Anthony Gregory on the anniversary of America’s dropping of nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945:
The only way to regard the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so many other U.S. war campaigns, as anything other than state terrorism, is to define the concept in such an absurdly narrow way as to categorically exempt the U.S. from the definition out of pure convenience. If nuclear holocaust inflicted upon innocent civilians for the purpose of securing a diplomatic result is not terrorism, then there is no such thing.
Gregory also pushes back against the 67-year old propaganda line about how the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to end WWII. Incinerating hundreds of thousands of people indiscriminately “was unnecessary in every strategic sense,” he reminds us.
Yet Americans still applaud the act of mass slaughter. As George Orwell wrote in his Notes on Nationalism, “there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral color when it is committed by ‘our’ side.”
