Bombing Civilians

This broadcast aired on Monday, July 29, 2024, between 8 and 9PM Eastern Time, WBCQ Radio in Monticello, Maine, 7490kHz. Below you can find a slightly edited transcript of this radio show. Download an mp3 file of this show here (right-click, and pick “Save Link As…” from context menu).
All broadcasts and podcasts by Hadding Scott’s “Devil’s Advocate Radio” are also accessible on X/Twitter @UnapprovedRadio.

Welcome to the first broadcast of The Devil’s Advocate. I am your host, Hadding Scott. This program is sponsored by ARMREG Limited. That’s A-R-M-R-E-G Limited, a seller of historical revisionist books.

Tucker Carlson, who is surely the best-known figure of what could be called America First alternative media, was recently the guest of Joe Rogan, to whom he stated a number of unexpected opinions.

Tucker showed himself to be, on one hand, a hardcore adherent of some traditional Christian beliefs, including creationism. But in other ways, Tucker Carlson is clearly a very independent thinker.

In this program with Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson had much to say about UFOs, which he thinks are not interstellar travelers, but spiritual beings. Rogan, however, proceeded with questions on the premise that UFOs were extraterrestrial, which developed into a discussion about technology and evolution, since interstellar travel obviously could happen only with a level of technology far beyond what is currently possible for humans.

Rogan suggested that sufficiently advanced technology might become “a god” and supersede humans. Apparently, Rogan had in mind that UFOs might be technological creations that had become independent of their creators.

As a Christian, Tucker Carlson rejected the suggestion that technology could literally become a god, and also he most likely does not believe in extraterrestrial life. But he did accept the premise that technology could take control, and he regarded this as a terrible prospect. Tucker Carlson said that we must make choices according to what is good for humans, which may mean aborting development of certain kinds of technology – above all, artificial intelligence.

Tucker said that artificial intelligence was very likely an example of prescience on the part of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. After Tucker proposes that the development of artificial intelligence should be halted because of the danger that it poses, Joe Rogan says, “You could say the same about the atomic bomb.” Tucker enthusiastically agrees: “Yes, you could!”

As a counterpoint to the whole proposition of aborting technology, Rogan cites the imperative that Robert J. Oppenheimer, who of course was portrayed in a much-promoted Hollywood movie last year, supposedly felt to develop an atomic bomb “before the Nazis did.” In effect, Joe Rogan argues that competition in technology makes the advancement of technology impossible to stop.

Tucker Carlson, however, derided the suggestion that the USA was obliged to compete with Germany to have the first atomic bomb.

“I love that! How’d that work? I love, by the way, that people on my side – I’ll just admit it, on the right – have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians. Like, are you joking? That’s just like prima facie evil.”

Carlson dismissed arguments about the advantages or the necessity of using nuclear weapons. He continued:

“And if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. It’s not a hard call for me. So, with that in mind, why would you want nuclear weapons? How about spending all your effort to prevent this from happening?”

What seemed very significant here to me was that Carlson had just dismissed an argument based on the supposed menace of Adolf Hitler. People who take that supposed menace very seriously will be wondering what Tucker Carlson could have been thinking. At the very least, it seems that in Tucker Carlson’s view, somebody back around 1941 to 1945 was worrying about Adolf Hitler too much.

Tucker Carlson seems to reject the underlying myth of all interventionist political discourse. It’s all based on the assumption that the USA had to stop Adolf Hitler. You gotta stop Hitler!

And Tucker Carlson’s attitude seems to be that we really didn’t need to worry about that. He seems to believe that the original America First movement of the 1940s was right. But perhaps to obfuscate the implication of what he had just said, to avoid being caricatured as a Hitler-lover, Tucker Carlson then compared the development of the atomic bomb to Hitler himself, asking a hypothetical question that was once directed to Ben Shapiro, not very long ago: “Would you kill baby Hitler?”

