“Worldwide Genocide”? History of U.S. Mass Killings of Civilians
The Monstrous Plan to Kill Palestinians Is Fully Endorsed by Washington
Michel Chossudovsky Aug 13, 2026
Israel’s Operation “To Wipe Gaza Off the Map” including the false flag agenda was carefully coordinated with U.S. military and intelligence. It is part of a broader military agenda of US-NATO.
America’s unspoken military practice from World War II to the present consists in routinely targeting civilians, which constitutes a crime against humanity. Netanyahu is Washington’s proxy.
“Are Special Units of the U.S. Military Fighting Alongside the Israelis”?
It should be understood that Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilians in Gaza is part of a longstanding U.S. military strategy of killing civilians. America is in this regard fully supportive of its Israeli proxy.
In recent developments Israeli officials have justified its killing of civilians in Gaza by pointing to the bombing of the German city of Dresden (a civilian target) as well as many other German cities by the U.S. and Britain towards the end of World War II.
Similarly, the U.S. applied the same strategy of targeting Japanese civilians with fire bombs towards the end of World War II.
America’s Strategy of Killing Civilians (1945- )
Since World War II, America’s military strategy has deliberately targeted civilians as well as “civilian objects” including hospitals, schools, churches, residential areas. The evidence is overwhelming.
While this practice is categorized as a crime against humanity, the United States has never been the object of prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The history of US-led wars confirms that murdering millions of civilians is an integral part of America’s global war agenda.
During and since World War II , the United States has killed more than 40 million people in a number of countries, most of them civilians, either directly or through proxy by its puppet regimes:
Germany–World War II: (several cities bombed by U.S. including Dresden, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Cologne); Number of people killed: 600,000 (according to Israeli official’s recent statement)
Japan-World War II: 442,000 civilians killed by U.S. and U.K. fire bombing.
Korean War 1950-53: Three million civilians killed by U.S. carpet bombing.
Vietnam War (1962-1975): 3.8 million civilians killed by U.S. bombing and invasion.
Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (1962-1975): A total of 4.3 million people killed by U.S. in all three countries.
Iraq War (2003): Three million Iraqis killed by U.S. invasion.
The U.S.’ so-called “War on Terrorism” has killed up to 4.6 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Pakistan according to a Brown University report.
Pakistan 1971: Up to three million ethnic Bengalis killed by the Pakistan army (a U.S. proxy) in East Pakistan (the country’s biggest province). Due to this East Pakistan separated from Pakistan and became Bangladesh.
The invasion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by U.S. proxies Rwanda and Uganda beginning in 1998 has killed more than 6.9 million civilians. This genocide continues.
The above is a partial list which does not include Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Indonesia, Angola, Mozambique and Latin America. Also of relevance are deaths resulting from famines and mass poverty enforced by U.S. policies globally, especially by sanctions.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (who assumed this post in 1997) was asked by the CBS interviewer Leslie Stahl in 1996 about the deadly effect of U.S. sanctions on Iraqi children. Stahl: “We have heard that half a million children have died. Is the price worth it?”
Albright replied,
“I think it is a very hard choice but the price–we think the price is worth it.”
The number of Iraqi children killed by U.S. sanctions up to 1996 was 575,000. Currently, Washington has imposed sanctions on 39 countries.
As Kevin Reese and Margaret Flowers put it in their 2020 Global Research article,
“Economic sanctions are an act of war that kills tens of thousands of people each year through financial strangulation.”
The list of U.S. war crimes above confirms that:
The Israeli genocide of Palestinians does not emanate from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but from the U.S. Empire.
The mass murder of civilians has been part of U.S. military doctrine since World War II and Washington has attempted to “normalize” this practice in one war after another.
World War II. Germany and Japan
“The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians” said U.S. President Harry Truman in a radio address on August 9, 1945. “We will use [this weapon] so that military objectives…are the target and not women and children.”
Of course Hiroshima was a city of 350,000 civilians and not a military target. Prof. Michel Chossudovsky in his article on the Hiroshima bombing, calls Truman “a liar and a criminal”.
“Had [Truman] been misled by his advisers that Hiroshima was a military base and that it was OK to bomb… was he stupid and uneducated?”
The U.S. firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945, is considered the single most deadly air raid in history killing more than 100,000 civilians, injuring a million and making another million people homeless.
The bombing destroyed half of Tokyo.
Haruyo Nihei, another survivor of the Tokyo bombing, says U.S. claims that its planes were bombing factories are “false”. “There were no big military factories in the areas they bombed on March 9” she explains, “they did it as punishment. I believe they should be held accountable for war crimes.”
Curtis LeMay, the U.S. Air Force general, who ordered the bombing of Tokyo said:
“[U.S. forces] scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night… than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”
LeMay admitted that
“if he had been on the losing side, he would be charged with war crimes.”
The Korean War (1950-53)
US military sources confirm that 20 percent of North Korea’s population was killed off over a three-year period of intensive bombings. Every single family in North Korea lost a loved one in the course of the Korean War.
According to General Curtis LeMay who was head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War:
“After destroying North Korea’s 78 cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians… over a period of three years…we killed off 20% of the population…perhaps an unprecedented percentage of mortality suffered by one nation due to the belligerence of another.”
North Korea lost up to 30% of its population (more than three million people) due to U.S. bombing according to War Veteran and Global Research Associate Brian S. Willson:
“Everyone I talked with, dozens and dozens of folks, lost one if not many more family members during the war especially from the continuous bombing…deliberately dropped on virtually every space in the country…The pained memories of the people are still obvious and their anger at ‘America’ is often expressed.”
