Aggression in all shapes and forms has been for a long time the tool of choice for Washington in its approach towards all of its foreign policy challenges. There’s more confirmations of this notion in history that you will be willing to check up and those become particularly relevant today as Washington launched yet another aggression against Syria, acting on baseless accusations.
America has always been after the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage, forcing countries that it managed to subject themselves to its will to turn their back on their values and traditions. That is precisely why the United States would be a in a frenzy to destroy the cultural heritage of its adversaries during the Second World War days. Those who were following geopolitical events a couple of decades ago would remember similar frenzy manifesting itself in the destruction of Yugoslavia. Today, it’s distinctly visible in Iraq, Syria and a handful of other countries.
As a matter of fact, most experts in the West prefer to keep silent about the fact that Washington used to bomb cities off the face of the Earth together with their residents without any strategic rationale behind those acts. During the Second World War such German cities as Wuzburg, Hildesheim, Paderborn, Pforzheim, and especially Dresden were wiped clean by American bombers, with Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon disappearing in first nuclear blasts. However, Germany was not the only one to suffer from such barbarity, as cities in Italy, Austria, France, the Czech Republic, Romania and other European countries would be obliterated by US bombs just as easily.
In the period from 1939-1945 Anglo-Americans bombers have almost completely destroyed the ancient French cities of Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Nantes, with German troops suffering little to no casualties during such assaults. As for Frenchmen, according to most skeptical estimates, they lost at least 60,000 people in such bombing runs.
But these facts couldn’t bother Washington any less as it has its own approach for dealing with such unpleasant facts that is called distortion of history.
The blame for the ruined Dresden was put on the USSR, with allegations being made that a request to commit this war crime was issued by Stalin, allegedly at the Yalta Conference. But written records made during this conference show no trace of such demands. In fact, the decision to bomb Dresden was taken by Washington long before the Yalta Conference, but the massive bombing run was delayed due to bad weather conditions. As individual researchers note, the sheer amount of ordinance that was dropped on Dresden produced two firey tornadoes, which would melt anything on their path, while approaching one another only to merge into one hellish inferno. The temperature in the epicenter of the tornado reached 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, melting steel and bricks together. The decision to bring such devilish fire upon the heads of German civilians was provoked by Washington’s zeal for revenge. It wanted to pay back for the military disgrace, the lack of military brilliance in its generals, the lack of the necessary courage and skill to conduct successful military operations. Many historians and researchers estimate the resulting death toll reaching more than 100,000 people. However, neither Marshal Arthur Harris nor the killer pilots are remembered today as war criminals, as they entered the history of England and the United States as heroes.
Most people are ignorant of the fact that at the Oise-Aisne military cemetery in northern France, where American soldiers who perished in World War I are buried, there is a restricted Plot E section, that no visitor is allowed to access. At this site in Coleville, located a couple hundred feet away from the infamous Omaha Beach more than 10,000 American soldiers found their final rest. Yet, among them are 94 individuals executed during the days of the Second World War – those are American soldiers and officers who would massacre civilians, rape children and women alike before murdering them during the liberation of Europe from Nazism.
There’s no mention of Plot E at the site of the American Battle Monuments Commission even though there’s a section that explores the Oise-Aisne military cemetery in much detail. According to French historians, at least 443 American soldiers were found guilty of committing despicable crimes in Europe to face immediate execution at the hands of their superiors. According to a well-known journalist Jesus Hernandez who penned a book under the title of One Hundred Secrets of WWII (100 historias secretas de la Segunda Guerra Mundial), a total of 90 soldiers out of the above mentioned war criminals was hung. However, this number shows that nobody was really trying to catch those soldiers that were abusing the civilian population of Europe as the total number of American soldiers that was brought to Europe amounted to 11 million people, according to the data provided by such researchers as David Jordan and Andrew West.
Yet, another European researcher Fernando Paz tells us that at least 17 thousand European women was raped by American soldiers during the Second World War in his book Núremberg. Juicio al nazismo. However, the actual number of women who suffered a terrible fate at the hands of American troops remains unclear, as it’s been shown in Giles Macdonogh’s Después del Reich. Crimen y castigo en la posguerra alemana.
However, those crimes are not the only ones that nobody was held accounted for, as one can remember the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war that was followed by a long list of unpunished crimes committed by US servicemen in that country.
There’s a growing number of reports about the use of torture by CIA that occurred in the course of Washington’s War on Terror. It turned out that the arsenal of methods for influencing a prisoner or just an interrogated person is extremely varied: a torture through inconvenient poses, sleep deprivation, music and white noise torture, use of direct violence together with a long list of other approaches! Under these conditions, Trump’s decision to appoint Gina Cheri Haspe CIA Director in spite of her reputation of being a saddist has provoked a massive backlash in the American media. This serves as a clear indication that Trump is indifferent to the daily brutality of the CIA, which can get on par with the inhuman methods of Waffen-SS with the appointment of Gina Haspe. We must not forget about thousands of civilians who perished in Washington’s aggression against in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other countries.
However, the United States is keen to make the countries affected by the American brutality to forget about the crimes committed against them. For example, the terrible bombing of French cities along the Bay of Biscay is not being taught in French schools and nobody is willing to talk about it these days in France. However, President Trump has gone even further by dismissing the sacrifice that the Soviet people made to liberate the world from the Nazi regime by declaring that the victory over fascism was secured by the United States. There’s been resistance movements in pretty much every single country occupied by Hitler, but those facts are disregarded just as well. Recently, the United States, Britain, France have stopped inviting representatives of Russia to the annual celebrations dedicated to the victory over the Nazi Germany. As if there were no Soviet troops entering Berlin in 1945. The West in its Russophobic frenzy is actively trying to persuade Europe and the rest of the world that Hitler was defeated by the US troops with a bit of assistance from the UK, and that the USSR had nothing to do with it.
But monuments of the atrocities committed by the US can not be completely destroyed. Facts cannot be completely erased from the history and memory of the obliterated Dresden, the French cemetery of Oise-Aisne, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam’s My Lai, together with the countries of the Middle East that lost hundreds of thousands of people as the result of unprovoked US aggression lives on.
It also can not be forgotten that millions of residents of the affected countries continue to insist that those who were behind the ongoing American aggression should be brought to trial, no matter how much Washington tries to rewrite the history.
Grete Mautner is an independent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”