The cognitive dissonance is fascinating. The Hammas attack on 10/7 is all but universally condemned in public discourse because civillians were targeted. Even die-hard militant anti-Zionists will not attempt to justify the Hammas attacks because they know it will only turn the public against them. When a brown force attacks civillians, it is terrorism and reviled.

Here on lemmy.world condemnation of Israel’s indiscriminant bombing is also prevalent. Maybe 5%-10% of commenters support Israel’s conduct. But of the at least eight people who have expressed an opinion on nuking Japan here in this thread, roughly 75% of them defend it as justifiable and no one has outright said it was wrong.

There are over 100,000 American WWII veterans alive today. They saved the world from the Nazis. We love that for us. Coming out of WWII, we dove right into the cold war. We were battling the USSR for the hearts and minds of the globe. McCarthyism silenced internal criticism. We had no patience for second-guessing our actions in WWII. It was our patriotic duty to convince the world that ours was the side of freedom, democracy, and justice.

So for 80 years now our culture has been saturated with propaganda promoting our glorious, righteous role in WWII. You, your parents, and your parents’ parents have been told the same thing in school and have seen the same messages in TV, books, and movies. And I’m not saying it’s all a lie. Sure, the defeat of Hitler was a high point in American history. But our understanding of our role lacks any nuance or self-criticism. For example, the Russian front was arguably more crucial to the fall of Germany than the Western front. Churchill is hailed as a hero, but he was an antisemetic racist. E.g.:

WINSTON CHURCHILL published a newspaper article. It was February 8, 1920. Churchill had a different enemy now. Now his enemy wasn’t Germany, it was the “sinister confederacy” of international Jewry.

“This movement among the Jews is not new,” Churchill said. It was a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.” He listed Marx, Trotsky, Béla Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman as some of the malefactors. The conspiracy had been, he said, the “mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century.” It had played a recognizable part in the French Revolution. All loyal Jews, he advised, must “vindicate the honour of the Jewish name” by rejecting international bolshevism.

And:

“I think you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury on them,” Churchill wrote Trenchard. Churchill was an expert on the effects of mustard gas—he knew that it could blind and kill, especially children and infants. Gas spreads a “lively terror,” he pointed out in an earlier memo; he didn’t understand the prevailing squeamishness about its use: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” Most of those gassed wouldn’t have “serious permanent effects,” he said.

Churchill’s War Cabinet ignored the repeated pleas of the British colonial government in India for food aid, allowing between one and four million people to die of hunger in 1943 and 1944.

Churchill was a horrible person.

And likewise, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unconscionable acts of evil. It is never acceptable to target civillian populations. It wasn’t acceptable on 9/11/2001 or 10/7/2023 when brown Arabs did it, and it wasn’t acceptable when white Americans did it either.

This is obvious to anyone who wasn’t raised inside the Western bubble.