A sobering look at American atrocities committed in the name of democracy.
Credit: Iranian News Service
Many Americans are selling themselves short. Too often, they are caught up in bingeing on mindless distractions like online streaming services, endless texting, and the latest celebrity gossip and are missing out on the corrupt and violent legacy of America’s founding fathers and the ensuing trail of white-collar imperialist gangsters that helped establish America’s long-standing reputation as the world’s number one tyrannical bully. This is like buying a banana, chucking the fruit, and eating the peel.
The heart of the problem is twofold: 1)America’s education system—pitiful institutions of indoctrination cranking out compliant armies of functional illiterates, and 2) the US state-sponsored corporate-controlled mockingbird media that has repeatedly failed to report the truth about America’s sordid track record—political, military, and intelligence operations that have consistently terrorized, poisoned, corrupted, and killed millions of people around the world in the name of democracy.
This blatant neglect is inexcusable. It’s time for Americans—particularly the diehard MAGA Republicans and delusional DEI Democrats—to wake up, turn off their flatscreens, and start smelling the coffee.
Seven Deadly Sins
Below is a list of seven notable American atrocities that have transpired over the past 80-plus years, a brief compilation of US state-sponsored invasions, bombing raids, chemical warfare, covert actions, false-flag operations, assassinations, and torture programs.
NOTE: The United States is not the first on a long list of countries to commit unspeakable atrocities. No doubt, the US faces stiff competition, but I believe that the majority of the close to 9 billion people inhabiting the planet would agree that America, along with their Zionist counterparts in the occupied state of Israel, currently holds the top slot.
►Number One: Dresden, Germany
Dresden, Germany. The aftermath of the 1946 US/British firebombing. Credit: Almay
The first horrific event was the WWII firebombing of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, which was a joint operation conducted by the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) and the British Royal Air Force (RAF) that took place over a four-day period in February 1945. The raid comprised over 1,000 heavy bombers that dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the heavily populated city. The bombing created a fierce firestorm (a conflagration that attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system) resulting in the destruction of more than 1,600 acres of the city center killing up to 25,000 people.
Renowned American author, Howard Zinn, a young USAAF bombardier who had participated in the raid over Dresden, reflectedon his experience years after the war:
I did not know much history when I became a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force in World War II. Only after the War did I see that we, like the Nazis, had committed atrocities … Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, my own bombing missions.
►Number Two: Hiroshima
Neighborhood reduced to rubble by atomic bomb blast, Hiroshima,1945. Credit: Bernard Hoffman
Under the direction of President Harry S. Truman, America dropped atomic bombson Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing more than 200 thousand people, creating decades of genetic deformities and irreparable environmental damage.
Scarcely reported fact: By 1945, America’s war with Japan had pretty much run its course and was nearing an end. The Japanese had been running out of fuel, and their rail system and food sources were rapidly collapsing resulting in widespread famine.
With memories of Pearl Harbor (a well-plannedUS false-flag operationdesigned to set up the Japanese by allowing them to “surprise attack” the US naval base as a pretext for securing America’s entry into the war) still fresh in the American psyche, President Truman authorized the unprecedented use of nuclear weapons against Japan. The justification offered at the time was that the use of this new wonder weapon would force Japan’s surrender and avoid a prolonged and bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland and save thousands of American lives.
While Japan was the unfortunate recipient of this immoral and psychotic massacre, the real intent of the bombings was not aimed at the Japanese who were thought of as expendable non-White Asian cannon fodder suitable for testing. On the contrary, it was directed at both Russia’s and America’s European allies, sending a clear, unspoken message: Never forget—this is who we are, and this is what we are capable of.
When asked about his decision, Truman (God rest his soul) responded:
The atom bomb was no ‘great decision.’ It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.
►Number Three: North Korea
Pyongyang after US bombing raids. Credit: National Museum of the US Air Force
Ecstatic from the achievements of WWII and the subsequent flag-waving victory parades, Truman and his gang of bloodthirsty imperialist thugs set their sights on Korea who made the foolish mistake of attempting to declare independence after half a century of brutal Japanese occupation. Unfortunately for the Koreans, Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur had other ideas. Mac (nicknamed “Dugout Doug”) announced that the US and the USSR would be occupying—and dividing–the entire Korean peninsula. Adding insult to injury, vanquished but no less vicious, Japanese forces were employed by the US to violently repress dissent, the same Japanese forces that had surrendered to the US a year earlier after witnessing US atomic bombs turn two of their cities into parking lots.
