Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Gaza
War crimes, genocide, empire, racism, and the falsification of history
On August 6th, 1945 the United States was the first, and to-date the only, state to ever use nuclear weapons on human beings. At roughly 9:15 that morning a B-29 bomber dubbed Enola Gay dropped a bomb named Little Boy which, for maximum carnage, was detonated roughly 2,000 feet over Hiroshima, killing 10,000 Japanese troops, 12 Allied prisoners of war and 156,000 civilians in an unprecedented display of such a weapon of mass destruction. An exultant Harry Truman called it “the greatest thing in history.”
Three days later the U.S. repeated the atrocity in Nagasaki. On August 9th, another B-29 named Bockscar took off carrying a bomb nicknamed Fat Man intended for the city of Kokura. But because of poor visibility the bombing run was switched to Nagasaki and, once it had arrived, the secondary target was not visible either. But the show had to go on, so at almost precisely noon the crew of the B-29 dumped Fat Man anyway, several miles from the intended target, detonating it 1,650 feet above Nagasaki, obliterating half the city and killing 150 Japanese soldiers, 13 Allied prisoners, and 80,000 civilians.
Even today, many liberals mouth the line that Truman's bomb saved American lives by ending the war. In the middle of a discussion with this writer about Hiroshima, the friend waved his hands in dismissal: "Hard things have to be done in circumstances not of our own making."
But when you're a superpower, as the United States has been since at least August 6th, 1945, almost every circumstance is of its making.
It is a presidential prerogative to be able to send hellfire missiles into someone's bathroom window without consequence — a perk extended to Israeli prime ministers under U.S. protection. When Donald Trump fantasized about murdering someone with impunity in Times Square he was not only anticipating his own future impunity but describing that of every US sitting president. Trump is just the latest monster we have elected many times before.
"Hard things" and "hard choices" are hollow phrases used to defend the indefensible. They imply that only a select few, unencumbered by normal human, moral qualms or trifling legalities, are capable of making the tough decisions that "keep us safe." An example from popular culture is the monologue delivered by a fictional Colonel Nathan Jessep in Aaron Sorkin's "A Few Good Men."
"You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? … You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don't want the truth, because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall."
Naturally, no perversion of ethics or morality can be accomplished without the falsification of history to cast these “grotesque and incomprehensible” choices in the most favorable light.
If we are to believe such creatures, the Israel-Palestine conflict began on October 7th, 2023. A century of Israeli colonization, ethnic cleansing and land theft is completely irrelevant and instead substituted with vehement declarations that "Israel has every right to defend itself" — at least to the extent that any home invader has the "right" to defend himself from someone whose home he has invaded at gunpoint and tied to a chair.
The American use of nuclear weapons on Japan was an uncanny precursor to Israel's carpet-bombing of Gaza. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki a combined 36 kilotons of TNT were used to level both cities. The kilotonnage dropped by Israel in its latest war dwarfs that dropped by the Allies on Dresden — and even the 25 kilotons dropped on Baghdad in 2003. By July 2024, provided unlimited munitions by the Biden administration, Israel had dropped 36 kilotons of munitions on Gaza. The past year, with Trump’s complicity, that number has only increased.
Israel has now surpassed all previous records for the number of kilotons of weapons used to snuff out human life in a relatively small area.
Truman's mendacious justifications for dropping the Bomb were very much like Netanyahu's excuses for the total destruction of Gaza and the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. Of the 226,000 Japanese killed, only 20,000 were military casualties. Virtually every justification for dropping the Bomb recited by Truman, Oppenheimer, Department of Defense officials, or echoed by a compliant, cheerleading media until they became "true" was spun from a tissue of exaggeration and lies.
But not everyone bought it. General and future President Dwight D. Eisenhower dismissed the human costs of slaughtering so many civilians: "Japan was at the moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of 'face'. It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
J. Samuel Walker, Chief Historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote, “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it."
