Top people charged with responsibility to protect and defend the United States know with certainty two facts, which the American people can only guess.
Who knows what they might be?
Think long and hard.
Maybe destinies of powerful persons, their families and friends, collaborators and enablers, hang in the balance.
Does anyone know?
Lives and legacies might depend on what Team USA believes it knows for certain.
Are we in a bio-war or not? If so, with whom?
Did someone throw the 2016 election and install a Manchurian Imposter?
Well… ??
Who is destabilizing America? Are legions loyal to foreign oligarchs and who intend us harm infiltrating Parties, paramilitaries, social media, and talk radio?
What about television news shows?
Believe it or not, people exist who know with certainty the answers to these questions. They possess power to set things right. They work for Team USA.
America’s defenders know which answers are yes and which are no. They are able to distinguish between threats that are crazy-talk and those which are dead serious. They possess data bases filled with names, phone numbers, and addresses of people who plot mayhem.
If they choose, they can put stealth missiles through the bedroom windows of those who have the wherewithal and intent to start World War Three. No one believes it, but it’s true.
The United States rules Earth. It isn’t going to change—not ever.
Folks who aren’t American, some of them, don’t understand. The USA rules because it knows how to identify threats and neutralize them. A lot of wannabe dictators could testify in the affirmative but unfortunately for them they are dead.
Why does power concentrated for long in the hands of solitary sociopaths drive some insane? Power-trippers, most of them, learn too late that their inevitable screw-ups suck like quicksand to extinguish their ambitions. History is filled with such stories.
It might be better for some folks to have never been born. They suffer in this life and maybe the next. Their goal?—to make their subjects as miserable as they can. It’s not right.
My dad worked for the National Security Agency when he wasn’t flying jet-helicopters to defend our eastern borders from adversarial submarines. I met and knew his friends. In their world, right made might, not the other way around.
I can assure readers that those I knew who served to defend American freedom were the good-guys. The world has no hope of living free absent the United States.
Yes, some of our oligarchs are depraved and crazy. Americans will deal with them eventually, right? For now, we face another decision, which is whether to settle scores with oligarchs who live elsewhere who may have tried to hurt us.
No ordinary person who lacks security clearances can say which threats are real and which are conspiracy theories told to divert attention from terrors most folks are not well-trained to handle.
People today deny it, but truth is—80 years ago—the Japanese people, some of them, wanted to be conquered by America. They longed for freedom, prosperity, and most of all for our collective sense that right and wrong mattered.
It’s why they obeyed their emperor and attacked Hawaii. Some generals knew full-well defeat was sure to follow, because they were sophisticated and well-traveled. They understood America. Being undone by Americans meant those in their families who survived war would soon live free and proud. When annihilation finally came it would bring fresh wind; they and everyone left alive would be delivered from evil.
There was no other way.
I lived in Japan for two years following the Korean War. The Japanese people, many of them, worshipped the righteous ground we walked on. We were heroes.
Today, America is led by loving people (Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) who care about doing what is right and fair. Unfortunately for our adversaries, we might have scores to settle. I have no way to know for sure. What some adversaries don’t seem to understand is that whatever are the stakes, events which will shape the future are already well-planned and underway as I write.
Underestimating capabilities of the USA to protect its secrets and war-making technologies is a trap the foolhardy step into from time to time. Adversaries should know by now that the USA does not bluff. For the United States, freedom is not a chess match; it’s not a game of Pong or Checkers.
We don’t fuck around.
If it’s true that scores will soon be settled, then the lives of powerful people, their families and friends, their collaborators and enablers in lands faraway are at this moment in grave danger.
America goes for the jugular of those who fuck with us. We hit leaders first if we can, last if we must.
When conflict comes, the takedown of foreign oligarchs who have messed with our democracy will be ruthless and total.
Who disagrees?
When it’s over the world will be a better place.
Yes, a few bad people will end-up missing. The best part is no one will miss them because everyone they know will disappear. It’s how civilization advances against barbarism when options vanish.
My advice to people who have done wrong is to write notes of apology to America and its friends. Tell us what you did wrong and what you regret. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Americans love apologies and are eager to forgive with open hearts any who are contrite and filled with remorse.
Leaders of the World:
Bring freedom to your peoples by dividing your governments into co-equal branches where no one person or like-minded group can seize power; where consent of the governed determines the course of history.
I read a report about the lunatic in Las Vegas; he was a multi-millionaire who owned nearly 50 high-powered guns plus a lot of other scary stuff. His dad graced the FBI’s ten most wanted list—ten years a fugitive.
