Remembering the US War Crime/Holocaust in Tokyo, March 9-10, 1945
By Michael Hoffman
76 years ago in Tokyo, Japan, more people were burned alive in a few hours than is estimated ever occurred in recorded history.
But this dictionary-definition holocaust will barely be reported in the media. When it is, it’s almost always accompanied by the justification that the incineration of Tokyo, like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “shortened the war” making a “costly invasion by US troops” unnecessary. It’s always nice to know that there are good, justifiable reasons for mass murder through barbecuing civilians.
President Franklin Roosevelt ordered General Curtis Lemay to implement LeMay's plan of attack on civilians in Japan. On March 9 346 American bombers were dispatched to intentionally create a firestorm holocaust that would wipe out 16 square miles of the city of Toyko, burning alive 100,000 Japanese children, women and men.
From the U.S. government’s own Strategic Bombing Survey, we read this astounding admission:
“Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in
a 6-hour period than any time in the history of man.”
The remains of a Japanese mother and her infant after United States Army Air Force incendiary bombing, Tokyo, March, 1945.
But the media refuses to call it a Holocaust. There’s a
monopoly on that word. Are not other victims deserving of
the holocaust designation, particularly since it
specifically denotes death by fire?
Yet the fact is, you’re not supposed to recall this epic crime against Japanese humanity, except perhaps in a kind of vague haze: “Oh yeah, didn't something happen to Tokyo—didn’t we bomb it before we bombed Hiroshima, saving a lot of American lives by sparing our troops an invasion of the mainland?”
Do you think Wahhabist Muslim terrorists are unaware of this American mass murder logic?
What about the Chinese Communists?
We reap what we sow.
The U.S. government commits only good war crimes against civilians. We envelop our mass murders in a soft amnesia, whereby they are only partly recalled, surrounded by self-serving alibis reeking of venality and callous indifference to the loss of non-American human life.
Compare the non-existent memorials to what even the US government’s Strategic Bombing Survey terms the worst incineration of humans in history, in Tokyo, with the Auschwitz death camp commemorations, beginning in April. Actually, there’s no comparison. One is a footnote and the other is the cosmic crime of all time.
"Scelera enim sceleribus tuenda sunt.” ("Crime must be safeguarded by crime”). — Seneca
Michael Hoffman is the author of nine books of history and literature, including The Israeli Holocaust Against the Palestinians. Michael’s Truth Mission and this Hoffman Wire column are made possible by donations from readers
