The bombing of Guernica in 1937 unveiled weapons of mass destruction aimed at civilian populations. While Picasso’s famous painting depicting that event brought cubism and outrage together, Guernica marks a more critical narrative demarcation point – the beginning of current US military culture. Hitler and Mussolini’s targeting of a Basque town in 1937 to assist Generalissimo Francisco Franco in the quest to overthrow the republic employed the cutting edge of war technology. Saturation bombing of civilians would be a universal feature of the Second World War, but eventually the US would reinvent the psychology of warfare. Today the US runs a global empire founded almost exclusively on serial terrorism from the sky.

With the increased military capacity to impersonally erase thousands of lives – eliminating any physical contact between the perpetrator and the victim – war has become “decoupled” from consequences, from risks, from personal accountability, and, ultimately, from moral constraints. War, an event that once featured the profound intimacy of hand to hand combat, now can be pared down to statistical results on a ledger sheet, the costs and benefits of a business that outsources pain and sacrifice as a means of shutting down public opposition. The goal of US military power is to control foreign governments without paying for that control with sacrificed soldiers. This can happen by raining terror from the sky, committing genocide from above at little risk. The ultimate accomplishment of US military evolution is Gaza – a proxy war in which technology has turned war into demolition. Think of Gaza as a series of buildings being razed to allow for a new construction project.

When war becomes a matter of technological imbalance, a confrontation between a culture that has no access to weapons of mass destruction and one that has limitless capacity to exploit the means of obliteration, we have reached Gazan dimensions of absurdity. There is no war in Gaza in the traditional sense, just the carrying out of technical acts – mechanical deeds, the soulless behavior of industrial systems. That has been the goal of US military power since World War Two, when the US took over the task of violent expansion from the vanquished Nazi regime, and surrounded The Soviet Union (as Germany had once held Stalingrad under siege) with military bases.

The US aspired to exploit a monopoly of nuclear weapons after conducting in vivo experiments – Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With all the atomic warheads hoarded under a single flag, the US, under Harry Truman, aspired to channel the spirit of Guernica into a global hegemony. US military brass had teetered on the edge of fantasy and nightmare, to imagine not one, but dozens, even hundreds of nuclear strikes on The Soviet Union, reducing a great country, and a competing economic philosophy to utter rubble on an inconceivable scale. According to Russian journalist, Ekaterina Blinova:

“Between 1945 and the USSR’s first detonation of a nuclear device in 1949, the Pentagon developed at least nine nuclear war plans targeting Soviet Russia, according to US researchers Dr. Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod. In their book “To Win a Nuclear War: the Pentagon’s Secret War Plans,” based on declassified top secret documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the researchers exposed the US military’s strategies to initiate a nuclear war with Russia.

The names given to these plans graphically portray their offensive purpose: Bushwhacker, Broiler, Sizzle, Shakedown, Offtackle, Dropshot, Trojan, Pincher, and Frolic. The US military knew the offensive nature of the job President Truman had ordered them to prepare for and had named their war plans accordingly,” remarked American scholar J.W. Smith (“The World’s Wasted Wealth 2”).

These “first-strike” plans developed by the Pentagon were aimed at destroying the USSR without any damage to the United States.”

The idea of one sided military destruction may have received a fatal and unexpected blow as the Soviets gained nuclear parity with surprising swiftness (creating our ongoing existential nuclear framework of mutually assured destruction), but the idea of controlling the world from the skies has been an inextinguishable driving force in US foreign policy. We saw this aspiration in General Curtis LeMay’s threat to “bomb Vietnam back to the stone age” – an undertaking that proved impossible, for war against defenseless villagers does not aim to destroy a nation militarily, it strives, rather, to exact human suffering for its own sake. The US leadership – habitually fond of hurling the word terrorist as a generic epithet – has used terrorism as an almost exclusive military default.

We normally think of terrorism as an equalizer for political organizations that have no capacity to wage war. A suicide bomber allows ISIS or Al Qaeda to intimidate western nations despite having an infinitesimal fraction of the military resources of their opponents. US terrorism raises a paradox – a country that has amassed more weaponry than any other still acts as though it has no military capability at all. In effect, the gargantuan US military indeed has almost no capacity to win wars – the US empire has become too vast to police, and the US public proved during the Vietnam War that it had no stomach to give up its sons for colonial adventures on the other side of the planet. Retired Lieutenant Colonel, William Astore explains the bizarre story of the US and its fetish for bombing:

This country’s propensity for believing that its ability to rain hellfire from the sky provides a winning methodology for its wars has proven to be a fantasy of our age. Whether in Korea in the early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, or more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the U.S. may control the air, but that dominance simply hasn’t led to ultimate success. In the case of Afghanistan, weapons like the Mother of All Bombs, or MOAB (the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. military’s arsenal), have been celebrated as game changers even when they change nothing. (Indeed, the Taliban only continues to grow stronger, as does the branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.) As is often the case when it comes to U.S. air power, such destruction leads neither to victory, nor closure of any sort; only to yet more destruction.”