These guns, which many civilians now own, were designed to shatter the bones and scramble the internal organs of victims—violating the spirit of international norms, agreements, and treaties agreed to by all countries before and after World War II.
These Geneva Convention prohibitions (and others) were crafted to make hollow-point style ammunition illegal. To evade these restrictions, US gun-makers designed weapons to fire high-velocity bullets that tumbled—to inflict crippling injuries with more ferocity than the banned hollow-points.
Billy Lee has never visited Las Vegas nor does he plan to. It was built as a stopover during WWII for GIs on route to the west coast, where they boarded ships to fight their way to Japan. According to legend, criminal syndicates built “Sin City”. People say the bad guys moved out. The president owns a hotel there. The Editorial Board
During combat officer training in the Vietnam era, I fired one of these weapons (an M16 rifle) at a bucket of water. The bullet went in clean but blew out the back. Shards of metal and water flew everywhere. The container exploded, basically.
Every massacre involving these weapons reaps what we sowed. The USA violated both the spirit of the international consensus and basic common sense nearly six decades ago. Our country put the lethality of heavy weapons into rifles that handled like toys. Weapon manufacturers created bone smashing ammo.
People shot by these guns don’t recover. Survivors carry their wounds to the grave.
Modern high-tech guns and ammunition are inhumane, lethal, and crippling. The military shouldn’t use them; neither should civilians; especially civilians who aren’t properly trained or supervised; some civilian gun owners have an unhealthy obsession with these kill-sticks; some are lunatics.
Flags are set at half-mast across the USA to honor the fallen in the Las Vegas attack. This pic was taken by Billy Lee in a Belle Tire parking lot. The Editorial Board
As for hollow-point ammo, police inside the United States ignore the international prohibitions. Many agencies use black-talon style hollow-points to reduce the penetrating power of tumbling slugs (that can kill bystanders) while dramatically increasing debilitation to the person shot.
Misunderstanding of the second amendment has put four million tumbling-slug killing tools into the hands of ordinary people who have no accountability and who are in some cases insane.
After all these years only God knows where these weapons are. What could possibly go wrong?
Despite being a pontificator who by definition lacks expertise, I don’t generally speculate about things I know nothing about. I really don’t. I try to not think about the hundreds of mass shootings that have taken place during past decades, because it is depressing and demoralizing (and scary) to believe that going to public venues is dangerous.
It’s hard to say who is worse off during these mass-casualty events, the dead or the wounded or those who witness the violence up close and personal. So many people are traumatized for no good reason. I suspect that even viewers of television coverage get a sick feeling in their stomachs when these horrors occur. I know I do.
The recent attack in Las Vegas was strange. A number of active duty U.S. military personnel — recently returned from Afghanistan, plus their wives and partners — attended the Route 91 Harvest country music festival. Daesh — called ISIS or ISIL in the U.S. — claimed that the shooter, Stephen Paddock, was a contractor who worked for them. He was a kind of highly-paid sleeper mercenary; he did what he was told when his time came apparently.
His handlers—who may have helped to set up the killing zone—occupied the hotel suite alongside him during the attack. They might have killed him to make it look like suicide and exited the building via a service elevator disguised as hotel workers—maybe. It’s possible.
Another disturbing possibility is that they let the shooter live expecting that he would escape and join them in another attack. He might have been disabled by gas — perhaps injected under the door by police. If so, he is now in custody.
Anything is possible, when conspiracy theories start percolating. The shooter might have been a kind of patsy, like Lee Harvey Oswald claimed to be (for those readers who have convinced themselves that Oswald did not conspire alone).
If the Las Vegas massacre was an ISIS attack (as ISIS claims) it’s not likely that the United States will give the group the satisfaction of an acknowledgment. Disclosure would undermine confidence in law enforcement’s capability to protect the public from terrorist attacks. [Editors Note: As of January 2018 the number of casualties stands at 58 killed and over 500 wounded.]
Agencies will instead work behind the scenes to uncover, debrief, and terminate with extreme prejudice all the players. Justice will be served. It will be methodical and relentless. It could take time — months or even years.
This vehicle is being tested for battle-worthiness.
Most Americans never fully understood the Iraq War that spawned ISIS and filled its ranks with experienced and ruthless fighters; nor have they grasped how powerful is Saddam Hussein’s family, his friends, and his army — once one of the world’s largest and most formidable. I’ve heard people say some dumb things about what all that fighting in the Middle East was about those many years ago.