Rogan, however, once again brought up the supposed relative advantage and necessary evil of developing an atomic bomb. Tucker Carlson’s wariness of unlimited development of technology, and skepticism about human calculations of the relative benefit from technology, seemed to be related to his religiosity. He says:

“It comes from the same place, which is hubris, like imagining that you’re God. You have unlimited power. You have omniscience. You believe that you can imagine what the future is going to be. You can’t. You’re an idiot. You’re a person. The limits of your power are really obvious. The limits of your wisdom, the same. So, like, don’t jump into shit, big things, whose outcomes you can’t predict with certainty.”

That’s, of course, a very conservative attitude. It’s a non-interventionist attitude. Don’t get involved in complex situations on the other side of the world that you don’t really understand. That would be an example of “big things whose outcomes you can’t predict with certainty.”

Perhaps Rogan’s curiosity was sharpened by the fact that Carlson had dismissed the supposed menace of Adolf Hitler without really addressing it. He kind of dodged that whole question. After a few minutes, Rogan returns to that point for a third time. Rogan says:

“Obviously, the Manhattan Project was done in secrecy, but they wouldn’t have stopped it because the imperative of getting this weapon before Hitler got the weapon was what was on everybody’s mind.”

Carlson’s response to that was weak and incoherent. He said:

“Well, Hitler was kind of done by then, but we were in the middle of the logic of war. It was four years of gotta beat the other guy. But no, we should pause and ask, is the machine we’re building worth having?”

It’s a weak response because the supposed menace of Adolf Hitler and the alleged necessity for developing the atomic bomb in the light of that supposed menace has not been dispelled. Tucker Carlson avoids taking any explicit position on whether developing an atomic bomb to use against Hitler’s Germany was right.

He seems to say that it was understandable, but wrong. Tucker Carlson’s rejection of what most people think was an unpleasant necessity, beating Hitler to the atomic bomb, without explaining away the supposed menace of Hitler, makes him look on this particular point like a foggy-minded, sentimental hippie. It makes him appear to be somebody responding based on a moral inhibition without thinking about the consequences.

This is surely not a correct impression. Most likely, Tucker Carlson behaved this way, I believe, because he was inhibited from saying all that he really thought about the matter. In the jargon of Zionist warmongers like Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro, however, it would be said that Tucker Carlson “lacks moral clarity,” because they always say that people who are ready to bomb some supposed enemy to kingdom come have moral clarity. That’s their idea of morality.

Tucker Carlson’s strongest option for dismissing the claim of necessity to beat Hitler to the atomic bomb would have been to point out that Hitler’s government was apparently not even trying to develop one, and was certainly not close to developing one. Albert Speer’s memoir says that Hitler himself did not believe that an atomic bomb was worth pursuing.

Speer wrote:

“In the 2,200 recorded points of my conferences with Hitler, nuclear fission comes up only once. What I told him of my conference with the physicists confirmed his view that there was not much profit in the matter. On the suggestion of the nuclear physicists, we scuttled the project to develop an atomic bomb by the autumn of 1942, after I had again queried them about deadlines, and been told that we could not count on anything for three or four years. The war would certainly have been decided long before then. Instead, I authorized the development of an energy-producing uranium motor for propelling machinery. The Navy was interested in that for its submarines.”

That’s all on page 227 of Albert Speer’s memoir, called Inside the Third Reich.

Incidentally, Adolf Hitler seems to have shared Tucker Carlson’s worry about technology, because Albert Speer wrote:

“Professor Heisenberg had not given any final answer to my question on whether a successful nuclear fission could be kept under control with absolute certainty, or might continue as a chain reaction. Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that Earth, under his rule, might be transformed into a glowing star. Occasionally, however, he joked that the scientists, in their unworldly urge to lay bare all the secrets under heaven, might someday set the globe on fire.”

Now, memoirs are not always 100% reliable, but Speer’s report that there was no German atomic bomb program, at least late in the war, is confirmed by the USA’s post-war investigation of the presumed German effort to develop an atomic bomb, which was led by Samuel Goudsmit. Samuel Goudsmit wrote in the final report for the Alsos Project:

“They had given up altogether the idea of making a bomb, and were concentrating their efforts on constructing an energy-producing machine, which they called a uranium burner. At the end of the war, they had not even succeeded in constructing a self-sustaining reaction, or pile.”