One might see the repetitive ritual of US bombing – almost always deployed against dark skinned victims – as part of a mass extortion scheme. Imagine a kidnapper demanding ransom for a child and sending the tip of the child’s severed finger as proof that he means business. The world knows that the US means business when it comes to bombing. The American military often displays severed body parts – in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq and Syria – and now, by proxy, in Gaza. The US controls the world, not by the usual colonial means of conquest and occupation, but by pure fear of the heavens that can open up on a whim unleashing bunker busters and napalm.

The last time the US won a war via destruction from the air was in 1945 when atomic weapons detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those terrible moments have been locked into the mindset of US masculinist prancing for eight decades. The prototypal episode unleashed a frightening aftershock of internal euphoria among top US brass that can be gleaned from a letter sent by Manhattan Project physicist, Louis Alvarez, to his young son Walter.

Alvarez was one of a few scientists wishing to see his handiwork in person, and he flew alongside “The Enola Gay” as a witness in a plane named “The Great Artiste.” He describes the blast as “awe-inspiring,” refers to his targets as “the Japs” and does not trouble himself with a single word of distress about the tens of thousands vaporized, burned, blinded, maimed and haunted by this dry run for the American military ego.

Alvarez and his son, Walter would later become famous for their theory proposing that a meteor strike wiped out the dinosaurs. One might speculate that the Chicxulub Meteor – the starring item in Alvarez’ famous theory – originated in the Nobel Prize winning physicist’s memory of Hiroshima. Legendary Princeton paleontologist, Gerta Keller (Keller, with her own improbable story, attributes the Dino demise to Deccan Traps volcanism), has fiercely argued against the Alvarez dinosaur extinction hypothesis, alleging that Louis Alvarez pushed his theory by bullying and threatening opponents with loss of tenure, but this tangent should not encourage us to see Alvarez as an outlier with hardened character flaws.

A far more toxic figure than Louis Alvarez – Donald Trump – invoked our shared horror with an unknowing boast about his ineffectual bombing of Iran last week:

“I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima. I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing that ended that war.”

Trump, who had once bragged that he owned a bigger nuclear button than Kim Jong Un, offered evidence that the prototype of US air domination never strays from the minds of those driving US colonial expansion. Hiroshima and Nagasaki comprise America’s wet dream, and sustain the obsession with air warfare.

Trump’s ridiculous baiting of Iran to surrender after an ineffectual air strike rather suggests the phallic symbolism of bombs and planes – penis shaped objects that soar and “explode” (the Elizabethans of Shakespearian times used death as a vernacular term for orgasm). And that may be the point, as it is in America’s gun fetishism – a masculinist ritual of phallic power, for which the people of the world are an endless repository of collateral damage. It is no accident that Trump, the court confirmed rapist, the small handed sufferer of phallic uncertainty, should embrace bombing with such joyful, threatening satisfaction.

We all know that the whole world despises the United States, but we rather analyze and describe that hatred in whimsical terms – we flatter ourselves that we are merely dumb, boorish, deluded and full of ourselves, when, in fact, we collectively engage in mass murder as a reflexive expression of our global fantasies. We murder with an air of mass oblivion, reflecting, like Louis Alvarez, upon the awe-inspiring mushroom cloud without even pretending to imagine the bodies underneath the smoke.

It is quite a mistake to merely attribute our rage to exterminate as a byproduct of some sort of unresolved phallic insecurity. War and weapons are enormously profitable. Almost every city and town in the US provides a safe haven for the armaments industry and in my tiny home town of Northampton, Massachusetts we make the sensors that have helped destroy tens and tens of thousands of defenseless innocents in Gaza at a little factory on Prince Street operated by L3Harris. This factory makes the systems that may soon consume the entire globe and bring our species, and all others to an abrupt halt.

I should list the profits of L3 and Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman and all the other icons of the military industrial complex that shake down the planet for every dime that the human race can possibly spare, but the astronomical totals are beside the point. The United States drives the world to hell in a handbasket with a fetish to rain down bombs from the sky. For my part, I picket my local death machine on Prince Street with two other elderly men and two younger women each Wednesday morning. I am not a crazy person who has any illusions about my actions – that might well be meaningless.

But if thousands would gaze into the tortured soul of America and see that L3Harris is the beating heart of our almost inevitable extinction, then our numbers would swell as they absolutely must. Every citizen of this cursed country has the task to bring the destroyer of the world to its senses. The very first priority is to upend the bomb dropping enterprise that feasts on profits and unacknowledged sexual compulsions.

This piece first appeared on Nobody’s Voice.

The post Sky Wars – The Bombing Industrial Complex of US Terror appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.