Before the Iraq War Saddam’s family was one of the world’s wealthiest; they owned a lot of stuff — popular media and franchises, magazines and food networks, even sophisticated enterprises, some with international reach.
Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, second in command in Saddam’s Iraq and founder of ISIS.
Saddam’s closest advisor and deputy — who President Bush called the King of Clubs — was never apprehended. His name is Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. Some believe he is the mastermind behind the formation of ISIS.
A few years ago reports appeared in the press that Ibrahim died during an attack on his security detail. But no one saw him die. No one attended his funeral. His body (including DNA evidence of his death) is missing.
Some say that ISIS agents planted these stories of al-Douri’s demise. Ibrahim faked his own death. Saddam’s allies own a significant chunk of the world’s media.
Who knows?
Anyway, my understanding is that ISIS was formed by members of Saddam’s family and loyal remnants of his army who are trying to take back what they lost during the Bush presidency. That’s how many see it, including reporters at Haaretz, an Israeli news organization.
When the USA conquered Iraq, Saddam’s army (and leadership) melted away, but they had billions of dollars stashed in banks, the walls of buildings, and in holes underground. They have not been afraid to spend it.
ISIS travels first class. It has the best of everything, including trucks, cars, weapons, and drones. It captured an astounding amount of USA war fighting machinery in fights with Iraqi Shiites (ISIS is Sunni) after the USA exited Iraq.
Some of the captured equipment included MRAPs (see earlier illustration). It seems unbelievable, but its true. (Note from theEditorial Board:Billy Lee helped design the run-flat wheel that permitted fighting vehicles in the Gulf wars to stay mobile after their tires were shredded, punctured, or shot through.)
Billy Lee helped develop for Chrysler the run-flat technology used by combat vehicles like this one. The Editorial Board
The way I understand the conflict, the Sunnis of Iraq could reasonably be compared in some ways to the southern whites who served the confederacy during America’s Civil War. The Shiites in this analogy would be the negro slaves.
Think about it. After the Iraq War, the downtrodden Shiites (with help from the USA) took control of Iraq from the entitled Sunnis, much like blacks took control of the southern states after the Civil War with help from the north’s military occupation (called Reconstruction).
Southern whites eventually wrested control from their former slaves, but it took twenty years of terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan to make it happen. A similar dynamic is underway in the Middle East today, it seems. The Sunnis are reestablishing their control through terror, for the most part.
Eventually the Sunnis might win — like the Ku Klux Klan won their fight. In the meantime, a lot of innocents are getting hurt and worse.
The territory that ISIS controls in the Middle East is vast. It is comparable in size to the country of Egypt. Yes, USA backed forces have recaptured some ISIS cities and towns in recent months, but the fights are costly in lives and treasure; the victories do not seem to have turned the tide of the war, at least not yet.
Every time the USA hits ISIS hard, as it has in recent months, ISIS seems to find a way to hit back. In the meantime, we destroy towns and cities in order to “save” them. The cities aren’t coming back — not for a long time.
It’s difficult (some would say, impossible) to defeat a determined foe in their own country. We learned this lesson in Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. The fight against ISIS is going to be a long one. Our country might go bankrupt before victory comes. It’s possible.
No one wants to admit it, but the USA is teetering on the edge of financial collapse right now, as this essay is being written. Our last president, Barack Hussein Obama, (now called Barry Obama by friends) worked out some fixes to stave off an economic crisis, but the current president seems hell-bent on bringing our country to ruin.
The president and his wealthy friends seem to want to eliminate the estate tax so that they can leave thousands of millions of dollars (they call them billions) to their crazy kids who can flee with our national treasure to whatever solvent country will welcome them after the dust settles.
I’m told that the people around the president are Christian patriots who are determined to prevent really big screw-ups from being implemented. The country is safe.
More importantly, Christians don’t do genocides. They don’t do mass killings of civilians like that lunatic in Las Vegas. Yes, Hitler said he was Christian, but history has judged him differently.
The Christian patriots in the White House won’t permit the president to first-strike North Korea, for example, with nuclear weapons. They won’t kill ten to twenty million people over a few missile tests, which many countries conduct without threat of retaliation, including the United States.
Atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Hydrogen bombs are much larger.
The USA dropped dozens of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific Ocean, remember, and no one did anything about it. Countries around the world have conducted 520 atmospheric nuclear explosions and 1,352 underground detonations. We aren’t going to exterminate an entire country like North Korea over a few low-level, underground atomic tests. No rational, humanity-loving civilization would even contemplate such an atrocity.