Speer also indicates that developing an atomic bomb would have required an extraordinary investment of resources that Germany, unlike the USA, simply could not afford.

In 1943, when Germany could no longer import wolframite to make cores for armor-piercing ammunition, Speer released Germany’s uranium stocks to be used for that purpose. Their armor-piercing ammunition would have uranium cores.

These facts – the limitations of the German economy, and the fact that uranium was being used in armor-piercing ammunition – these facts were knowable in the United States, but the Manhattan Project went on anyway.

If you read Richard Overy’s book, The Bombing War, or F.J.P. Veale’s book, Advance to Barbarism, you will learn that flattening cities with bombs was not a German strategy. Britain and the United States were the only countries that waged war this way in the Second World War. Consequently, it made sense for the USA or the UK to try to develop an atomic bomb, which would give them an effect similar to that of an Anglo-American thousand-plane raid. It did not, however, make sense for Germany to invest enormous resources in developing a weapon that really didn’t even fit into the German approach to war.

There were some things that the Germans were simply unwilling to do in their struggle for victory. One of Germany’s secret weapons, which they certainly did have, was nerve gas. Speer says that certain individuals — he says Robert Ley and Joseph Goebbels — urged Adolf Hitler to use nerve gas to stop the Red Army. Although Hitler was personally averse to gas warfare in general, because this was being urged on him he proposed it to a conference of generals in the autumn of 1944, when things were starting to look very bad. He proposed the possibility of using Tabun to stop the Red Army.

Not one general spoke up to endorse the idea, because, Speer says, they feared the unpredictable consequences. And, after that, Adolf Hitler never brought it up again.

So there you go. They had nerve gas. They could have used it. They didn’t use it because they were afraid of what kind of genie they would be letting out of a bottle. They were afraid of what the consequences of it might be. This difference in the overall attitude and approach to war, rather than the supposed imperative to get the bomb before Hitler, is probably closer to the truth about why the USA developed an atomic bomb first.

The supposed imperative to get the atomic bomb before Hitler looks like an excuse, and it certainly does not explain the actual use of it against Japan.

In Germany, pursuit of an atomic bomb was never heavily funded., and after 1942, only nuclear power generation was being pursued. The idea that the United States were in a race with Germany to develop the first nuclear weapon was simply false. This would have been a helpful point if Tucker Carlson had known it, to justify his position to Joe Rogan. If Tucker Carlson did know this, but chose not to say it, because it would have looked like defending Hitler, then this is an inhibition that Tucker Carlson ultimately will need to overcome in order to argue coherently against keen verbal assailants like Ben Shapiro and Rabbi Dennis Prager.

Even Joe Rogan, as friendly as he is, seemed to have been dissatisfied with Tucker Carlson’s evasive response to the claim that the atomic bomb had to be developed because of Hitler.

Subsequently, Tucker Carlson came under attack from Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager, who accused him of talking like an anti-American leftist by criticizing the use of the atomic bomb.

In terms of history, Prager’s and Shapiro’s justification for using the atomic bomb relies mainly on two false propositions. Prager and Shapiro say that the use of the atomic bomb ended the war. Actually, it didn’t. And they say that the use of the atomic bomb was necessary for ending the war. Actually, it was not.

Shapiro also says that the USA’s development of an atomic bomb prevented nuclear war with the Soviet Union through mutually assured destruction. But he’s assuming that the USSR would have developed an atomic bomb without the Manhattan Project, and without the theft of its findings – by members of his ethnic group who were Soviet agents.

By all accounts, it would have taken a very long time for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb without access to the findings already accomplished in the Manhattan Project. And since leveling cities was not part of Soviet strategy, it’s unlikely that they would have pursued it. It seems unlikely that they would have pursued that technology if it hadn’t been there for the stealing.

So, Ben Shapiro is completely wrong again. Of course, Americans have always believed that the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Second World War, because those bombs were great attention-getting spectacles, and they were big news, and they happened just before the war ended. So, you know: post hoc ergo propter hoc. Well, that happened after this, so that happened because of this. Well, no, not really. There were other factors involved.

