John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICE GREANVILLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
'Let's Be Honest - Stalin Was Less of a Criminal Than Churchill, Truman, and LBJ'
I don’t know about the author's "less of a
criminal," but there is no doubt that Churchill, Truman, and LBJ were war
criminals, criminals on a rather gigantic scale.
The point is simply factual, not controversial, as you may see by reading some solid histories and biographies.
Truman’s carpet-bombing of North Korea was estimated by the Pentagon to have wiped out one-fifth of the country’s population. The US also experimented with biological weapons against North Korea and nearby China.
Truman of course used two atomic bombs on Japan, and a series of a dozen was planned. That happened after Japan had clearly signaled that it was ready to surrender. Truman’s government wanted unconditional, abject surrender, and for that he destroyed two cities of no military importance.
LBJ started the Vietnam War on a colossal scale, and the carpet-bombing there would eventually extinguish about three million lives. Another million were killed in Cambodia. Vietnam had been a small-scale conflict ever since the French left their former colony.
LBJ’s crimes included the heavy use of napalm and early forms of cluster bombs. American troops on the ground fought a very dirty war with torture, rape, and mass night time assassinations of village leaders.
And what was the glorious purpose? To keep an artificially-created rump state, South Vietnam, run by dictators, going as an American pied-a-terre in Southeast Asia.
Churchill was an arch-imperialist who never hesitated using machine guns and fighter planes on peasants who were out of line.
Churchill, and not Hitler, was actually the one who started
the bombing of cities, rather than just military targets like airfields, in
early WWIl. Eventually, these raids grew to horrific levels, as with the fire-bombing
of Dresden, equivalent in every way to an atomic attack. The target was also
one of the greatest historical and artistic treasures of Europe.
If you read Churchill's war memoirs, you get a definite feeling of a certain admiration he had for Stalin.