So far, so good, I guess. Yes, we are in good hands, I’m told. No one is insane — not here; not there.
In time, no one will remember the killings in Las Vegas, anyway. No illusions. Everyone knows the truth when they see it, right?
When given a choice, decent people do what’s right, don’t they? Of course, they do. They show mercy; it’s what the Bible says God wants.
You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.’
Jesus
The wars of Israel were the only ‘holy wars’ in history… there can be no more wars of faith. The only way to overcome our enemy is by loving him. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Those who have waged war in obedience to the divine command (or in conformity with His laws) have represented…the wisdom of government and… put to death wicked men; such persons have by no means violated the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Saint Augustine
The United States deploys drones like the Scan Eagle and the Predator (which can dispatch Hellfire missiles) to kill people by remote control anywhere in the world.
Readers might notice that the quotes by the three Christians cited above the picture don’t agree about murder. Killing is a moral controversy.
The subject is even more contentious between leaders of religions outside Christianity. It’s a strange thing. In the United States where Christianity is mainstream, pastors sometimes lead the charge towardwar; some endorse capital punishment, so it’s confusing.
Can killing people be a good thing? The Catholic Church developed Just War doctrines to permit good people to kill the wicked under certain carefully crafted conditions such as proportionality, just cause, and last resort.
From my point of view, ideas of Just War fall under the umbrellas of self-justification, rationalization, and delusion. Will anyone admit the obvious? All countries are ruled by elites, and the USA is no exception.
Elites get to be elite through in-fighting, war, intrigue, and politics. They are, for the most part, desensitized to violence. The morality of religion is of no use to them except when it helps to consolidate and enhance their prestige and power. If a philosophy like Just War helps to alleviate the guilt feelings of soldiers they order into combat, they are fine with it.
Elites are, by process and definition, really good at fighting to maximize their advantages. Over time elites become a law unto themselves and develop their world view and their reasons for doing things, which are usually not well-understood by the average people who serve them.
Who wants to take on people who can really hurt them?
In most places, people go-along with their elites to get along. It’s less stressful and much safer to pretend that average people’s best interests are at the heart of decisions made by the wealthy and the powerful — especially as they negotiate deals, wage wars, and craft treaties.
Who wants to take-on people who can really hurt them should they ever choose to?
For their part, our elites tolerate religion, because in the United States at least Christianity seems to encourage citizens to be docile and compliant. Preachers and pastors encourage their flocks to turn the other cheek and obey authorities.
Christian evangelicals don’t challenge military power, and they generally oppose government policies designed to curb the power of individuals who accumulate vast wealth. Some encourage gun ownership and participation in wars — confusing non-Christians who might be under the impression that Jesus advocated pacifism and non-violence.
In the United States, the wealthy have built a powerful military and have used it to kill many millions of people during the past seventy-five years (the modern era). Much of the killing has occurred during periods when the United States did not formally declare war.
A lot of the killing has taken place under continuing resolutions like the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which helped to justify the long war in Vietnam.
Another is the AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force) — passed by Congress on September 14, 2001 — which provided the legal authority for the United States to use military power in perpetuity against any individual, group, or country who dared threaten it.
Only Barbara Lee(no relation to Billy Lee) of California voted against AUMF, the perpetual war resolution of 14 September 2001. President George W. Bush signed it into law on September 18.
Congressional consent is no longer required to wage war. Military force is now forever justified whenever and wherever the United States is threatened. The Congressional authorization of 2001 makes it easier for the USA to kill people, including American citizens living out of country.
One estimate by The Hill — a news organization whose on-line stories are widely read by members of Congress — places the number of killings by USA drones operating outside of war zones since 2001 at 2,400.
TheBillyLeePontificator.com could not independently confirm the estimate, which one of its editors characterized as “bordering on the ridiculous.”
It defies common sense that high numbers of assassinations of civilians could occur outside of warzones without arousing a profound backlash by people of goodwill, she insisted.
Is she right? Does anyone outside of government really know?
History seems to say it’s possible. Over the years the USA has invaded and tried to overthrow many countries, often under the pretext of retrieving businesses that were seized by their host countries.
In most places, the United States has succeeded — temporarily — like in Iran in 1953 where it secured natural gas and oil reserves; in Guatemala in 1954 when it took back the nationalized United Fruit Company; and in Chile in 1973 when it repossessed certain mines that were producing strategic metals.
