Weltmeister des Vergessens (Nachtrag)

Toward the end of my essay, “Weltmeister des Vergessens” (Merkur, July 2025), I observed: “Our own pervasive culture of forgetting invisibly undergirds the extremism we are witnessing today.”

I was wrong. What seemed then to be merely implicit has become – like so much else in this second Trump administration – shamelessly and repugnantly plain.

Since this article went to press, U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has justified the Israeli bombing of Gaza specifically with reference to the Allied bombing of Germany in WWII. If the latter is unreservedly justifiable–as he clearly assumes–then so too is the former: „What a hypocrisy to say that those bombings that ultimately ended World War II and stopped the threat of the Nazis into all of Europe was somehow OK. But if the Israelis, you know, 70 years later, try to defend themselves from an existential threat, that we ought to be mad at them.“

The juxtaposition of course only “works” to the extent that the massive civilian casualties of WWII have already effectively been neutralized in American public memory–suppressed, justified, or forgotten. Only in this way can the comparison serve as a benediction on the ongoing Israeli bombing of Gaza, “the devastating price of which,” Pope Leo IV reminds us, “is paid by children, the elderly and the sick.”

That was May 21, 2025. Just over one month later, on June 25, Trump stated that the US’s recent bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities was “essentially the same thing” as the US bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshimi at the end of WWII. This in an effort to bolster his unproven claim that Iran’s nuclear capability had been “completely and fully obliterated” and that the bombing, like the dropping of the first nuclear bombs in history, had been decisive: “That hit ended the war.” 

He is counting on precisely those particular American memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: total, war-ending obliteration, rather than the unprecedented incineration of over 200,000 people, and the nuclear poisoning of thousands more. It is the “awesome” mushroom cloud, that testament to American power, rather than the child’s abandoned lunch box, or bicycle, never to be used again.

William Collins Donahue

June 28, 2025