The vastness of the American Empire is built upon a mountain of civilian corpses and an ocean of innocent blood. Despite historical revisionism to the contrary, US imperialism remains the greatest threat to world peace.
It is an anniversary that almost goes unacknowledged in today’s day and age. One that, at nearly a century old, is fading further into memory while the consequences of it have left lasting scars on human history. 81 years ago this week, on August 6th and 9th of 1945, the United States government would carry out the most heinous and life altering act of terrorism the world has ever seen, dropping two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The immediate explosions resulted in the instantaneous death of approximately 80,000 people in Hiroshima. Days later the second bombing, this time targeting Nagasaki, would vaporize approximately 40,000 civilians, for a grand total of an estimated 120,000 people dead between the two cities combined, with tens of thousands more dying as a result of the aftermath.
In previous reporting, The Free Thought Project has directly addressed the prevailing false narratives regarding the atomic bombing of Japan, with articles such as Hiroshima At 80: Setting The Abhorrent Precedent For Atomic Warfare deconstructing the fabricated belief that such an attack was the only way to end the war without suffering excessive casualties. The analysis relies heavily on the testimony of top military officials of the time, including Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy, 1st Supreme Allied Commander of Europe and later 34th President of the United States General Dwight Eisenhower, Commander of the Pacific Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, and Commander of the Southwest Pacific Fleet General Douglas MacArthur, all of whom expressed disgust at the use of such weapons, insisting that doing so was not necessary to bring about an end to the war.
Likewise, in other reporting such as Justifying Evil: How Roosevelt Used The Pearl Harbor Myth As A Pretext For Atrocity, the disingenuous distortions surrounding the attacks of Pearl Harbor are similarly dissected and debunked, conclusively demonstrating how the narrative surrounding the incident was a carefully curated facade obstructing the fact that the Roosevelt administration deliberately provoked the attack as a manufactured pretext to enter the conflict, rather than the fairy tale of the Japanese “surprise attack” recounted in American textbooks.
Historical records also indicate that despite the myth of “saving lives”, in actuality the densely packed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were deliberately identified by the Targeting Committee to maximize civilian casualties as a means of fully demonstrating the deadly capabilities of America’s new weapon of mass destruction.
While the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are certainly the most well known instances of American mass murder against Japanese civilians, it is not the first of its kind. Only months earlier in March of 1945, under what is known as Operation Meetinghouse, the U.S. would carry out one of the most murderous and horrifying bombing campaigns in the history of the world. Hundreds of B-29 bombers descended over Tokyo, dropping more than 1,600 tons of incendiary bombs including napalm and white phosphorus over densely populated civilian areas, raining a terrifying hell fire from above that would kill over 100,000 civilians and displace over a million more from their homes as more than a quarter of the city was burned to the ground.
Just this attack alone resulted in a number of casualties almost equal to that of the annihilation of Hiroshima. But this campaign didn’t stop with Tokyo, over the course of the next several weeks the US would continue to carry out a ruthless carpet bombing campaign against nearly 60 Japanese cities, predominantly consisting of civilians, with many of them resulting in similar casualty rates. Ultimately, this terroristic firebombing of the Japanese mainland, often referred to as The Forgotten Holocaust, took exponentially more lives than the atomic bombings that took place only months later, exacerbating the nauseating body count by several magnitudes.
Of course, it hardly goes without mentioning that the horrors of American imperialism certainly did not start with the atrocities of the Second World War, with the very foundation of the nation itself built on the back of an indigenous genocide that took the lives of over 100 million native peoples, and four centuries of brutal slavery whose impacts can still be felt in American society today with the lingering shadow of institutionalized white supremacy.
The Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century, in all of its expansionist colonialist fervor wreaking havoc in Central America, is perhaps among the best examples of American imperialism predating the Second World War.
Even World War II itself, it can be argued, can be seen as a result of the ruthless tendencies of American exceptionalism when one considers that Adolf Hitler’s political career and the rise of the Third Reich was covertly funded and encouraged by Anglo-American financial elites and intelligence assets. Or that the psychotic dictator himself directly credited the American eugenics movement as his main inspiration for the Nazi extermination campaign that would lead to the Holocaust. A Holocaust, mind you, that Allied leaders were fully aware of years before publicly acknowledging it, and allowed to continue unabated.