The problem for most countries is that after the USA retrieves its property it moves in to take over the country, usually behind the scenes using native-born (and ruthless) dictators loyal to the United States.
USA backed fighters killed and wounded 5,000 Cubans during the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. Cuba captured 1,200 who they added to several thousand political detainees in a trade for medicine.
Every once in a while, takeover fails, like in Cuba in 1961 and in Vietnam in 1972. In those countries, strategic resources were never at stake, so the losses didn’t seem to affect our safety or our economic security. Still, after the fights ended, the USA worked overtime to make sure it ruined their economies by deploying embargos and unleashing its leverage over international banking.
The USA ignited recent wars in the Middle East — Kuwait, Iraq, Syria — for various reasons and continues them to this day. The United States fights terrorists in undeclared wars permitted by AUMF resolutions, which allow it to kill enemies anywhere in the world by remote control using un-humaned drones.
It’s pointless to argue whether the killings are justified or moral, smart or stupid. Many families have been ruined by drones and by war. They don’t care about smart or stupid. They just hurt; survivors wonder what might have been were their loved ones allowed to live.
So, how many people have we killed? How many hurt? How many wounded? How many amputees; how many blinded; how many deafened; how many disfigured? How many orphans? How many widows? How many dreams crushed; how many aspirations demolished?
The picture reveals the lethality of Hellfire missile-strikes. The heat cooks flesh off bones of bystanders who get too close.
How many loves-of-a-lifetime have been dashed on America’s battlefields?
Unless God Himself reveals it someday, we will never know, because during the era of Bush-senior and his general, Norman Schwarzkopf (of the renown German family) no one bothered to track body-counts; no one kept statistics on the maimed and crippled.
Our military says it doesn’t do counts. It’s in bad taste. A country like the USA doesn’t count pelts or put notches on rifles; besides, how does anyone collect the names of entire families destroyed in atomic blasts like Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
In those attacks, the genealogy archives of families were obliterated. The files of victims, the records of everyone who knew them, were vaporized.
The directories of the dead in Japan are missing, perhaps forever. Unless resurrected by God, the dead, many of them, are forgotten to the end of time.
The Arlington National Cemetery holds the remains of 400,000 veterans who have served the USA in defense of our way of life. It is a sacred place. A summer job during college privileged me to trim the gravestones of thousands who loved their country enough to serve. A cemetery for those the USA has killed in the modern era, should it ever be built, will be 25 to 150 times larger depending on who collects the dead.
Nevertheless, brave reporters and historians have tried to pull together records where they can find them. I can tell you that the numbers of deaths, executions, and imprisonments in America’s wars are in dispute — with some articles on Wikipedia, for example, frozen in place and fought over by review committees for historical accuracy. The reports are hard reading, disturbing really, because some folks seem to be trying for whatever reasons to understate and misrepresent the carnage.
Despite obvious inaccuracies which defy common sense, the numbers on the internet are the most reliable civilians have. They may perhaps be understated, but they are still large. I’ve included links for those who might want to verify the statistics.
Billy Lee
Notes from the Editorial Board: As everyone knows, the United States is a close ally of Israel. Many prominent Israelis are citizens of the United States, such as former Homeland Security Director, Michael Chertoff. Some folks, like Billy Lee, consider Israel a de-facto fifty-first state of the Union, much like Hawaii, though he admits there are important differences, to be sure.
Billy Lee has pointed out that since 1948 Israel and the United States have cooperated in a dozen or so wars and flare-ups — among them, the War of Independence, the Suez Crisis, the Six Day War, the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanon War of 1982, the South Lebanon conflict, the first and second Intifadas, the 2006 Lebanon War, the Gaza War, and various operations like Protective Edge — which were fought to secure Israel’s safety and its autonomy.
The USA has spent trillions of dollars to stabilize the Middle East and prop up with money and weapons governments favorable to our side. It has pumped over two-hundred billion dollars into Israel’s economy alone. How many people have been killed in the wars which erupted? Billy Lee doesn’t know.
He seems to think that an accurate figure for war-related killings by the USA should include in some way the deaths inflicted during the many conflicts in the Middle East where the United States was directly involved. He simply doesn’t have the numbers, so he can’t report them. The numbers may be available to others, but they are not included in his analysis.
A similar concern involves NATO, where the United States, again, is partnering with others in wars and conflicts, and is not the sole actor.
As for other conflicts: Billy Lee has added the following list with links to the statistics. The Editorial Board
The names and numbers of people killed in Japan will never be known. USA bombers obliterated their records in the fires they ignited in the Japanese made-from-wood-and-paper neighborhoods and cities.
