{"id":302149,"date":"2025-09-01T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=302149"},"modified":"2025-08-30T16:36:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T15:36:14","slug":"from-guernica-to-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/09\/from-guernica-to-gaza\/","title":{"rendered":"From Guernica to Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mass Killers Have Been Above It All<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

28 Aug 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can\u2019t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem<\/a>, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, \u201cDo not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italy\u2019s air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals<\/a> were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Stop bombing Gaza by duncan cumming is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 \/ Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

Within weeks, Pablo Picasso\u2019s painting \u201cGuernica\u201d<\/a> was on public display, boosting global revulsion at such barbarism. When World War Two began in September 1939, the default assumption was that bombing population centers \u2014 terrorizing and killing civilians \u2014 was beyond the pale. But during the next several years, such bombing became standard operating procedure.<\/p>\n

Dispensed from the air, systematic cruelty only escalated with time. The blitz by Germany\u2019s Luftwaffe took more than 43,500<\/a> civilian lives in Britain. As the Allies gained the upper hand, the names of certain cities went into history for their bomb-generated firestorms and then radioactive infernos. In Germany: Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden. In Japan: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween 300,000-600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by allied bombing during the Second World War, most as a result of raids intentionally targeted against civilians themselves,\u201d according to the documentation<\/a> of scholar Alex J. Bellamy<\/a>. Contrary to traditional narratives, \u201cthe British and American governments were clearly intent on targeting civilians,\u201d but \u201cthey refused to admit that this was their purpose and devised elaborate arguments to claim that they were not targeting civilians.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Guernica by Picasso – The Guardian<\/p><\/div>\n

Past Atrocities Excusing New Ones<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the New York Times<\/em> reported<\/a> in October 2023, three weeks into the war in Gaza, \u201cIt became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II \u2014 including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki \u2014 to try to defeat those countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told<\/a> President Joe Biden much the same thing, while shrugging off concerns about Israel\u2019s merciless killing of civilians in Gaza. \u201cWell,\u201d Biden recalled him saying, \u201cyou carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.\u201d<\/p>\n

Apologists for Israel\u2019s genocide<\/a> in Gaza have continued to invoke just such a rationale. Weeks ago, for instance, Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, responded derisively to a statement<\/a> by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that \u201cthe Israeli government\u2019s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong.\u201d Citing the U.S.-British air onslaught on Dresden in February 1945 that set off a huge firestorm, Huckabee tweeted<\/a>: \u201cEver heard of Dresden, PM Starmer?\u201d<\/p>\n

Appearing on Fox & Friends<\/em>, Huckabee said<\/a>: \u201cYou have got the Brits out there complaining about humanitarian aid and the fact that they don\u2019t like the way Israel is prosecuting the war. I would remind the British to go back and look at their own history. At the end of World War II they weren\u2019t dropping food into Germany, they were dropping massive bombs. Just remember Dresden \u2014 over 25,000 civilians were killed in that bombing alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

The United Nations has reported<\/a> that women and children account for nearly 70% of the verified deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. The capacity to keep massacring civilians there mainly depends on the Israeli Air Force (well supplied<\/a> with planes and weaponry by the United States), which proudly declares<\/a> that \u201cit is often due to the IAF\u2019s aerial superiority and advancement that its squadrons are able to conduct a large portion\u201d of the Israeli military\u2019s \u201coperational activities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cGrace and Panache\u201d of the \u201cIndispensable Nation\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The benefactor making possible Israel\u2019s military prowess, the U.S. government, has compiled a gruesome record of its own in this century. An ominous undertone, foreshadowing the unchecked slaughter to come, could be heard on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel resulted in close to 1,200 deaths. \u201cThis is Israel\u2019s 9\/11,\u201d the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations said<\/a> outside the chambers of the Security Council, while the country\u2019s ambassador to the United States told<\/a> PBS viewers that \u201cthis is, as someone said, our 9\/11.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loyal to the \u201cwar on terror\u201d brand, the American media establishment gave remarkably short shrift to concerns about civilian deaths and suffering. The official pretense was that (of course!) the very latest weaponry meshed with high moral purpose. When the U.S. launched its \u201cshock and awe\u201d air assault on Baghdad to begin the Iraq War in March 2003, \u201cit was a breathtaking<\/em> display of firepower,\u201d anchor Tom Brokaw told<\/a> NBC viewers with unintended irony. Another network correspondent reported<\/a> \u201ca tremendous light show here, just a tremendous light show.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the U.S. occupation of Iraq took hold later that year, New York Times<\/em> correspondent Dexter Filkins (who now covers military matters for The New Yorker<\/em>) was laudatory on the newspaper\u2019s front page as he reported<\/a> on the Black Hawk and Apache helicopter gunships flying over Baghdad \u201cwith such grace and panache.\u201d Routine reverence for America\u2019s high-tech arsenal of air power has remained in sync with the assumption that, in the hands of Uncle Sam, the world\u2019s greatest aerospace technologies would be used for the greatest good.<\/p>\n

In a 2014 commencement speech at West Point, President Barack Obama proclaimed<\/a>: \u201cThe United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.\u201d<\/p>\n

After launching two major invasions and occupations in this century, the United States was hardly on high moral ground when it condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and frequent bombing of that country\u2019s major cities. Seven months after the invasion began, President Vladimir Putin tried to justify his reckless nuclear threats by alarmingly insisting<\/a> that the atomic bombings of Japan had established a \u201cprecedent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whoever Doesn\u2019t Count Goes Uncounted<\/strong><\/p>\n