The division of Korea along the 38th parallel was an exercise in arbitrariness and utter disregard for the wishes of the people it affected. The United States, the champions of freedom and democracy, denied these tenets to the people of Korea who quickly realized that they were merely trading one occupying empire for another.
Asurvey of Koreans in the summer of 1946 found that 77 percent of Koreans preferred socialism or communism while only 14 percent favored capitalism. Be that as it may, the idea of a Korea—a country some 7,000 miles away from the United States—choosing a socialist government was a no-go for the Americans.
Initially hesitant, “Dugout Doug” finally gave the thumbs-up to General George Stratemeyer who ordered US bombers to “destroy every means of communications and every installation, factory, city, and village” in North Korea.
Determined to outdo itself, the United States dropped more bombs (some 635,000 tons) on Korea than during the entire World War II Pacific campaign. The massive US carpet bombing of North Korea included napalm, incendiary, and fragmentation bombs that killed and maimed by the thousands and left cities, towns, villages and countryside in scorched and shattered ruins. In the Northern capital of Pyongyang, only around 50,000 people remained in 1953 out of a prewar population of 500,000. That’s 10 percent of the Pyongyang population. Men, women, and children wiped out; gone.
When all the cities and towns were destroyed, US warplanes bombed dams, reservoirs, and rice fields, flooding the countryside and destroying the nation’s food supply. Only emergency aid from China, the Soviet Union, and other socialist nations averted imminent famine.
►Number Four: Vietnam
Terrified Vietnamese children running from American bombing campaign. Credit: New York Times
The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a well-documented false-flag operation designed to spark outrage and galvanize American support for America’s entry into the war against the Southeast Asian country of Vietnam in the mid-1960s.
In an effort to strike fear in the hearts and minds of the North Vietnamese, the United States introduced Operation Rolling Thunder (ORT) initiated under Lyndon Baines Johnson, a vile human being who served as the 36th US president succeeding John F. Kennedy.
ORT was an insidious sustained bombing campaign that commenced in March 1965 and ended in November 1968. The objectives of the operation were to terrorizethe people of North Vietnam,boost the morale of South Vietnam, force North Vietnam to stop sending soldiers and material into South Vietnam to fight in the communist insurgency, and to destroy North Vietnam’s transportation system, industrial base, and air defenses.
Operation Rolling Thunder sounds like the name of a rock and roll concert tour, except that ORT had nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with unprecedented evil and destruction. In a war that lasted ten years, the United States dropped more than 864,000 tons of bombs on a population of roughly 18 million people and lost approximately 922 aircraft.
The US also employed the use of toxic chemical agents as part of its combat strategy. Under Operation Ranch Hand, another insidious name, the democracy-loving American military sprayed nearly 20 million gallons of herbicides to defoliate jungles and destroy crops, affecting vast areas of Vietnam from 1962 to 1971. This included Agent Orange, the most notorious herbicide, primarily composed of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, contaminated with Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), a known carcinogen. The environment and health effects were overwhelming. Many veterans and Vietnamese citizens suffered from long-term health problems including cancers and birth defects linked to chemical exposure.
When all was said and done, the war in Vietnam accomplished nothing, and is often regarded as a strategic, political, economic, and moral failure as the American military planners knew from the outset that a war in Southeast Asia was an unwinnable cash cow for US arms manufacturers and their congressional supporters. It cost US taxpayers billions of dollars and took the lives of more than 57,000 US soldiers and an estimated 1.1 million North Vietnamese.
►Number Five: Guatemala
Death squad victims, Guatemalan Civil War. Credit: Stefani Westby
Unlike Guatemala and the 11 other South American countries who chose to mind their own affairs and butt out of the American Civil War, the United States was heavily involved in the Guatemalan Civil War, supporting the military government against leftist insurgents under the banner of—you guessed it— democracy!
America’s involvement included training military personnel in counterinsurgency tactics and providing financial and logistical support, which contributed to widespread human rights violations during the bloody conflict.
The Guatemalan Civil War lasted from 1960 to 1996. US involvement began with the 1954 coup that overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, who had implemented land reforms that threatened US business interests, especially the United Fruit Company (UFC), a large multinational corporation with financial ties to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, through their former law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell. UFC owned 42 percent of Guatemala’s land but used only 15 percent of it, while 2 percent of landowners controlled 70 percent of arable land and 300,000 families were landless.
The justification for US involvement was the fight against communism, a much-maligned Marxist political ideology that gave birth to a culture of fear and repression in Guatemala, the same fear that, for decades, has been sold to millions of financially broke and morally bankrupt Americans who lack health insurance and find themselves living hand-to-mouth, constantly scrambling for work.
