https://vimeo.com/443876955 In 1939, President Roosevelt called on nations at war to refrain from the "inhuman barbarism" of targeting civilians. In 1945, the U.S. firebombed Japanese cities and dropped nuclear weapons killing hundreds of thousands. On the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Peter Kuznick joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast. Transcript Paul Jay Hi, I'm Paul Jay, and welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and August 9th, 1945, I think it's important to understand how the mass killing of civilians in war became acceptable, and how U.S. public opinion and media, on the whole, supported the use of weapons of mass destruction. Now joining us to discuss this is Peter Kuznick. He's a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University and is the author of "Beyond the Laboratory Scientists as Political Activists in the 1930s America" and with filmmaker Oliver Stone, he co-authored the twelve-part Showtime documentary film, series, and book, both titled "The Untold History of the United States." Thanks for joining us, Peter. Peter Kuznick Happy to be with you, Paul Paul Jay So my understanding is that, more or less in the 19th century, even up until the First World War, as a tactic of war, strategy of war, the mass killing of civilians was more or less considered outside the bounds of acceptable warfare. Now, of course, civilians got killed and there was a certain amount of targeting, but mostly armies fought armies. But in the Second World War, that really changes where civilians on a mass basis become targets. And it's not just by any means the Nazis that do it. It's the British and the Americans as well. And so this targeting of civilians before the use of the atomic bomb, I think, created the conditions to help make it acceptable to make the decision to drop the bomb. Can you talk a little bit about the history of the development of this large scale killing of civilians and then up to leading us to the decision to drop the bomb? Peter Kuznick You're correct to say that this really is a phenomenon that occurs during World War Two. And that's partly because even in World War I, air warfare was just taking off. In World War I there was some bombing of civilians. WWI is really the first time that airplanes are used to drop bombs on a large scale. And that happens during World War I. By the end of the war that was happening much more commonly in the interwar period. The British were using bombings to secure their empire in places like Iraq in the 1920s. But still, at the start of the war, there was a general sense that killing civilians deliberately was off-limits. The US State Department in 1937 condemned this and said "Public opinion in the US regards such methods as the slaughter of civilian populations, in particular women and children - as barbarous. Such acts are a violation of the elementary principles of those standards of human conduct which have been developed as an essential part of modern civilization." The State Department was very clear in its moral condemnation. Franklin Roosevelt, when war broke out in Europe in 1939, called upon the combatants to refrain from this "inhuman barbarism," but it was already starting. The most interesting comment that I've seen about it at the time, before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was by Dwight MacDonald, founder of Partisan Review, Politics, and other publications. MacDonald says in the summer of 1945 before Hiroshima, "I remember when Franco's planes bombed Barcelona for the first time.
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