General MacArthur Says “Sorry for the Human Suffering”
The criminal bombings of Pyongyang in 1951 ordered by president Truman, had been opposed by General Douglas MacArthur who was commander of allied forces in Korea:
“A defiant Douglas MacArthur appeared before Congress and spoke of human suffering so horrifying that his parting glimpse of it caused him to vomit.
“I have never seen such devastation,” the general told members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. At that time, in May 1951, the Korean War was less than a year old. Casualties, he estimated, were already north of 1 million.
“I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man,” he added, “and it just curdled my stomach.” (quoted by the Washington Post, August 10, 2
As Chossudovsky in his September 2013 article on the Korean War explains:
“The Korean War set the stage for a global process of militarization and U.S.-led wars… In the words of U.S. General Wesley Clark quoting a senior Pentagon official,
‘We’re going to take out seven countries in five years starting with Iraq then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off, Iran. (March 2, 2007)
The Vietnam War
From 1965 until 1975, the United States military dropped “more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II…It remains the largest aerial bombardment in human history.”
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. expanded the style of genocidal warfare it had perfected in Korea, bombing three countries at the same time, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
The bombing of Vietnam was accompanied by a ground invasion of a million American and allied troops who devastated the country for ten years generating a holocaust.
3.8 million Vietnamese civilians were killed in the war, 5.3 million civilians were wounded and 11 million Vietnamese were made refugees. Another 4 million Vietnamese were doused with 20 million gallons of the toxic chemical herbicide called Agent Orange dropped by U.S. planes leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.
The spraying of Agent Orange destroyed three generations of Vietnamese children (up to the present) many thousands of whom were and are born with serious mental disorders and physical deformities. Many babies were still-born or without brains, arms and legs.
“It’s suffering on an almost unimaginable scale” says Nick Turse author of the 2013 book Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Macmillan).
According to Turse, “indiscriminate killing was a deliberate strategy of the U.S. military.” And this strategy was “dictated at the highest levels of the [Pentagon].” Turse explains that the military was obsessed with body counts:
“So when they were not able to achieve victory through attrition, through the body count, the only recourse was to increase the firepower and this was turned loose on the Vietnamese countryside.”
The role of racism was also central to U.S. strategy. Similar to Israeli officials calling Palestinians “human animals” the U.S. military dehumanized the Vietnamese.
“The idea was that the Vietnamese were not really people” says Turse “they were subhuman, mere ‘gooks’ who could be killed or abused at will. I talked to veterans who told me that from the moment they got into basic training, they were told, ‘Never call them Vietnamese, call them gooks or dinks, slopes, slants, rice-eaters.’ Anything to take away their humanity, to dehumanize them and make it easy to see any Vietnamese–all Vietnamese as the enemy.”
Demolishing Iraq: Iraq War I. The Gulf War (1991)
More than thirty-five years ago, the so-called “Gulf War” (Iraq War I) was launched against Iraq on January 17, 1991.
Of relevance to Palestine, extensive crimes against humanity were committed by the US and its NATO allies under the banner of a “peace making operation”.
Remember: The 1991 Gulf War: The Massacre of Withdrawing Soldiers on “The Highway of Death”
There for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it’s impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel.”
Those extensive crimes against humanity were the beginning of a long and unending war against the people of Iraq.
Destroying Iraq. Iraq War II (2003- )
During April 2004, the Iraqi city of Fallujah was almost completely destroyed by the U.S. military which showed no regard for its massive killing of civilians as documented by Felicity Arbuthnot who reported from Iraq on this massacre. She quotes Brigadier-General Mark Kimmett who was asked by a reporter:
“You talk about a clean war in Fallujah but the Iraqis have an image through television, from what is happening in Fallujah including killing children.
Is there a way that you can convince Iraqis through your point of view that you have only utilized force against terrorists?”
As Arbuthnot puts it,
“With his hallmark contempt for humanity, Kimmit replied:
“With regards to the solution on the images of Americans killing innocent civilians, my solution is quite simple, change the channel..to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station.
The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda and lies.”
“Marines killed so many civilians that the municipal soccer stadium had to be turned into a graveyard”. (Emphasis added)
According to Felicity Arbuthnot:
The Americans invaded, chillingly: “house to house, room to room”, raining death and destruction on the proud, ancient “City of Mosques.”
One correspondent wrote: “There has been nothing like the attack on Fallujah since the Nazi invasion and occupation of much of the European continent – the shelling and bombing of Warsaw in September 1939, the terror bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940.”
Arbuthnot emphasizes that Fallujah was in fact made “a free fire zone” by the U.S. military:
“two hospitals were demolished…and at the General Hospital, patients and doctors were initially handcuffed, the ‘liberators’ regarding it as a ‘centre of propaganda’, since the staff talked … of the numbers of dead and wounded they were treating. The ‘non-American wounded were in essence left to die’ as a result. “
Arbuthnot quotes a Lt. Col Pete Newell as saying that U.S. forces wanted
“Fallujah to understand what democracy is all about.”
US Military Doctrine and Israel’s Ongoing Genocide
Israel’s current genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza is a continuation of the horrendous civilian killings carried out by the US and its NATO allies since the Second World War.
The atrocities committed in Palestine are similar to those committed in Fallujah. Washington’s fingerprints are on the Gaza genocide. Netanyahu has the unconditional support of the US Presidency.
From Dresden to Gaza (1945-2026): The Death of 40++ Million People
From Dresden to Gaza, the U.S.’ “hallmark contempt for humanity” has resulted in the death of more than 40 million people.
The people of the Global South are in the way of Washington and its proxies who covet the valuable mineral resources these people happen to live over or near.
The massacres of Gazans, Congolese and Iraqis (among others) facilitate access to these minerals (natural gas in the case of Gaza) ensuring the continuing impoverishment of the Global South and the resulting enrichment of the U.S. empire.
