The Greatest Generation

Destroy. Destroy. Destroy again.

When destruction comes to define the national purpose,

annihilation becoming the end product of the best-organized communal effort

in history--there is the threshold to remember. By the year 1945

what American believed in--judging not from what they said

but from what they did--was nothing.

I'm sure we are all familiar with the dominant paradigm of America's role in World War II. It goes something like this: we were attacked by an inherently agressive Japan, after which a psychotic Germany declared war on us. We did not start this fight, but we sure did finish it. We were the good guys and, all modesty aside, we saved the world. We crushed regimes that were evil and expansionist. Rarely has there been such a clear dividing line between right and wrong, between good and evil.

I have sympathy with this argument, but it is riddled with holes, and millions of incinerated women and children filled those holes. While it is impossible for any American or Japanese to be totally objective about Pearl Harbor, a couple thoughts: first of all, Pearl Harbor was a purely military target and Hawaii was not a state at the time. Secondly, it can be seen as a classic pre-emptive strike if emotions take a back seat.

The United States did not single-handedly win World War II. It was one of two indispensible powers; the other was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union sacrificed 22 million lives to defeat Germany; the United States sacrificed 200,000 lives in that theatre, all military. For every pint of American blood, the Reds gave a hundred.

The real issue, however, is the means that we employed towards the end of defeating Germany and Japan. When waging war, we must decide: do we aim to break the enemy's capability or to break the enemy's will? In World War II, we decided to break the enemy's will. The means were indiscriminate terrorism, pure and simple.

The United States did things from the air that no modern nation would ever dare do on the ground; it purposefully destroyed entire cities full of civilians. In Japan, for example, there were very few soldiers; the huge majority of them were deployed in China and throughout the Pacific. The United States executed the most destructive acts ever carried out by man against Japan. Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. These were the three largest scale killings every committed.

The United States, as a matter of policy, destroyed these cities, killing 300,000 civilians in 3 days. Women, children, and elderly mostly. Those who attempted to escape the fire bombs by jumping into rivers were boiled alive. Japan's rivers ran thick with melted human fat. With babies. Incinerated by the thousands, melted into their mothers' arms.

All we can say about this is that Japan and Germany, which was subjected to similar indiscriminate slaughter, got the message; they both surrendered without condition and accepted occupation without reverting to guerilla warfare.

In Iraq, we temporarily crushed the enemy's ability to fight, but clearly did not undermine his will. Should we nuke Anbar? No. Analogies between World War II and Iraq are mostly counterproductive, but we must come to grips with this fact: there are no good guys in war. And out greatest generation, in order to win its war over "evil", which surely existed, committed the largest scale single acts of murder in the history of the Earth. The next time you wonder how foreigners could possibly fear the United States and see us as a threat, keep that in mind.