The US backed Guatemalan military led to widespread atrocities, including brutal right-wing death squadsand themassacre of indigenous populations and other civilians. The Civil War resulted in an estimated 200,000 people killed or “disappeared” forcefully during the conflict, which includes 40,000 to 50,000 disappearances, a significant portion of the casualties being people of Mayan descent.
“WarCosts,” a data-driven platform documenting every American war, military intervention and covert operation since 1776, reported that the Guatemala coup:
. . . cost only $2.7 million but triggered $200 billion in economic losses from decades of civil war, making it one of history’s most destructive ‘cost-effective’ operations.
The conflict in Guatemala ended with peace accords in 1996, but trauma and the legacy of violence and impunity continue to affect the people of that country to this day.
►Number Six: Iraq
US soldier—approximately 5,043 nautical miles from the nearest American shoreline—aims his weapon at an Iraqi citizen pleading for his life in Mosul, Iraq, July 23, 2003.
Photo credit: Wally Santana, Associated Press.
The Iraq War, also known as the Second Persian Gulf War, began on March 20, 2003 and ended in 2011. Under the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration, the United States led a coalition of equally shameless allies in the invasion of Iraq, aimed at overthrowing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, primarily justified by the unsubstantiated and false claims that Saddam was in possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and links to terrorism. The same Saddam Hussein who had been a CIA asset since 1959.
The consequences of this despicable fiasco were devastating. The eight-year conflict resulted in the deaths of nearly 5,000 American servicemen and more than 30,000 wounded. According to estimates from Iraq Body Count, a total of 209,982 Iraqi civilians were killed in the war and subsequent internal conflicts between 2003 and 2022. In 2006 alone, 29,526 civilians were killed, making it the bloodiest year for the Iraqi civilian death toll. Not to mention the 3.9 million refugees who fled Iraq between 2003 and 2016 and the 1.9 million who were displaced within Iraq,
The Costs of War project reported that the amount spent by the US on the wars in Iraq and Syria totaled $1.79 trillion. This figure includes Pentagon and State Department spending, veterans’ care, and the interest on debt financing the conflicts.
One would think that the criminals responsible for these atrocities would be tried, convicted, and sent to the slammer. Think again.
In keeping with America’s tradition of honoring felons, the warmongering elite continue to live “the good life,” making TV guest appearances like the George W. Bush spot on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, promoting his book “Portraits of Courage,” where Ellen danced with the 43rd President in front of millions of viewers and joyfully announced:
I am so excited to have you here. Are you as excited as I am to be here?
Had there been a Golden Globe award category for “Best Hypocritical Talk Show Host,” Ellen would have been the category’s first recipient.
►Number Seven: Libya
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s final moments before he was beaten and anally stabbed to death. Photo credit: Reuters
Dubbed the “Mad Dog of the Middle East” by American President Ronald Reagan for his defiantly anti-Western foreign policies, Muammar Gaddafi, a 28-year-old lieutenant in the Libyan military, amassed a band of revolutionaries and staged a bloodless coup against Libya’s corrupt and highly unpopular King Idres in September 1969.
Two years after Muammar Gaddafi’s September 23, 2009provocative oration at the UN, the decision to take the Libyan leader out of the loop was unanimous among the permanent members of the Security Council and had garnered support from members of the Arab League.
Leading the charge was none other than Barack Obama, the then US president and the onetime protégée of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a warm and compassionate humanitarian who in 2008 proclaimed, “Today, it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people.”
Mr. Brzezinski’s words were not wasted on the smooth-talking one-time junior senator from Illinois who had replaced George W. Bush as the new, favored lackey for the financial and political elite. In a March 11, 2011 nationally televised address, Barack Hussein Obama, the widely popular “yes we can” president, was emphatic about his resolve and stated:
For more than four decades the Libyan people had been ruled by a tyrant, Muammar Gaddafi. He has denied his people freedom. Exploited their wealth. Murdered opponents at home and abroad. And terrorized innocent people around the world, including Americans that were killed by Libyan agents.
Ten days later Obama announced:
Today I authorized the Armed Forces of the United States to begin a limited military action in Libya in support of an international effort to protect Libyan civilians. That action has now begun. In this effort, the United States is acting with a broad coalition that is committed to enforcing United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which calls for the protection of the Libyan people. That coalition met in Paris today to send a unified message, and it brings together many of our European and Arab partners.
Courtesy of the United States and their obedient allies, Libya has become a 21st-century laboratory of chaos: a failed state, a non-country whose fate is no longer in the hands of the citizens of Tripoli and Benghazi.