A powerful image like the mushroom cloud is hard to overcome. It captures people’s minds, and you can’t talk them out of what they think they saw and what they think it means. Therefore, I’m going to cite some authorities on this point.

General Curtis LeMay, who had commanded most of the bombing of Japan in 1945, stated in September 1945, a month after the Japanese surrender:

“The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war. The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians coming in and without the atomic bomb.”

Admiral William Leahy, who had been the top military advisor to both President Roosevelt and President Truman, wrote in his memoir:

“Once it had been tested, President Truman faced the decision as to whether to use it. He did not like the idea but was persuaded that it would shorten the war against Japan and save American lives. It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

That’s from William D. Leahy’s book, I Was There, which was published in 1950.

Disputation of the claim that the atomic bombs ended the war goes all the way back to 1945 and came from men of military authority. Neither General LeMay nor Admiral Leahy could be called an anti-American leftist.

Okay, well, people are going to be wondering: if the atomic bombs didn’t end the war, what did end the war? Essentially what ended the war with Japan was modification of peace terms. The United States government retreated from Franklin Roosevelt’s insistence on unconditional surrender, and they let the Japanese know that they would allow the Emperor Hirohito to retain his position. That was all they needed.

They were ready to surrender on that assurance. And that’s what happened. And if that had not happened, the atomic bombs wouldn’t have made any difference – just as incinerating 100,000 people in Tokyo back in March 1945 hadn’t made any difference. They would have kept on fighting because they regarded the maintenance of the Emperor as an institution, the Japanese regarded this as essential to their national survival — and they weren’t going to surrender without that, because they would expect to perish anyway.

Now, what Ben Shapiro and Rabbi Dennis Prager and also Tucker Carlson don’t seem to know is that criticism of the atomic bomb used to be a conservative position. Although criticism of the use of the atomic bomb has for some decades been conspicuously associated with the anti-White and anti-American New Left, this was not always true.

From 1945 until 1965, such criticism of the atomic bomb and of the Second World War generally was associated mainly with conservatives. And they did not all change their views simply because Barry Goldwater became the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, and because Gar Alperovitz’s leftist book about the atomic bomb was published in 1965. Some anti-interventionist conservatives, some of those original America Firsters, survived that kosher sandwich with their conservative views intact.

For our purposes, the most important example of such a paleo-conservative is Russell Kirk. Russell Kirk was the author of The Conservative Mind, which he wrote in 1953. It’s a very important book in American conservatism, and he’s called the father of American conservatism because of that book. Russell Kirk was also for several decades a regular monthly columnist in William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine –  which today has been taken over by neocons.

Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Russell Kirk had been one of those America-First anti-interventionists, like Charles Lindbergh. In 1945, Russell Kirk, like Tucker Carlson today, objected to the use of the atomic bomb on moral grounds. After the atomic bombs were dropped, Russell Kirk wrote to a close friend:

“It will not be long before we are reduced to savagery. We are the barbarians within our own empire.”

The original America First was concerned about foreign influences, especially Jewish influence, dragging the USA to war, and otherwise distorting US foreign policy. In 1954, John T. Flynn, a Georgetown law graduate, a prominent journalist, and an advisor to United States senators, who had co-founded the America First Committee before the Second World War, wrote:

“The great lesson of the war is that in its foreign affairs, the government of the United States must have a state department composed of men and women who think as Americans, who represent America, and who cannot be permitted to become infatuated with the dreams and ambitions and projects of other nations, to the point where they become the agents of such nations.”

This admonition from John T. Flynn should have been engraved on a plaque somewhere, because by 1988, Russell Kirk had become aware of an analogous trouble – except that now the great danger was no longer pro-Soviet, but pro-Israel sympathy. Russell Kirk said:

“And not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.”

During the 1992 Republican presidential primaries, Russell Kirk supported Patrick J. Buchanan, another, of course much younger, giant of conservatism, who, through evolution of his views after the end of the Cold War, came to share Russell Kirk’s jaundiced view of Zionist influence, and also took a more critical view of the Second World War. Criticism of Zionist influence and criticism of the Second World War seem to go together.