Journalist Anand Gopal, author of the brilliant book No Good Men Among the Living<\/em><\/a>, spent years in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion of that country, often venturing into remote rural areas unvisited by Western reporters. While U.S. media outlets were transfixed with debating the wisdom of finally withdrawing troops from that country in August 2021 and the flaws in the execution of the departure, Gopal was rendering a verdict that few in power showed the slightest interest in hearing: the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan had involved the large-scale killing of civilians from the air, and civilian deaths had been \u201cgrossly undercounted.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Helmand Province (\u201creally the epicenter of the violence for the last two decades\u201d), Gopal investigated what had happened to the family of a housewife named Shakira, who lived in the small village of Pan Killay. As he explained during a Democracy Now!<\/em> interview<\/a>, she had lost 16 members of her family. \u201cWhat was remarkable or astonishing about this was that this wasn\u2019t in one airstrike or in one mass casualty incident,\u201d he pointed out. \u201cThis was in 14 or 15 different incidents over 20 years.\u201d He added:<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, people were living \u2014 reliving tragedy again and again. And it wasn\u2019t just Shakira, because I was interested, after interviewing her, to see how representative this was. So, I managed to talk to over a dozen families. I got the names of the people who were killed. I tried to triangulate that information with death certificates and other eyewitnesses. And so, the level of human loss is really extraordinary. And most of these deaths were never recorded. It\u2019s usually the big airstrikes that make the media, because in these areas there\u2019s not a lot of internet penetration, there\u2019s not \u2014\u00a0there\u2019s no media there. And so, a lot of the smaller deaths of ones and twos don\u2019t get recorded. And so, I think we\u2019ve grossly undercounted the number of civilians who died in this war.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Citing a U.N. study<\/a> of casualties during the first half of 2019, the BBC summed up<\/a> the findings this way: \u201cSome 717 civilians were killed by Afghan and U.S. forces, compared to 531 by militants\u2026 Air strikes, mostly carried out by American warplanes, killed 363 people, including 89 children, in the first six months of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n

During my brief trip to Afghanistan 10 years earlier, I had visited the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 on the outskirts of Kabul, where I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma. She told me about what had happened one morning the previous year when she was sleeping at her home in southern Afghanistan\u2019s Helmand Valley. At about 5 a.m., the U.S. Air Force dropped bombs. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.<\/p>\n

As Guljumma spoke, several hundred people were living under makeshift tents in the refugee camp. Basics like food arrived only sporadically. Her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, told me that the sparse incoming donations were from Afghan businessmen, while little help came from the government of Afghanistan. And the United States was offering no help whatsoever. The last time Guljumma and her father had meaningful contact with the U.S. government was when its air force bombed them.<\/p>\n

Normal and Lethal<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Shakira and Guljumma lost relatives to bombs that arrived courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, their loved ones were not even numbers to the Pentagon. Instead, meticulous estimates<\/a> have come from the Costs of War project<\/a> at Brown University, which puts \u201cthe number of people killed directly in the violence of the post-9\/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere\u201d at upwards of 905,000 \u2014 with 45% of them civilians. \u201cSeveral times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars \u2014 because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.\u201d<\/p>\n

The increasing American reliance on air power rather than combat troops has shifted the concept of what it means to be \u201cat war.\u201d After three months of leading NATO\u2019s bombing of Libya in 2011, for instance, the U.S. government had already spent $1 billion on the effort, with far more to come. But the Obama administration insisted that congressional approval was unnecessary since the United States wasn\u2019t actually engaged in military \u201chostilities\u201d \u2014 because no Americans were dying in the process.<\/p>\n

The State Department\u2019s legal adviser, former Yale Law School dean Harold H. Koh, testified<\/a> at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the nation\u2019s actions targeting Libya involved \u201cno U.S. ground presence or, to this point, U.S. casualties.\u201d Nor was there \u201ca threat of significant U.S. casualties.\u201d The idea was that it\u2019s not really a war if Americans are above it all and aren\u2019t dying. In support of Koh, a former colleague at the Yale Law School, Akhil Reed Amar, claimed<\/a> that the United States truly wasn\u2019t engaged in \u201chostilities\u201d in Libya because \u201cthere are no body bags\u201d of American soldiers.<\/p>\n

Ten years later, in a September 2021 speech<\/a> at the United Nations soon after the last American troops had left Afghanistan, President Biden said: \u201cI stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war.\u201d In other words, American troops weren\u2019t dying in noticeable numbers. Costs of War project co-director Catherine Lutz pointed out<\/a> in the same month that U.S. engagement in military actions \u201ccontinues in over 80 countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seeking to reassure Americans that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a matter of repositioning rather than a retreat from the use of military might, Biden touted an \u201cover-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.\u201d During the four years since then, the Biden and Trump administrations have directly sent bombers and missiles over quite a few horizons, including in Yemen<\/a>, Iraq<\/a>, Syria<\/a>, Somalia<\/a>, and Iran<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Less directly, but with horrific ongoing consequences, stepped-up U.S. military aid<\/a> to Israel has enabled its air power to systematically kill Palestinian children, women, and men with the kind of industrial efficiency that fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s might have admired. The daily horrors in Gaza still echo the day when bombs fell on Guernica. But the scale of the carnage is much bigger and unrelenting in Gaza, where atrocities continue without letup, while the world looks on.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/p>\n

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include <\/em>War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and most recently <\/em>War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine<\/a> (The New Press). He lives in the San Francisco area.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2025 Norman Solomon<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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