It’s been 15 years since the removal of Gaddafi from power, and Libya in 2026 remains divided between two rival governments: the Government of National Unity (GNU) based in Tripoli and the eastern administration backed by Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA). While large-scale fighting subsided after the 2020 ceasefire, the country faces ongoing political deadlock, foreign military presence, militia control, and unresolved elections.
American Exceptionalism
When it comes to domination, corruption, treachery, and warfare, America is indeed incomparable, evidenced by America’s exceptional track record established in its relatively short 250-year history. Below are a few notable highlights:
- America controls 750 military bases in 80 countries and has an annual defense budget of $850 billion, a $34 billion or 4.1 percent increase from the 2023 enacted level;
- Along with Russia, America holds the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons;
- America has the largest intelligence agencies on the planet with budgets of $73.3 billion for the National Intelligence and $27.8 billion for Military Intelligence Programs;
- America introduced the world to insidious weapons such as napalm, Agent Orange, white phosphorus, and depleted uranium;
- America dropped bombs on more than thirty sovereign nations since WWII—killing tens of millions of innocent men, women, and children—including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, China, Congo, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia–Serbia, and Vietnam;
- America backed, funded, and trained murderous right-wing military regimes around the world and ousted the governments of more than twenty-five foreign countries including Albania, Afghanistan, Australia, British Guiana, Bulgaria, Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Chad, Chile, Congo, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Fiji, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Jamaica, Laos, Nicaragua, Panama, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Venezuela, and South Vietnam;
- Americawas one of the three countries to vote against a United Nations resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism;
- America developed and rolled out an untested injectable bioweapon, raking in billions in profit while causing more than 17 million deaths and more than 567 million adverse reactions and long-term injuries;
- America staged a 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine and sent billions of US tax dollars and weapons to that country’s ultra-right-wing Nazi regime, igniting an all-out proxy war with Russia resulting in more than 500,000 deaths.
- America currently supports and funds the despicable Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza that has killed more than 72,134 people including 18,592 children, 12,400 women, 4,412 elderly, 1,411 medical personnel, 252 journalists, 800 educational staff, 203 United Nations staff, and 113 Civil Defense workers.
As of 2026 there are more than 20,000 Palestinian children missing and 50,000 children who have lost one or more of their limbs.
The End of an Empire
In 2026, the United States has engaged in an unprovoked attack on the sovereign nation of Iran killing Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, along with several members of his family—a sterling example of American-style democracy.
To date, US and Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 1,400 Iranians including 200 children. Key oil refineries have been destroyed, and the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, crippling trade and impacting economies in the Middle East Gulf Coast region and around the world. Countries across Asia are rationing fuel, canceling thousands of flights, and closing schools to conserve energy. This rapidly escalating insanity is threatening to ignite WWIII, and expert military analysts are now suggesting the very real possibility of the use of nuclear weapons.
A Fatal Combination: Unbridled Hubris and Breathtaking Stupidity
To compound the situation, the Pentagon has asked the White House to approve a 200-billion-dollar funding request to Congress. President Trump, a deeply troubled former game show host, told a rally crowd that the war was won in the first hour but failed to acknowledge that the US is sending more war ships to the region packed with thousands of US Marines, locked and loaded and prepared for a ground invasion, a fatal decision that—similar to every other American war—will undoubtedly send many young Americans back home in flag-draped coffins.
Who Are We and How Did We Allow This to Happen?
After a careful and realistic examination of America’s history of war and intervention over the last two centuries, any sane, rational, and critical-thinking American citizen would have to take a step back and question America’s political, cultural, and psychological profile and ask: Exactly, who are we and how did we allow this to happen?
Americans have been lulled to sleep by decades of cheap energy, boundless convenience, and mindless distractions, along with the implacable flag-waving patriotic delusion that they are on the right side of peace, justice, and democracy. The empty shopping cart full of Trump’s lies and failed campaign promises, along with the current escalating crisis in Iran, is slowly waking groggy Americans from a deep sleep and is about to treat them to the sobering final chapter of a fairytale that they believed would last forever.
With skyrocketing inflation, an increasing homeless population, millions out of work and addicted to drugs, astronomical healthcare and food costs, bank failures, and a national debt approaching $40 trillion, the writing is clearly on the wall: It’s a race to the bottom and we are headed for an economic collapse that will make the 1930s depression feel like a trip to Disneyland.
For the sleepwalkers forever chasing The American Dream with their eyes closed and their arms fully extended, little preparation will be required of them. History has proven that the universe has a way of taking care of itself.
Stay tuned. It’s about to get real.