Today, conventional bombs have a colossal force like smaller nuclear bombs. The USA/Biden/Trump have supplied and are supplying Israel with enormous 2000 pound bombs that can destroy and kill everything within a large area.
Hiroshima was an ”instant of truth” an expression by Hannah Arendt, see also Arendt in Giroux (2016), which in our world has been drowned in a culture where violence, cruelty and mass murder have been normalized through the media. Industrial warfare has erased the distinction between soldiers and civilians. The unthinkable has been normalized. Killing civilians in the name of military necessity is a legacy that stretches from Hiroshima to the slaughter of civilians in today’s Gaza.
The images of the destruction in Gaza bring up images similar to Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Gaza has therefore today become a moment of truth in a world of lies and concealment. Refugee camps in Gaza are being bombed indiscriminately, and large areas have been reduced to rubble. A brief ceasefire allowed residents to dig in the ruins, where thousands remain dead for over a year. If you don’t mind the comparison with Hiroshima, photos of the carpet bombings of Dresden and Hamburg during World War II are apt.
The atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, instantly wiped out 70,000 people and 70,000 died later. The bomb was celebrated as the means to end the war. A weapon of mass destruction that was praised by politicians and military personnel, but which also cruelly erased the distinction between civilians and soldiers. The bomb became a symbol of human evil, but defended with a fanaticism that we still see in today’s doomsday planners who can eradicate all life on our planet. We see this advanced technological mass destruction today refined through the development of conventional weapons of enormous impact. Combined with advanced digital satellite control, they can destroy large residential areas with frightening efficiency. There was an atmosphere of “technological fanaticism” (Giroux, 2016), where civilians could be mass-annihilated.
Today, Israel has continued this form of total warfare in Gaza, where an armed resistance movement is trying to defend Palestinian land against occupation. Suspicion of a resistance member in a building is enough to send the entire building to rubble, killing all the residents. It is also reported that they choose to bomb when the family gathers for the evening meal…voila!
This is a Hiroshima mentality, where the distinction between military and civilian is blurred. Entire families and their relatives are cynically slaughtered. Because we can, we do it, seems to be the military and political option. Just like one could drop the atomic bomb. A technological fanaticism, where new weapons are tested on living people and the stench of burning flesh does not bother the practitioners or the politicians who let all hell break loose.
A new technological arms race has occurred, where Israel’s war in Gaza is a living laboratory for the use of organized violence against an unprotected, defenseless civilian population. With the use of artificial intelligence (AI), the extermination has been automated, so that the human factor does not delay an attack. Automated weapons mean an increased risk of civilians being hit, but also mean that war “can be waged without putting large numbers of military personnel at risk” (Hartung, 2025).
Using AI-guided weapons to enhance the ability to annihilate enemies must, as quickly as possible, reinforce the urge to make the software make the decisions, not the operators. Biden’s Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall put it; “If you have a human in the loop, you will lose” (Hartung, 2025).
It is about developing new weapons of mass destruction and as inspiration, Palantir CEO Alan Karp cites the Manhattan Project where the atomic bomb was developed and then unleashed on Japan in a fiery hell the world had never seen before. Although there was disgust for Hitler’s mass extermination, there was less empathy with the Japanese civilian population. War has become a question of advanced technology, but who should be the victims? Typically, it is populations that the white supremacist mentality sees as inferior and that can be bombed beyond recognition. Alan Karp: “The United States and its allies abroad should without delay commit to launching a new Manhattan Project in order to retain exclusive control of the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield — the targeting systems and swarms of drones and robots that will become the most powerful weapons of the century.”
Driving this development are the large private tech companies owned by super-rich oligarchs with close ties to the Pentagon. An unholy alliance to control the world and, if necessary, enforce so-called American values by force. Palantir, owned by the oligarch Peter Thiel and with Alan Karp as CEO, has made no secret of its support for mass extermination and genocide in Gaza. It is about maintaining American dominance in military technology. In close cooperation with the government of Israel, killing machines are being tested on the Palestinian civilian population with enormous casualties. At the same time, the so-called liberal West turns its back and does not intervene in this slaughter that is happening in the open.
Let us quote Giroux: “To be informed, critical, and willing to fight for a better world demands immense courage. It requires a refusal to be silenced by institutional comforts or pressures. Speaking out today is, indeed, dangerous. In times like these, as Hannah Arendt noted, thinking itself has become a risk”(Giroux, 2024).
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John Graversgaard is a Political activist from Denmark Email: [email protected]
Notes
Hartung William D. :
William D. Hartung, A Manhattan Project for AI Weaponry? The new age militarists. And their threat to our common future, 18 March 2025. www.tomdispatch.com
Giroux Henry A. : America`s addiction to terrorism, Monthly Review Press, New York 2016.
https://monthlyreview.org/product/americas_addiction_to_terrorism/
Giroux Henry A.: Interview: “If your work doesn’t reach into the future, what’s the point?”