Pat Buchanan wrote in August 2005:

“The 40th, 50th and 60th anniversaries of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not times of celebration or warm remembrance. And the reason is obvious. The means we used must trouble any Christian conscience. Were not Hiroshima and Nagasaki terrorism on a colossal scale?”

In that same essay, Buchanan mentioned that the atomic bombs fit into a strategy of terror bombing that had also been used in Germany. The agenda of destruction aimed at the enemies of the state of Israel, beginning with Iraq in 1990, created a déjà vu scenario for criticizing persons of foreign loyalty who were trying to drag the USA to war.

Russell Kirk very likely influenced Pat Buchanan, whose views in turn have become the platform upon which Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016. In his inaugural speech, Trump rejected in a single sentence both, the Roosevelt administration’s stated war aims, and the aims of the Project for a New American Century in the 1990s and first decade of this century, when he declared:

“We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone.”

Trump as president, apparently yielding to the prevailing forces in Washington politics, was not a very steady representative of America First, but Tucker Carlson articulates that position with a much greater consistency and will thereby tend to pull Trump and the rest of his movement back onto its proper course.

So now you see why Ben Shapiro and Rabbi Dennis Prager seemed to become so alarmed when Tucker Carlson criticized the use of the atomic bomb in 1945. He was attacking the entire myth of the Good War, upon which all Zionist warmongering propaganda is built.

This program is sponsored by ARMREG Limited, a seller of historical revisionist books. Listen at the end of this program for details about our sponsor.

Late last year, after the Israeli offensive in Gaza had begun, which seems to consist mainly of bombardment – and destroying cities, basically – the Israeli ambassador to Britain, a woman named Tzipi Hotovely, appeared on Piers Morgan’s interview show and stated that what the Israeli government was doing in Gaza was like the Anglo-American bombing campaign in the Second World War.

“And going back to your own history, when you fight Nazi Germany, you knew that there were many, many civilians that got attacked from your attacks on German cities. Dresden was a symbol, but you attacked Hamburg, you attacked other cities, and all together it was over 600,000 civilian Germans that got killed. And was it worth it in order to defeat Nazi Germany? And the answer was yes.”

She is right that there were many such bombings, other than just the bombing of Dresden. There were two other bombings, in fact, that also generated firestorms. The bombing of Hamburg generated  a firestorm, and so did the bombing of Kassel. The actual casualties in Dresden have never really been established. The highest estimate was that published immediately after the bombing by the German Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, which said 350 to 400 thousand.  Meanwhile the Swiss journal Flugwehr und Technik estimated that 100,000 had been killed. The lowest estimate was 25,000, published by the Soviet government. People who want to make the Germans stop complaining about how they were treated during the war have now made that low Soviet estimate into the official death toll for the bombing of Dresden.  It is contradicted however by a report written for the United States Air Force in 1954, Joseph P. Tustin’s Why Dresden Was Bombed: A Review of the Reasons and Reactions. This is a declassified military document, which you can find online. On page 17 this report for the United States Air Force endorses the estimate of some postwar German authors, that the death toll for Dresden was 60,000. In any case, the bombing of Dresden was a gigantic atrocity. And it was part of a deliberate strategy, what’s often called strategic bombing.

Strategic bombing always involves bombing some kind of civilian target. In its most idealized form, it involves bombing ball-bearing factories and railway junctions, and synthetic fuel plants, and oil refineries, and things like this. But during the Second World War, strategic bombing was very largely about bombing people. They were deliberately trying to create misery and death for German people. And then later in Japan, it was very explicitly a policy of killing people.

The point of it was to try to have a psychological impact on the people, to terrorize the people. It was called terror-bombing. And they used terror-bombing to try to influence the civilian population. It didn’t work.

But anyway, that was a deliberate strategy during the Second World War. And I’m going to talk a little bit about the history of this strategy.

The entire Anglo-American bombing campaign in the Second World War was a war crime. It was a war crime because it aimed at civilian targets. But in that respect, it was not entirely unprecedented. This had been done during the First World War, first by Britain, and then by Germany in retaliation.

