Fifty-seven years ago, before the crimes at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the US firebombed Tokyo killing an estimated 100,000 civilians. A little later, the US went on to win the distinction of being the only government in history that has used atomic weapons against human beings. Our government is worse than the worst serial killer or terrorist. At its best it’s dishonest and corrupt and at its worst it’s organized genocide and institutionalized criminality.
Of course, war crimes and megadeaths are permissable if you are the victor.
“Until the San Francisco Treaty in 1952, Japan was under control of the occupation forces, and when they arrived, they applied media restrictions, saying that one should not report things which reflected negatively on the United States,” said Shinichi Arai, a historian who has written a comparison of European and Japanese civilian bombing. Later, as the country formed a close alliance with the United States, he said, “we were too busy trying to rebuild our country, and trying to forget the past.” …
For Americans, it would raise questions about the prosecution of the war according to standards that Washington had long denounced as inhuman. “With the firebombings, we crossed the line that we had said was clearly beyond the pale of civilization,” said John Dower, a leading American historian of Japan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The American reaction at the time was that they deserved it. There was almost a genocidal attitude on the part of the American military, and it extended to the American public.”
