connection between terrorism, culture, and barbaric scenes like this, think again." Peggy Noonan believes it wouldn't be enough to capture and kill the Fallujah murderers and mutilators -- collective punishment is called for: "blow up the bridge" from which corpses were hanged, she says. And Bill O'Reilly thinks we should "knock this place down," "sanitize that whole city" -- as a "final solution."

I wonder if they'd all have similar things to say about the English crowd that witnessed the first shootdown of a German Zeppelin during World War I. Sybil Morrison was there. Years later, she recalled the incident:

"...we knew there were about sixty people in it - we'd always been told there was a crew of about sixty - and that they were being roasted to death. Of course you weren't supposed to feel any pity for your enemies, nevertheless, I was appalled to see the kind good-hearted British people dancing about in the streets at the sight of sixty people being burnt alive - clapping and singing and cheering. Even my own friends - delighted. When I said that I was appalled that anyone could be pleased to see such a terrible sight, they said 'But they're Germans; they're the enemy' - not human beings...."

And I wonder what Tacitus, Noonan, and O'Reilly would say about this photo, which appeared in Life magazine during World War II. It shows a young woman staring at an object on a desk; the Life caption was:

Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her.

The picture appears in Paul Fussell's book Thank God for the Atom Bomb. Fussell, who's no pacifist (the title is not ironic), writes:

Life magazine featured the girl meditating pensively on the skull in a full-page photograph, thus bringing to its several million patriotic readers the good news about Japanese skulls being collected in the Pacific. It's notable that the girl in the photograph is neither a ghoul nor a tramp. She is conspicuously decent and middle class. She is dressed in a nice suit and tasteful earrings, with her blond hair worn up.... The tone of both photo and caption is one of calm normality, without a trace of irony or outrage.

Fussell tells of visiting a friend who'd been a Marine on Guadalcanal during the war and seeing snapshots of Japanese skulls among the ex-Marine's souvenirs of the war.

One was displayed atop a pole, like a warning at the entrance of a "native village" in a jungle film of the 1930s. Another was mounted on the front of a ruined Japanese tank, looking forward like a radiator ornament of the period. Another was not yet ready for display but was being processed. It was being boiled in a metal vat, and two marines were busy poking it and turning it with sticks. One of these marines was my host....

They all deserved to have their bridges blown up, in England and America. And their towns razed. Clearly they were all barbarous savages. Right?

(Links in the first paragraph from Billmon, TBogg, and Atrios.)