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It is an anniversary that almost goes unacknowledged in today’s day and age. One that, at nearly a century old, is fading further into memory while the consequences of it have left lasting scars on human history. 81 years ago this week, on August 6th and 9th of 1945, the United States government would carry out the most heinous and life altering act of terrorism the world has ever seen, dropping two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The immediate explosions resulted in the instantaneous death of approximately 80,000 people in Hiroshima. Days later the second bombing, this time targeting Nagasaki, would vaporize approximately 40,000 civilians, for a grand total of an estimated 120,000 people dead between the two cities combined, with tens of thousands more dying as a result of the aftermath.

In previous reporting, The Free Thought Project has directly addressed the prevailing false narratives regarding the atomic bombing of Japan, with articles such as Hiroshima At 80: Setting The Abhorrent Precedent For Atomic Warfare deconstructing the fabricated belief that such an attack was the only way to end the war without suffering excessive casualties. The analysis relies heavily on the testimony of top military officials of the time, including Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy, 1st Supreme Allied Commander of Europe and later 34th President of the United States General Dwight Eisenhower, Commander of the Pacific Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, and Commander of the Southwest Pacific Fleet General Douglas MacArthur, all of whom expressed disgust at the use of such weapons, insisting that doing so was not necessary to bring about an end to the war.

Likewise, in other reporting such as Justifying Evil: How Roosevelt Used The Pearl Harbor Myth As A Pretext For Atrocity, the disingenuous distortions surrounding the attacks of Pearl Harbor are similarly dissected and debunked, conclusively demonstrating how the narrative surrounding the incident was a carefully curated facade obstructing the fact that the Roosevelt administration deliberately provoked the attack as a manufactured pretext to enter the conflict, rather than the fairy tale of the Japanese “surprise attack” recounted in American textbooks.

Historical records also indicate that despite the myth of “saving lives”, in actuality the densely packed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were deliberately identified by the Targeting Committee to maximize civilian casualties as a means of fully demonstrating the deadly capabilities of America’s new weapon of mass destruction.

While the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are certainly the most well known instances of American mass murder against Japanese civilians, it is not the first of its kind. Only months earlier in March of 1945, under what is known as Operation Meetinghouse, the U.S. would carry out one of the most murderous and horrifying bombing campaigns in the history of the world. Hundreds of B-29 bombers descended over Tokyo, dropping more than 1,600 tons of incendiary bombs including napalm and white phosphorus over densely populated civilian areas, raining a terrifying hell fire from above that would kill over 100,000 civilians and displace over a million more from their homes as more than a quarter of the city was burned to the ground.

Just this attack alone resulted in a number of casualties almost equal to that of the annihilation of Hiroshima. But this campaign didn’t stop with Tokyo, over the course of the next several weeks the US would continue to carry out a ruthless carpet bombing campaign against nearly 60 Japanese cities, predominantly consisting of civilians, with many of them resulting in similar casualty rates. Ultimately, this terroristic firebombing of the Japanese mainland, often referred to as The Forgotten Holocaust, took exponentially more lives than the atomic bombings that took place only months later, exacerbating the nauseating body count by several magnitudes.

Of course, it hardly goes without mentioning that the horrors of American imperialism certainly did not start with the atrocities of the Second World War, with the very foundation of the nation itself built on the back of an indigenous genocide that took the lives of over 100 million native peoples, and four centuries of brutal slavery whose impacts can still be felt in American society today with the lingering shadow of institutionalized white supremacy.

The Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century, in all of its expansionist colonialist fervor wreaking havoc in Central America, is perhaps among the best examples of American imperialism predating the Second World War.

Even World War II itself, it can be argued, can be seen as a result of the ruthless tendencies of American exceptionalism when one considers that Adolf Hitler’s political career and the rise of the Third Reich was covertly funded and encouraged by Anglo-American financial elites and intelligence assets. Or that the psychotic dictator himself directly credited the American eugenics movement as his main inspiration for the Nazi extermination campaign that would lead to the Holocaust. A Holocaust, mind you, that Allied leaders were fully aware of years before publicly acknowledging it, and allowed to continue unabated.

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