Strategic bombing was particularly appealing to naval powers that had a tradition of using artillery against cities.

Since primarily naval powers tended not to have such large armies, it was a lot easier for them if they could just use their ships and the cannon on their ships, for whatever they needed to do. And, so, they would tend to rely on their cannon. If they had to retaliate somewhere, if there was a coastal city, they would bombard that city.

And so there was this tradition among the naval powers, Britain and the United States, of using naval cannon to bombard cities, so that once aircraft became a factor in warfare, it naturally occurred to them that they could use aircraft as they had in the past used naval bombardment. And being naval powers, they had a sense of being immune to retaliation from that kind of thing. Britain dominated the seas, right? “Britannia rules the waves,” right? That’s the famous song. And we have from the Spanish-American War, Columbia, the Gem of the Oceans.

The idea of strategic aerial bombing appeared in a novel by H.G. Wells, The War in the Air. That’s from 1908.

And by the way, H.G. Wells formulated anti-German propaganda during the First World War. The first actualization of aerial bombardment was in the First World War.

Historian Richard Overy says:

“Attacks by aeroplanes away from the front began on the 22nd of September 1914, when a handful of aircraft from the Royal Naval Air Service, on the orders of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, attacked Zeppelin sheds in Cologne and Düsseldorf, followed on the 23rd of November by a raid on the city of Friedrichshafen, where Zeppelins were built. The first German aircraft to bomb Britain did so in retaliation on the 24th of December.”

So he’s saying that the British were the first to do bombing away from the battle lines, and that the Germans did this only later, in retaliation for British action – which would happen also, again, in the Second World War.

These German raids during the First World War struck port cities and then London. Overy says:

“The air raiding was widely condemned as a vicious and cowardly attack on the innocent. The final death toll of 1,239 from all Zeppelin and bomber raids included 366 women and 252 children. Bombing represented, according to The Times, ‘relapses into barbarism,’ a language regularly applied to aerial bombing for the next 25 years.”

As is typical in war, the German retaliation was called barbaric but not the British provocation, during the First World War. The same kind of selective focus and selective indignation has dominated popular impressions also of the Second World War and now the events in Gaza.

The German retaliatory bombardment of England in the First World War accomplished little except to engender in Britain support for more strategic bombing of Germany. Retaliation sometimes is a very bad idea in war. You retaliate in kind, it may be exactly what your enemy wants.

In April 1918, the Royal Air Force was established. The First World War was still in progress. It’s April 1918 and the First World War ended in November 1918. In April 1918, the Royal Air Force was established by merging the Army’s and the Navy’s aerial units. A cabinet’s ruling of the 13th of May 1918 emphasized that this distinct branch of British armed forces was established for “carrying out bombing raids on Germany on a large scale.” This purpose was not actualized, however, until the Second World War.

So, the Royal Air Force was established for the purpose of large-scale bombing raids, which means not supporting infantry or armored vehicles at the front. It means for attacking civilian targets. The Royal Air Force was established for attacking civilian targets.

The leader of the strategic bombing division of the recently created Royal Air Force, Sir Hugh Trenchard, believed that war was “a contest of morale” and that bombing’s effect on morale would be 20 times as great as its impact on material targets. Richard Overy tells us that the Germans, however, drew a very different conclusion:

“Unlike the RAF, German airmen drew from the lessons of the Great War the conclusion that it made much more strategic sense to fight the enemy air force and to protect the ground army rather than squander men and machines on long-range bombing.”

Most of the top brass, even of the British armed forces, saw things the same as the Germans. Overy continues:

“In 1928 the British chiefs of staff insisted on securing a firm description from the RAF on the war object of an air force. In the meetings that followed, the navy and army chiefs of staff made it clear that in their view the vague commitment to attacking the enemy economy and population was not only contrary to international law, but departed from the traditional principle of war that the main effort had to be devoted to defeating the enemy in the field.”

So, the aims of the Royal Air Force, the very aims of the Royal Air Force, were contrary to international law, according to the British chiefs of staff in 1928.

