NCJ Number
230916
Date Published
2010
Length
16 pages
Annotation
This chapter presents a theoretical account of how - after the outrage over Guernica (General Francisco Franco and his allies' bombing of civilians in this Basque town in Spain in April 1937) - the terror bombing of civilians developed during World War II and became culturally accepted and approved by many American political and military leaders as well as the American people.
Abstract
In the course of World War II, gradually the majority of American political and military leaders came to believe that the accomplishment of national goals required a change in the use of air power from a sole reliance on precision bombing of military and industrial targets to an increasing use of terror bombing of enemy civilian populations. This included the use of newly developed atomic weapons. This was done under the rationale of winning the war decisively at the lowest cost in American casualties. Another justification proposed is referred to as "American exceptionalism" (Fiala, 2008; Hodgson, 2009), which portrays the United States as a Nation of exceptional virtue, a moral leader in the world with a unique historical mission to spread "universal" beneficial values such as freedom, democracy, equality, and popular sovereignty, in concert with global capitalism. This chapter argues that the aerial bombardment of civilian populations during World War II was a form of state crime, because it violated the moral and legal principle of noncombatant immunity and other standards of international law that existed at that time. Since then, the bombing of civilians has become a normal and acceptable way of warfare for the United States. This chapter lists the ways in which a broad-based international peace movement can make inroads toward putting an end to the mass killing of civilians by the state terrorism of aerial bombardment.