In an interview with Sky News Arabia, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza, comparing it to what the United States and its allies did to their enemies during World War II. “Just flatten it. We flattened Berlin. We flattened Tokyo,” he said.
The West loves moments in history to use as a moral example. And there is no greater period of history than World War II to both act as myth and an example of what must be done in order to win. In that war, the enemy became those by which all others have since been compared. Weapons were invented that had been science fiction before the war. Bombers that could drop devices which would flatten cities, chemicals that could burn and reignite until skin and bone are melted away, and rockets that could carry explosives built by slaves to blast cities.
The destruction of cities during World War II has set a prime example. It was not enough to fire bomb Dresden or Tokyo. We had to obliterate Nagasaki and Hiroshima with atomic fury. They say it shortened the war, saved Allied lives, or deterred the Soviet Union. If the mass bombing was limited to World War II, maybe it could be argued that such means were needed to defeat an enemy so evil; a temporary suspension of justice and principles to satiate the need for victory. But the mass bombings in the Korean and Vietnam wars prove this was all a lie.
The United States ran out of buildings to bomb by the end of the Korean war. Millions were killed. Air power destroyed most of the peninsula. There was no Hitler or Imperial Japan. In fact, the same Japanese scientists who had poisoned and tortured to death innocent people—many of them Koreans and Chinese—in the pursuit of military curiosity helped the Americans to secretly infect and kill those same Koreans and Chinese. That war still ended in stalemate.
The Indo-China war was not limited to Vietnam, especially when it came to the bombing campaigns. Laos became the most bombed country in history. Cambodia also suffered beneath the weight of the U.S. Air Force. Neither nation was at war with the United States but hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed and many continue to die from hidden remnant bombs that randomly explode to this day. Ho Chi Minh was no Hitler.
Historical examples had been established. “Just flatten it!” Kill them all.
“There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders,” said General Curtis LeMay of the United States Air Force. During World War II and after he was one of the harbingers of mass death to civilian populations. A skilled pilot and good to those in his command, he understood the bloody business of war. To kill them all: women, children, innocent men. It did not matter. Before World War II when the bombing of Guernica was viewed as an atrocity, no American war master could have survived such a statement. But the war changed the mindset, and what would go on to be accepted by the public.
“Gaza must be burned…I have no mercy for those who are still there. We need to eliminate them,” said Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli Parliament. His sentiments are shared by the former Israeli Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman, who claims, “There are no innocents in Gaza.” It was even suggested openly by Amihai Eliyahu, the Israeli Minister of Heritage to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza. Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu suggested Palestinians are the biblical Amalek, a people who have been commanded for extermination.
Israel’s allies in the United States have been honest and open with their intentions as Israel wages its campaign in the Middle East. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) said, “Israel doesn’t need patronizing lectures about civilian casualties. As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza.” Former President Joe Biden was matter of fact in his statement, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”
Which brings us back to another Senator Lindsay Graham statement. “We are in a religious war here. I am with Israel. Whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself; level the place.” Such language wins donors as well as voters. There are members of the public who love to see the carnage or believe it is a religious struggle or at least a clash between civilizations. Israel is the shield holding oriental expansion at bay.
In his interview with Hadley Gamble, Senator Graham was asked about killing women and children. He answered, “Because what did we do in World War II? Did we think one minute about starving the Germans? Did we bomb every city into smithereens?”
He is correct. The Allies did all that and more. In Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East the United States acted with absolute, self-righteous violence because World War II taught them valuing innocent human life does not matter so long as your enemy can be framed as evil. So long as that condition is met, a president can act as Ghengis Khan or a prime minister may speak with the tongue of a Reichfuher.
We can hear and see it, and there is nothing we can do about it. Might is right. It’s only after the genocides and the mass bombing of cities are over are we are asked to feel sorry for the killers. Decades from now, Israel will be full of PTSD-afflicted veterans, just like in the United States. And they’ll reflect back that all those people had to die because they were a biblical enemy, snakes without redemption.
Now that we have a war with Iran, we can only hope it stops sooner than later. Too many innocents have died already.
