The West loves moments in history to use as a moral example. And there is no greater period of history than World War II to both act as myth and an example of what must be done in order to win. In that war, the enemy became those by which all others have since been compared. Weapons were invented that had been science fiction before the war. Bombers that could drop devices which would flatten cities, chemicals that could burn and reignite until skin and bone are melted away, and rockets that could carry explosives built by slaves to blast cities.

The destruction of cities during World War II has set a prime example. It was not enough to fire bomb Dresden or Tokyo. We had to obliterate Nagasaki and Hiroshima with atomic fury. They say it shortened the war, saved Allied lives, or deterred the Soviet Union. If the mass bombing was limited to World War II, maybe it could be argued that such means were needed to defeat an enemy so evil; a temporary suspension of justice and principles to satiate the need for victory. But the mass bombings in the Korean and Vietnam wars prove this was all a lie.

The United States ran out of buildings to bomb by the end of the Korean war. Millions were killed. Air power destroyed most of the peninsula. There was no Hitler or Imperial Japan. In fact, the same Japanese scientists who had poisoned and tortured to death innocent people—many of them Koreans and Chinese—in the pursuit of military curiosity helped the Americans to secretly infect and kill those same Koreans and Chinese. That war still ended in stalemate.