Katie McKinney, Scott D. Sagan, and Allen S. Weiner argue in Lawfare and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that today the 1945 bombings would be considered a war crime and that
"The archival record makes clear that killing large numbers of civilians was the primary purpose of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; destruction of military targets and war industry was a secondary goal and one that “legitimized” the intentional destruction of a city in the minds of some participants. The atomic bomb was detonated over the center of Hiroshima. More than 70,000 men, women, and children were killed immediately; the munitions factories on the periphery of the city were left largely unscathed. Such a nuclear attack would be illegal today. It would violate three major requirements of the law of armed conflict codified in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions: the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. There could be great pressure to use nuclear weapons in future scenarios in which many American soldiers’ lives are at risk and there is no guarantee that a future US president would follow the law of armed conflict. That is why the United States needs senior military officers who fully understand the law and demand compliance and presidents who care about law and justice in war."
"In his first radio address after the bombing of Hiroshima, President Harry S. Truman claimed that “[t]he world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”Footnote1 This statement was misleading in two important ways. First, although Hiroshima contained some military-related industrial facilities, an army headquarters, and troop loading docks, the vibrant city of over a quarter of a million men, women, and children was hardly “a military base” (Stone Citation1945, 1). Indeed, less than 10 percent of the individuals killed on August 6, 1945 were Japanese military personnel (Bernstein Citation2003, 904–905). Second, the US planners of the attack did not attempt to “avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” On the contrary, both the Target Committee (which included Robert Oppenheimer and Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project) and the higher-level Interim Committee (led by Secretary of War Henry Stimson) sought to kill large numbers of Japanese civilians in the attack. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was deliberately detonated above the residential and commercial center of the city, and not directly on legitimate military targets, to magnify the shock effect on the Japanese public and leadership in Tokyo."
Sun Tzu wrote of the "selective, instant beheading of military or societal targets to achieve shock and awe." The Nazis called it Blitzkrieg. The U.S. doctrine of “Shock and Awe” was codified in 2005, two years after the “Battle of Baghdad.”
“Shock and awe” — or whatever you call the use of massive force for terror — always expresses itself in genocidal rage and is fed by domestic racism. During World War II Japanese American citizens were rounded up (euphemism: “interned”) and placed in concentration camps.
White Americans were even given instructions on how to differentiate a “Jap” from other Asians:
In 1942 Fortune Magazine managed to roll up every Japanese stereotype together with a call for the destruction of “medieval” Japanese society and its false gods:
Today the aims of Israeli generals and Israel’s far-right government are no different — to vent racist genocidal rage on a despised population through the disproportionate use of military power, ostensibly to demoralize the enemy but in fact designed to scrape him off the face of the earth.
A recent Haaretz poll showed that a shocking 82% of all Israelis approve of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Last year a couple of podcasters broadcast an episode (since removed) of a podcast called “Two Nice Jewish Boys,” expressing not only their approval of ethnic cleansing but of genocide.
“If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second,” Eytan Weinstein, co-host of the Israeli English-language podcast Two Nice Jewish Boys, said in an Aug. 9, 2024 episode. His co-host Naor Meningher went on to reiterate several times that he would press that extermination button “right now,” adding that “most Israelis would.”
And if you think these two psychopaths represent Israel’s fringe, both genocide enthusiasts hosted Deborah Lipstadt, Joe Biden’s “antisemitism” advisor, on one of their episodes.
Add to this the thousands of social media posts by Israeli troops in Gaza self-documenting war crimes and looting. All this is in line with incitement so frequent and numerous that Law for Palestine has documented incitement by more than 500 Israeli legislators, journalists, and the military calling for the annihilation of Palestinians.
While the disproportionate use of weaponry is based on hate, not strictly self-protection, the very nature of such wars always betrays the true aims of the colonial powers that use them.
When an imperialist power has virtually unlimited armaments for “Shock and Awe,” every day is an opportunity to terrorize smaller nations — or share its munitions with geopolitical allies.
When an imperialist power chooses warfare designed to cripple and demoralize “societal targets” through the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, it is always and predictably accompanied by an enormous loss of civilian life. And that is by design when you are not fighting an enemy as much as subduing a nation.
The generals have long ceased worrying about how many women and children they will slaughter. But, more importantly, the imperialist powers deliberately choose these tactics in order to reinforce hegemony and destroy global (or local) rivals.
As we peel away the lies and propaganda that America’s many wars and military adventures are built on — lies that also permeate the teaching of history, particularly around race — we need to question the propaganda we are continuously fed. A lazy, tractable media is always more than happy to repeat the conventional wisdom or reprint an official story, even verbatim, but sometimes they reveal (as the Washington Post did not that long ago in a story about the Bomb) some new finding based on diving into archives to see how history was really made.