The War against Japan deserves special mention.
The names and quantities of people the USA killed in Japan will never be known. The Air Force obliterated their records in the fires they set in the Japanese made-from-wood-and-paper neighborhoods and cities.
Beginning in 1945 sixty-seven Japanese cities of consequence were burned to rubble by incendiary night-time attacks involving hundreds of B-29 Superfortress bombers under the command of USA General Curtis LeMay.
During the first attack against Tokyo in March 1945, Lemay deployed 325 bombers to drop a half-million slow-burning napalmcluster-bombs, which killed at least 150 thousand civilians. His bombing of the capital city continued unabated for three weeks; the fire-bombing of the other sixty-six Japanese cities continued for three more months.
Five cities were held back (protected from attack) until August 1945 to permit General LeMay to decisively demonstrate American atomic fire-power. He annihilated two of them — Hiroshima and Nagasaki — with the atomic bombs named Little Boy and Fat Man.
He spared the three remaining targets, Yokohama (Japan’s second largest city, where I lived from 1952-1954), Niigata, and Kokura — after the Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945.
Some older readers might remember that Curtis LeMay ran for Vice-President in 1968 on a third-party ticket led by Alabama Governor George Wallace. The two men tried unsuccessfully to derail racial integration in the South, which our Congress had recently mandated.
One of General Douglas MacArthur’s closest aides, Bonner Fellers, described Curtis LeMay’s attacks on Japanese civilians as “the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.”
The most conservative estimate of the number of civilians burned alive that I’ve seen in print is 500,000. Some historians have estimated the number to be as high as two million. The Japanese effort to evacuate their cities saved countless lives, but left many millions of women and children homeless, until the cities could be rebuilt after the Japanese surrendered.
Official histories written by the US Air Force claim that ”five months of jellied fire attacks” were ”so destructive” that they ”cremated 65 Japanese cities.” The attacks left ”9.2 million homeless.”
Here are some numbers of interest: atomic bomb attacks in Japan — 225,000 killed; Vietnam War — 3.4 million killed; World War II — 55 million killed; Korean War — 2 million killed; Iraq War — 1 million killed.
This list of wars is necessarily incomplete, because the USA fights secret wars from time to time. In his 1990 book, Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama spoke of one such war against the Chinese and admitted taking millions from the USA to support the effort. He claimed that America’s policy was to destabilize and overthrow wherever possible each and every Communist country in the world. Inside the US intelligence establishment, the suppression is called Strategic Strangulation.
This policy was the reason many Communist societies sealed their borders during the Cold War. Some, like North Korea, still do. Military historians have claimed that the United States dropped anthrax bombs on North Korean troops and their Chinese allies in 1954. This biological terror was unleashed after what historian Richard Rhodes says was a program of US bombing against cities and dams in North Korea that killed two million civilians.
General Curtis LeMay agreed. He led the US Strategic Air Command during the bombing of Korea. In 1984 he bragged before the Office of Air Force History, ”Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — twenty percent of the population.” It helps to explain why they hate us.
The numbers killed in these secret and not-so-secret wars are argued over; they are not certain or even known — certainly not by civilians who lack security clearances. Mayhem from traumatic wounds is not known.
The consensus seems to be that the total number of human beings killed by the United States since 1940 exceeds ten million. Depending on how it is counted, the number could be far higher. A case can be made that it’s as high as sixty-five million.
In the modern era, the United States has warred against one out of four countries on the earth. I didn’t believe it, until I did the count. Count the number any which way you choose. It’s a big number. And the numbers of wounded and traumatized human beings is certainly enormous, but unknown.
I’d like to think that in the future the United States will resolve its differences with other countries and organizations in a way that doesn’t involve killing people.
The United Nations was established to do just that — peacefully resolve disputes — but the United States runs the place, some say, and others have insisted that the USA is the biggest warmonger on the planet.
It has something to do with its defense industry and the efforts of tycoons to maximize profits for themselves and their shareholders.
I hope it’s not true.
How horrible it is to have so many people killed–And what a blessing that one cares for none of them! Jane Austin, 1811, on the Battle of Albuera
Billy Lee
Postscript: Here is a quotation from wisdom literature, which — who knows? — might help policymakers. I wonder if anyone believes it.
It is by the fear of the LORD that someone turns away from evil. When someone’s ways please the LORD, He makes even their enemies be at peace with them.
I found the passage in the Proverbs of the Bible. See chapter 16.
