by Richard Balzano
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has a skewed understanding of the Second World War.
In a recent Sky News Arabia interview, Graham claimed the existential threats faced by Israel are akin to those faced by the U.S. in WWII, insisting that Israel’s military response in Gaza is no less justified than the allied choice to bomb civilian targets in Germany or the American decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan: “Just flatten it. We flattened Berlin. We flattened Tokyo. Were we wrong to drop an atomic bomb to end the Japanese reign of terror?” He has repeatedly invoked Hiroshima and Nagasaki to justify Israel’s total war, and labeled October 7th Israel’s “Pearl Harbor.” These references rest on a distinctly American misunderstanding about how and why WWII unfolded.
Chest-thumping Americans often deflect European criticism with, “You’d be speaking German if it wasn’t for us.” Hollywood has canonized Normandy as the decisive turning point in the European theater, but the pivotal moment came earlier on the eastern front when the Soviet Union defeated the Germans at Stalingrad by February 1943, and began chasing the Wehrmacht westward. Germany was already bleeding out when the Americans stormed Normandy in June 1944. The Red Army bore the brunt, and when Allied forces raced towards Berlin, it was the Soviets who arrived first—hence a divided Germany.
The Soviets by far suffered the war’s greatest losses—between 24 and 27 million Russians died during the war. In our hyperpatriotic Cold War commitment to anathematize Moscow, American historical memory neglects their partnership and sacrifice. Polemical works like The Black Book of Communism padded their “victims of communism” statistic by including Nazi soldiers and collaborators killed by the Red Army. Memory in the United States is less about history than about narrative management.
This distortion bleeds into the present. Americans justify their morbidly obese military budget by insisting that “we” protect “all of you,” gesturing to our NATO allies like Denmark whose territories we now threaten to confiscate. Western allies tethered to Washington’s fading hegemony bite their tongues while the mythology that only Americans adhere to persists: America the exceptional, innocent, reluctant bodyguard, savior, liberator and harbinger of democracy.
Graham’s confidence that incinerating up to 250,000 Japanese citizens was morally uncomplicated belongs to such mythology. Conventional wisdom, historical memory, and American textbooks credit Washington’s decision to a desire to expedite Japan’s surrender and spare American lives. An Orientalist version offers that the Japanese were so fanatically loyal that every man, woman, and child would have fought to the death had the Americans invaded the mainland. The latter is racist caricature, but the former contains a shard of truth, void of crucial context.
Wars are not (responsibly) ended in a vacuum. They are ended with an eye toward what comes next. Washington was aware that Japan was on the verge of surrender in the summer of 1945. The U.S.S.R pivoted to the Pacific theater, and the U.S. needed to expedite the war’s end to prevent the Soviets from having a seat at the table when determining the trajectory of postwar Japan. The Red Army planted its flag over Berlin first; the Americans had no intention of sharing leverage in the Pacific. Demonstrating a terrifying new weapon served two purposes—ending the war quickly and signaling to Moscow who possessed the ultimate death machine. The result was not lasting peace but an accelerating arms race that defined the second half of the twentieth century.
There were bureaucratic considerations as well. The Manhattan Project had consumed unprecedented resources, and scientific careers, institutional reputations, and military budgets were tied to its success. What precedent would be set if the most expensive weapon ever built went unused? What would it mean for future military budgets if the war could be won without such a weapon? The military might not be given a future blank check for death toys if they had nothing to show for it. The military industrial project was not yet enshrined as our national purpose, and the government was not immune to sunk-cost analysis.
Graham’s claim that the bombs were dropped “to end the Japanese reign of terror” rings hollow. Imperial Japan committed unspeakable horrors across Korea, China, and the Pacific. Moral outrage is rarely distributed evenly. The U.S. committed a plethora of atrocities in Asia in the succeeding decades, but hawks like Graham do not traffic in apologies. Righteousness travels selectively, often first class and paid for with AIPAC money.
By invoking “Pearl Harbor” in the context of Israel, Graham unintentionally draws attention to the colonial parallels between Hawaii and Palestine. Americans rationalize entry into WWII by claiming that Japan attacked “American territory” in 1941, but Hawaii was not yet a state. Hawaii was a plantation colony, wherein local resources and labor were exploited, Hawaiians were displaced, white settlers took possession of prime real estate and established a segregated plantation caste system sometimes referred to as “environmental apartheid.” Japanese-Americans were interred in camps during WWII, but Americans unwilling to differentiate between Hawaiians and Japanese people living in Hawaii interred both, ostensibly transforming Hawaii into one large internment camp. The twentieth century militarization of Hawaii imposed economic dependency and cultural genocide on the Native population. Parallels can be found, as displaced Palestinians living under the Israeli settler colonial project endure what international and Israeli human rights organizations deem apartheid. Gazans long subject to Israeli control over movement, water, and aid, are now starving in refugee camps, and the UN has determined Israel’s assault on Gaza has crossed the threshold for genocide. Graham’s comparison is more illuminating than he realizes. He’s right about the analogy—just not the lesson.
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Richard M. Balzano is an historian and political analyst peddling truths at several institutions of higher learning, quietly devoted to the art of sedition and comfortably resigned to the peripheral left.