The United States and Its History of War Crimes (Part 1)

In light of the 77th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On the authority of “Respected President” Harry Truman, at 8:15 in the morning of August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped a uranium bomb with an explosive power of 16 kilotons, which is equivalent to 1,600 tons of dynamite. It immediately killed an estimated 66,000 people and later caused the deaths of another 140,000.

In their criminal and geopolitical calculations, the fact of such enormous brutality was not enough for them, and three days later, another nuclear bomb, this time loaded with plutonium, was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, destroying it and causing the death of another 70 thousand.

To this should be added hundreds of thousands of deaths from health problems, injuries, bomb-related consequences and radioactivity, according to UN data. They died in the weeks and months that followed from burns and radiation. More of these were affected as carriers of a cancer-prone gene, which affected their grandchildren. In addition, water, air and land have been contaminated by radioactive precipitation, making those who drink or eat produce from the area sick for decades. The side effects have been going on for years, and they still exist.

These criminal acts, the decision to drop both bombs, occurred when the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany had already taken place, and it was known that the Soviet Union was about to launch a powerful attack in the Far East that would bring Japan under control. who were desperately seeking a path to inevitable surrender.

By March 1945, the Japanese had already lost nearly half a million people. The Americans destroyed part of Tokyo with M69 napalm bombs, killing about 80 thousand people and wounding a similar number.

“We use it – as Truman justifiably said and then in reference to both nuclear bombs – to reduce the suffering of war, and to save the lives of thousands upon thousands of young Americans…”. On the other hand, General Dwight Eisenhower years later issued a different opinion: “The Japanese were ready to surrender and there was no need to hit them with this horrible thing.”

According to respected experts, the cold geopolitical calculation and the main reason for using the bomb was to force the Japanese leaders to surrender before the Soviets entered the war in the East.

Now, was this action by the US government an anomaly? Or was the commission of war crimes rather a rule in the historical development of that force?

Many of these crimes are perpetrated from a distance, wreaking havoc thousands of kilometers from their shores, sometimes with direct strikes, but increasingly with or through their European or Asian “allies”. To a large extent, the United States achieves and benefits from a certain degree of impunity, and from the somewhat tolerant and sometimes complicit treatment of many media outlets.

With the so-called and manipulated “war on terror”, the United States since 2001 has generated a new cycle of death and profit for the military industry, surpassing the number of victims of those terrible bombings against two Japanese cities in 1945.

Crimes against indigenous peoples

It all started long ago. Violence and war are part of being American. It includes the violent acts committed by the colonists, the wars waged by federal forces against the Native Indians of North America, as well as the repeated misdeeds and massacres against them as they were expelled from their ancestral lands to regions far in the West, but in some sense beyond the concept of war crimes.

The killings and attempts to eliminate Native Americans are entirely consistent with the definition of genocide under current international law.

According to historical records and media reports, since its founding, the United States has systematically denied indigenous peoples their rights to life and basic political, economic, and cultural rights through assassinations, displacement, and forced assimilation, in an effort to both physically and culturally. Eliminate these people, those ethnic groups. Even today, the indigenous Indians still face a serious existential crisis.

Survivors of defeated indigenous peoples were interned in reserves in the wasteland; Many of their children were taken from them and sent to boarding schools and boarding homes, where they had their hair cut, their languages ​​banished, and their festivities, in a kind of cultural genocide. For decades, the practice of separating many Indian families and offering their children up for adoption has persisted.

They had to live and witness a profound transformation in their environment: many of their lands were taken over by white speculators; Settlers and ranchers who settled with blood and fire cleared their hunting grounds, and a blunt trail of progress followed: fenced lands, highways, reservoirs, mining pits, railways, power lines, new cities, oil fields, etc.

On Midwest prairies, hundreds of species of grass and woodland have been replaced by soybean and corn monocultures or set aside to build reservoirs without tribal permission.

Statistics reveal that since its independence in 1776, the United States government has launched more than 1,500 attacks on indigenous tribes, murdered indigenous people, seized their lands, and committed countless atrocities. On March 27, 1814, about 3,000 Indian soldiers attacked the Creek at Horseshoe Bend, Mississippi Territory. More than 800 warriors and villagers were massacred in the creek.

Among the most notorious crimes is the Bear River Massacre of 1863, in Idaho, in which 350 members of the Shoshone “nation” were murdered, or that which occurred on December 29, 1890 near Windkney Creek in South Dakota.

At the beginning of colonization in 1619, about two million citizens inhabited what is now the United States. In the three centuries that followed, many perished not only from pathogens and diseases, but mainly from the violence of settlers and federal forces to seize their lands and to expand westward. It is estimated that around 1900 only one in ten indigenous people, less than 240,000, survived the brutal extermination of the nineteenth century. At that time the slogan prevailed that only the dead Indians were the good Indians (Only dead Indians are good Indians).

Life expectancy in the vast majority of bookings is known to be lower than that of many third world countries; Poverty and unemployment rates are usually 40% or more; alcoholism and dependence on social assistance prevail; They suffer from higher infant mortality and lower birth weight, as well as lower levels of education and shorter lives than whites.

Imperial overthrow through war

Since its founding in 1776, that country has only indulged in armed conflict for only 17 years. In many of them, the frequency with which war crimes were committed in the context of feigning global dominance and the use of force was evident, particularly in the past two centuries.

Arrogant and aggressive foreign policy, generating war-like tensions is not situational and does not depend primarily on who lives in the White House. In it, diplomacy and pluralism boil down to an emphasis on intimidation and force.

This is accompanied by campaigns to foment terrorism, based on very high military technology, covert operations, drones, outsourcing of combat missions with the extensive use of mercenaries and affiliated armies, the use of about 800 foreign military bases and facilities in more than 130 countries, among which there are many units US Special Forces carry out deadly “surgical” operations and pursuit.

It is impossible here to collect all or even the bulk of the cases in which the United States has been implicated and committed relentless war crimes, but it can be said without a doubt that this country is the largest perpetrator of such horrific abuses. and deviations.

(taken from The watchful disciple)