But the kind of American imperialism that would come out of “The Last Great War” amid the creation of the military-industrial complex, the establishment of the United States as a global superpower at gunpoint, and the initiation of the surreptitious Cold War as a means to subvert any opposition to the emerging corporatist world order under the American unipolar hegemon, ushered in an era of unbridled brutality the likes of which the human species has never seen before.
As documented by author William Blum in his seminal book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, the decades since the Second World War were shaped by what amounts to a campaign of global conquest and terrorism on behalf of the American Empire, characterized by military interventions justified on false pretexts, and clandestine regime change operations the world over, all with the intentions of maintaining US global dominance.
Similarly, journalist Vincent Bevins documents in The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, the expansive history of American state backed terrorism employed to subdue any movement that would arise to challenge US dominance, whether they be leftist socialist / communist, or sovereign conservative nationalist in nature.
Beginning with a terror campaign of mass killings committed by US backed fascist paramilitaries in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1965 which resulted in the deaths of nearly a million people, “The Jakarta Method” would then be utilized throughout the world by the American government providing support to right-wing death squads acting as hired jackals for US imperialism ― Seen everywhere, from the backing of anti-Soviet jihadists in Afghanistan, to the heinous regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the horrific crimes of Operation Condor that led to the mass murder of thousands throughout South America.
Since systematizing mass murder as a staple of foreign policy at the tail end of World War II, large scale civilian deaths have become the accepted norm of US military interventionism, rather than an aberration.
Perhaps is this nowhere better documented than in the case of the Vietnam War, where not only the Vietnamese but the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia experienced the life altering brutality first hand. Under Operation Menu, Cambodia alone was turned into a destitute killing field beneath the death rain of 500,000 tons of explosive ordnance, resulting in an estimated body count in the hundreds of thousands, far surpassing the victims of the atomic bombs in Japan only two decades earlier.
Journalist and historian Nick Turse details in Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam utilizing declassified documents and extensive testimonies from veterans and survivors, how the mass targeting of civilians in Vietnam was a pervasive policy decision. Demonstrating that instances of mass murder such as the infamous My Lai massacre were far from rare, and sickeningly standard.
Atrocities in subsequent decades would follow a similar pattern, with drone bombings becoming a preferred method of civilian extermination, and ground forces including proxy armies under the control of US client regimes still carrying out indiscriminate death campaigns; such as the infamous 2017 Mosul massacre which saw the city pulverized to ruins and the streets literally running red with the blood of 40,000 dead civilians.
In Iraq alone, following two decades of illegal occupation, the death toll exceeds 2.4 million.
Even now, as the US maintains its unjust and illegal war against Iran, it continues to deliberately target civilian infrastructure again and again, with the most egregious of these attacks taking place in February of this year as American forces would bomb an Iranian elementary school, leading to the death of 168 children in the worst single civilian massacre committed by the US military since the Vietnam War.
The true extent of the body count due to American imperialism around the globe in all of its forms, from direct military interventions, to destabilization campaigns, regime change operations, proxy conflicts, and the mass suffering of economic warfare and ecocide attributed to US militarism is truly on such a vast scale, so astronomical, that it is quite literally impossible to accurately calculate, though we can rest assured that the death toll resides in the millions.
Yet despite this atrocious anniversary of annihilation against the people of Japan and the birth of the American military mass murder machine, there is another anniversary only recently passed that offers us an outlook to oppose perpetual death and destruction. The anniversary of JFK’s Peace Speech.
On June 10th, 1963 president John F. Kennedy gave what was one of his administrations defining speeches. Speaking to the graduating class of American University in Washington DC, the President would emphasize the utmost importance of a foreign policy rooted in peace, non aggression, understanding, and mutual cooperation.
The president would remark in part:
“I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.”
Kennedy’s words are just as relevant today as they were 63 years ago. As a people, as a species, we have a choice, to either vehemently opposed the ravages of imperialism with all of our might and put our efforts towards creating a better future, or to sit back and wait for our very civilization to be destroyed by the maniacal machinations of mad men.
I, for one, choose peace.
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