What was unprecedented in the Second World War was the deliberate targeting of civilian populations with deliberate infliction of maximum casualties. Like the Israelis in Gaza, British policymakers in the Second World War justified their atrocities by making accusations of atrocities. You know, the “40 beheaded babies” and all this stuff that we’re hearing from the Israelis.

As justifications for the area bombings of German cities, British policymakers cited the German air raids of the First World War, neglecting the fact that these raids had been provoked. Also, they cited pro-Communist propaganda about what had happened in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. While not directly challenging that propaganda himself, historian Richard Overy tells us that Wolfram von Richthofen, who had overseen bombing in Guernica, Spain, had ordered only an attack on enemy forces and communications in Guernica, while Franco’s forces stated that communists in Guernica had set fires there to make the German air raid look like an atrocity.

The reporting all came originally from a pro-Communist journalist named George Steer, who was not in Guernica, but nearby in Bilbao. George Steer’s reporting had a recognized anti-fascist tone, as Wikipedia calls it, which is another way to say pro-communist. While his report claimed that 1,400 of the town’s 6,000 residents had been killed, the true figure is only 240.

So George Steer grotesquely exaggerated the number of dead in Guernica: 240 versus 1,400. So, that’s about a six-fold exaggeration. George Steer stated the number of dead in Guernica at about six times what it actually was, which makes an appearance that the Germans had targeted civilians trying to kill people there, which was not the case, according to Wolfram von Richthofen.

An investigation by the League of Nations also concluded that George Steer’s account of the bombing of Guernica was inaccurate. Nonetheless, the myth of the German terror bombing of Guernica was widely propagated, making the Germans look like monsters, and after widespread protests led to a condemnation and a demand by the League of Nations for withdrawal of foreign military forces from Spain, which would obviously benefit the Communists, who were not assisted by any foreign air force.

The myth of the German terror bombing of Guernica was thereby established and had some consequence for the future, for future anti-German propaganda. Based on this highly distorted account of German actions in Guernica and a one-sided recollection of the First World War, the Royal Air Force Bomber Command took for granted that, of course, the Germans would conduct terror bombing of British cities whenever it might become convenient, and on that basis felt justified in bombing German cities first. Motives behind the Royal Air Force’s adoption of area bombing of cities, which is the same as terror bombing, deliberately killing civilian populations, area bombing, were the anti-German malevolence of Frederick Lindemann, the science advisor to Winston Churchill, who was also known as Lord Cherwell, and a similar attitude of Bomber Harris.

And also, the fact is that the Royal Air Force was unable to bomb with precision. Area bombing was much easier. You could bomb at night, and as long as you got a bomb somewhere in the city and started a fire, the other bombers could try to drop their bombs in the area of that fire. It also happens to be the case that Stalin had proposed to Churchill that he should bomb residential areas.

Lindemann was a proponent of the idea that German war production could be reduced by killing workers, while others had proposed that killing civilians was a way to damage morale. The bombing campaign in the Second World War, did not cause German morale to collapse, as had been hoped. On the contrary, it made German citizens more dependent on the National-Socialist German Workers’ Party and on Hitler’s government. Late in the war, the population may have lost belief in a German victory, but did not rebel against their government because of that.

The bombing campaign also had surprisingly little effect on the German economy. John Kenneth Galbraith is an important source on that point. In his memoir, A Life in Our Times, he calls it one of the greatest mistakes of the war, the bombing campaign against Germany.

The Royal Air Force’s area bombing of cities was not even cost-effective. It cost Britain more than it cost Germany, and Galbraith says that it also cost the USA more than it cost Germany.

Churchill presented the bombing campaign in 1942 as Britain’s way of assisting the Soviet Union after Operation Barbarossa had commenced — Operation Barbarossa being, of course, the German campaign against the Soviet Union, German invasion of the Soviet Union. According to British historian Richard Overy, the bombing of Germany was somewhat helpful insofar as it diverted aircraft, anti-aircraft guns for defending Germany away from the Eastern Front.

Now, the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, Tzipi Hotovely, and the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, have referred to the Anglo-American bombing of Dresden and other German cities as a precedent for their bombing of Gaza, for the Israeli bombing of Gaza. From a purely rhetorical perspective, it’s hard to understand why they would make that comparison, because the bombing of Dresden in particular has always been controversial. It is certainly not regarded universally as a good precedent.

