Well. It’s been another long week of fending off “conservatives for Hamas,” but I press on — and today, in fact, I was tasked with rebutting these same “conservatives’” arguments that US military policy in WWII was but a series of “war crimes” (Rob Schneider), that dropping two atomic bombs on Japan was an especially egregious act, because we need, as Americans, to hold ourselves to a high ethical standard, and live by a certain measure of morality, one which from what I can tell includes never killing an innocent civilian in war.

Or, in other words, we must resign ourselves to living under some despotic regime that doesn’t much give a sh*t about our morals and chooses instead to eat our lunch, because that’s the inevitable outcome of such a folly. Should we continue to press such ill-conceived and facile, sanctimonious positions, we may as well begin learning some dialect of Chinese.

Of course, it’s easy, from a position of safety, to pass judgment on those who actually enlisted and fought in a war to defeat Nazism, fascism, and Japanese imperialism; playing armchair general or CiC, with the luxury of a freedom in which to engage such considerations, is an exciting yet appalling form of presentism and is no different in kind than judging any other historical figure for what during their lives were not considered transgressions. This is what the left does. And it is yet another reason why I will not stop pointing out how the current alt-right literally mirrors the left, down to and including the adoption of its historical revisionism to claim some current moral high ground.

Now, do I think many of these “conservatives” believe the US committed war crimes in WWII? Not really — though I think some are quite clearly willing to romanticize the aims of ethnic nationalism fetishized by Hitler and those in his orbit. Instead, I believe they have affected this position because it allows them to do what they do best and most often: castigate and demonize Jews. If it was historically wrong for the British to firebomb Dresden, then it’s wrong today for the Israelis, despite their best efforts to prevent them, to amass civilian casualties in Gaza. Once we denounce Hiroshima and Nagasaki as historical atrocities, it’s much easier to appear “consistent” when denouncing Israel for having the temerity to try winning a war foisted upon them by a genocidal terrorist regime voted into power by those it governs.