This is what happened with contemporary scholarship on Palestine. Until Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, Rashid Khalidi and others began poking around Israeli archives, the "official story" went something like this:
"In 1947 the Zionist leaders accepted the UN partition plan, which was rejected by the Arabs, who united to launch a war to expel the Jews from Palestine, a war during which Israel narrowly escaped destruction. In the course of the war, the Palestinians fled at the behest of Arab leaders. Later, Israel sought a peace which has always been refused by every Arab state."
What the “new historians,” many Israeli, actually discovered was that Israel had long planned to completely depopulate Palestine of Arabs, and in 1948 they came close to finishing the job. 80% of Palestine — over 500 cities, towns and villages — were emptied of Palestinians through murder and terror.
References to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by one of the planners can be found in the diary of Yosef Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Transfer Committee and Chief of land confiscation operations. On December 20, 1940, Weitz referred to a plan later referred to as Plan Dalet in his diary: "The only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. They must all be moved. Not one village, not one tribe, can remain. Only through this transfer of the Arabs living in the Land of Israel will redemption come," he wrote.
The Zionist “solution” to the Palestinian Problem was formulated more than a year before the Nazis came up with a similar “solution” to the Jewish Problem.
But this is all Zionism 101. "Transfer" was the 1940's Zionist term to describe ethnic cleansing. Israelis still use it and mean it in its original sense. Theodor Herzl had written in 1896 in his own diary, "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country." In the 1950's another plan, Operation Yohanan, was conceived to ship to South America any remaining Arab Christians who had not been "transferred" in the 1948 Nakba.
75 years after the Nakba, Israel is still trying to eliminate Palestinians. And in 2025 it even revived the “South American” plan — this time the end of the line for “transferred” Palestinians was to be Africa.
To the average liberal Zionist American or Israeli, such narratives are unimaginable cognitive dissonance and are rejected out of hand as blatant antisemitism. Nevertheless, they are unpleasant historical facts that must be reckoned with honestly — just as the truth behind bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki is unimaginable to a liberal American because he simply cannot bring himself to believe that his country could ever commit a crime so heinous.
140+ days into the Trump administration many Democrats fondly remember the last president a bit too wistfully. For the average liberal, Joe Biden is credited with making "hard choices," even as the enthusiastic self-described “Zionist” signed on to assist Israel's genocide in Gaza.
But Biden’s choices were never that difficult to make because every president surrounds himself with national security advisors, generals, admirals, lobbyists, donors, a handpicked defense secretary, relies on the assistance of Congressional and Senate Foreign Affairs Committee members from his own party (people like Bill Keating), or has been delegated war powers that actually belong to Congress, by men exactly like himself.
Foreign affairs experts call this assemblage of homogenous and self-reinforcing decision-making “The Blob” — institutional group-think by a revolving door of business and foreign policy interests and lobbies, some foreign. Within the “Blob” there are no principled positions, no out-of-the-box solutions, only pre-approved policy based on the expectations of interests that have paid to bring the president to power and keep him there.
All of this fosters legal and moral isolation as well. Who in the Blob is going to remind the President that genocide is wrong? At the end of the day, such creatures don't make hard choices at all; they play the parts they were hired, or appointed, to play. This is, after all, how Capitalism works. Only after they leave government (men like Matthew Miller) do they occasionally screw up the courage to tell the world that the boss was wrong or that they themselves were lying to the public.
Of all the dismal aspects of American foreign policy madness, the worst may be the almost messianic belief that America has a divinely ordained “exceptional” mission in the world, that it must maintain a military edge at all cost, must be allowed to operate freely on foreign soil or interfere in the affairs of other nations at any whim or minor provocation — that only the United States has valid national interests. There is only one other nation that shares such a messianic view — Israel.
Unburdened by conventional morality or ethics, swatting away trivial Constitutional and legal barriers to illegal acts, surrounded by ideological clones, and armed with an almost fundamentalist religious belief about the nation, a president's "tough" decisions are actually quite easy, fairly rote. He simply does what he is paid to do. All the rest is public relations.
As for the rest of us, the lies we tell ourselves about the abilities and decency of these "exceptional" men to make "hard choices" to "keep us safe" — this just keeps us electing sociopaths and genocidal maniacs, always voting against our own interests.
This is excellent