Moreover, the Allies learned after the war that area bombing of cities had not accomplished what they hoped, and the one thing that it did accomplish, diversion of aircraft and air defenses from the Eastern Front, has no application to Gaza. I mean, the Palestinians don’t have any anti-aircraft guns that they can relocate to oppose Israeli missiles or drones. They don’t have anything like that.

It’s not evident that the comparison between the bombardment of Gaza and the Anglo-American bombing of German civilian populations justifies anything. It’s not evident that there was any justification for either action. The Israelis are saying that bombing Dresden somehow was necessary for defeating Germany, but it is not clear that it advanced that aim in any way that is applicable to Gaza.

This is something that people don’t know. It’s not at all clear that the strategic bombing of German cities, which reduced large areas of very many German cities to rubble, contributed significantly to the outcome of the war. And it was an embarrassment, in fact. It became an embarrassment for the United States and Britain, so that they actually avoided discussing the whole thing.

During the Second World War, many of the Royal Air Force’s bombs did not fall anywhere near their intended targets, so that area bombing was partly a way of bypassing the need for precision. The Israel Defense Force today, of course, does not have that excuse. Obviously, they’re bombing the Palestinian population of Gaza as a collective punishment on one hand, but also for the purpose of driving them out of Gaza. They’ve stated that they wanted Palestinians to evacuate northern Gaza. We’ve had this statement from President Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, Kushner, Jared Kushner, about what a fabulous place Gaza would be for a beachfront resort. So they’re really looking at driving these people out of their country with bombing, just leveling their places of habitation, terrifying them, driving them out. That’s what’s really going on there.

An important motive for bombing as a strategy in the Second World War, which is a recurring factor in reliance on bombing as a strategy – it was a recurring factor with Lyndon Johnson and Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam – is reluctance to commit troops. Right? So it’s evident that the Israel Defense Forces don’t want to risk their lives going into Gaza, and the few that do are scared to death, as evident, for example, in the famous case of the three Israeli hostages who tried to make contact with an Israeli soldier and were all gunned down rather than rescued. So that’s one factor. Reluctance to commit troops on the part of a power that has plenty of money to spend will lead to the attempt to use bombing as a substitute for troops.

The other significant factor here is hatred, extreme hatred. There was extreme hatred of the Germans in World War II by certain people. Supposedly Churchill’s science advisor Frederick Lindemann, supposedly also Arthur “Bomber” Harris, and today you have this extreme, one could say biblical, hatred of the Palestinians. These are unconditional, Old Testament hatreds. At the beginning of the assault on Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “Think Amalek.”

Think Amalek. What is Amalek? That is the name of a legendary Canaanite king, and in one of the books of the Old Testament, Jehovah is supposed to have told the Israelites newly arrived in their Promised Land that they must kill all of the people of Amalek. So this is what would today be called genocide, and there’s actually scholarship that deals with this fact, that the murder of the people of Amalek was an instance of genocide and an advocacy of genocide. This is something that Benjamin Netanyahu has openly advocated, basically killing all the Palestinians in Gaza. He implicitly advocated this when he said, “Think Amalek!”

Some influence of the Old Testament is also evident in the Second World War. For example, in the fact that the bombing of Hamburg, which was the first bombing that generated a firestorm, was called Operation Gomorrah. Operation Gomorrah, from Sodom and Gomorrah.

Whether the main author of the plan to mass-murder German civilians was a Jew is impossible to demonstrate, says biographer Adrian Fort, but it certainly would explain why a man born in Germany – I’m referring to Frederick Lindemann – was so eager to kill Germans.

Perhaps more relevant is the invocation in war propaganda of biblical concepts such as good versus evil. Yeah, a lot of this viciousness is not necessarily because of Jews, but because of the Old Testament, I think. That’s my belief. The Old Testament presents models of uncivilized behavior as if they were ideal. Kill all of them! That’s something that’s divinely mandated on multiple occasions in the Old Testament.

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