Bombing the enemy.

So far, the only person to have ordered the use of an explosive nuclear device is a hysterical American president. Not once but twice, at different altitudes to see which was the most effective in destroying a city. To situate the hysteria, the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were but the apotheosis of a campaign aimed at the urban destruction by carpet bombing of Germany and Japan. For three years the Anglo-Americans had thought nothing of the mass murder of enemy non-combatants, of women and children. Collateral damage was a way of sapping the adversary’s morale. Burning the innocent to death had become the ordinary night-time occupation of thousands of airmen, and it was condoned by the millions who glorified these routine massacres. The bombing raids were dangerous missions, planes were shot down and crews lost their lives, and the constant toll masked the terrible destruction that was being wreaked. Even the torching of Dresden was deemed no more than a regrettable mistake. By August 1945 the annihilation of a city had become a commonplace occurrence. Doing it with a high-flying plane and a single bomb was the only novelty. And, to show it was not a freak event, the experiment was repeated signaling to the world who was the boss.

War dehumanizes, and total war… Killing can be just a day’s work for a professional. He has chosen his career and trained for it, and his victims are targets he must hit. He obeys orders and need not be emotionally engaged, concentrating on the difficult task at hand. Whereas mobilising a whole nation for war needs strong emotions such as hate, as well as convictions of moral, cultural or racial superiority. Caught up in the maelstrom of war the conscript soldier does what he is commanded to. On the home front, however, there must be a conviction that the nation has right on its side. This is best brought about by demonizing the enemy. He is the aggressor who commits atrocities, which justifies all counter-reactions of the same kind. The attack on Pearl Harbor brought America into the war on a great wave of patriotic outrage (1). The images of the event were used effectively to raise the emotional intensity. And more images followed from the battle fields and from Hollywood that showed the struggle of good against evil. In Europe the bad Nazis, Fascists and collaborationist governments were oppressing their own people as well as making war. No similar distinction was applied to Japan. It seems unlikely that Harry Truman would have ordered the vitrification of Hamburg and Genoa with same callousness. America was of European descent – those whose ancestors were African, Mexican or Native did not count the politically – and had to make the distinction between its cultural origins and the gangster régimes who had usurped power. There were no such links with Japan, which allowed a confrontation of civilisations with racial undertones (2).

Any government can declare war, as it is usually an executive prerogative. But maintaining a war effort needs wide public consent. This is because the nation pays the price of war, the budget as well as the dead and wounded. Vietnam was America’s last conscript war. The disturbances and disruptions it brought to American society led to revolt and armed rebellions, and indirectly to the end of conscription. Since then the West has fought its wars with career soldiers, which had not happened since the final colonial land grabbing of the late 19^th century. A hundred years of conscription had come to an end, signifying the changed nature of conflict from total war to counterinsurgency. It was a return to empire and asymmetric combat. The end of the USSR and of the Cold War signified the end of an era where the two major powers had jostled for control of the world without being able to confront each other directly. The Cold war was basically an arms race, with ideological subversion and proxy intervention at the periphery. But it still functioned on the mode of general mobilization, and the continual threat of war was perceived as an ongoing conflict. The sudden collapse of the Soviet menace left America and its NATO allies with an overdimentioned military industrial structure. And, a bit like Rome after the Punic wars, the temptation of empire was too great to resist.

To justify the maintenance of a large war machine, governments need a plausible enemy. Between 1991 and 2001 none presented itself, so defense budgets were slimed down considerably and public deficits were reduced accordingly. For a while it seemed that policing the world would be a simple task that could be outsourced and privatized. It must have been an anxious time for the military complex until the events on 9/11 gave it new future prospects. Holding down the empire would be much more demanding than had been expected. So America went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the gun merchants invented new weapons. And all would have been for the best, except for the cost at a time when vast sums were being blown to the four winds by exploding bubbles of speculative credit. The Western empire imagined it could master the planet, but it is already overstretched militarily and financially. Its decline and fall seems to be approaching quickly.

1. Whether Pearl Harbor was provoked, planed or allowed to happen by the Roosevelt administration is of little importance. It was, however, hugely instrumental in establishing a belligerent mentality, as was 9/11 sixty years later.
2. Japanese Americans were put in concentration camps. It would have been difficult to do the same with Italian and German Americans.