Do they take us for fools? It appears so. Are we fools? Mmm – maybe.
If you weren’t aware of the horror happening in the Ukraine before this week, you almost certainly are now. Tales of bodies found, hands and feet bound, shot dead. Tales of rape, pillage, slaughter of civilian families. Civilians fleeing in cars mown down in the town of Bucha, with twenty bodies found lying in the street.
These and other brutalities have been named as war crimes, and the US President Joe Biden and other Western leaders have called for Putin to be held responsible. War crimes are defined as, among other things, the deliberate taking of civilian lives. If the accounts and pictures we have seen are true, then Putin is indeed a war criminal.
But – and here’s the foolish bit – why is the West sounding so horrified by what Russian troops have done? Has the West ever done anything like this?
Well yes, and a lot worse. In a 1945 air raid on the German city of Dresden, somewhere between 135,000 and 250,000 civilians were killed. When the Americans dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima, around 140,000 of its population were killed. When they dropped another on Nagasaki a few days later, around 74,000 people died. Archives show that US commanders in Korea repeatedly ordered their men to target and kill Korean refugees. Well over 200,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed by US troops.
On a local, much smaller scale, British troops shot dead eleven innocent civilians in Ballymurphy in 1971, and fourteen innocent civilians in Derry the following year. And then of course there were the dozens of collusion killings detailed in Anne Cadwallader’s book Lethal Allies.
No one was charged with war crimes for these many killings of innocent people. No one ever will be. In fact, the term ‘war crimes’ has never been used by those who did the killings or their superiors.
This is not to say that what Russian troops did in the Ukraine wasn’t monstrous. It was, or certainly appears that way. But while Joe Biden declares himself sickened by the deaths in the Ukraine, when Boris Johnson does his Churchill impersonation, while we applaud them for their outspokenness, what kind of fools are we that we never mention, maybe don’t even think about, the many deaths of innocent people at the hands of Western powers?
Do they take us for fools? It would appear so. And it would appear we’ve conveniently scrubbed massive UK and US war crimes from our brains.
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