Mike Huckabee’s attempt to justify Israel’s annihilation of Gaza by invoking the Allied bombing of Dresden is more than historical sleight of hand — it’s an open declaration that mass killing of civilians is an acceptable tool of war. Appearing on Fox News, the former Arkansas governor and current U.S. ambassador to Israel sought to bat away British criticism of the siege and ethnic cleansing of Gaza by telling the UK to “remember Dresden.”
It’s a telling choice. In February 1945, over the course of two days, U.S. and British warplanes unleashed high explosives and incendiary bombs on the German city, killing more than 25,000 people. The inferno melted human flesh, suffocated those who took refuge underground, and incinerated refugees, prisoners of war, hospital patients, and even zoo animals. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, then a prisoner of war in Dresden, would later describe it as “carnage unfathomable.” Winston Churchill himself briefly wavered, wondering whether ‘the destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing… I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives… rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction’
The Nuclear Shadow: Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Dresden was not an aberration. Six months later, the United States would obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands in moments. These attacks were justified at the time as acts to “end the war,” but historians have long noted their other function: a demonstration of force to the Soviet Union, a message in the opening moves of the Cold War.
Whether by firestorm or nuclear blast, these were mass killings of civilians. The kind of acts later prohibited under the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. But the victors at Nuremberg prosecuted only the defeated. No Allied commander or politician ever faced trial for Dresden or Hiroshima.
The Dangerous Logic of Unpunished Crimes
Huckabee’s logic is simple and lethal: if the Allies could do it, why can’t Israel? This is why the failure to reckon with the full range of Second World War atrocities matters so profoundly today. By writing history as if only the Axis committed crimes, the Allies left future leaders with a ready-made defence for their own brutality.
This is not a new tactic. Every empire has reached for historical precedent to cloak its violence in legitimacy. What is chilling here is the openness with which Huckabee makes the argument, as if Dresden’s infamy has somehow transformed into a badge of moral authority rather than a warning against the depths of human cruelty.
Never Again Means Everyone
The true lesson of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki is that no state, no matter its cause or its enemies, should be permitted to commit such acts with impunity. “Never again” was supposed to mean never again for anyone, not “never again unless it’s us or our allies.” Huckabee’s defence of Gaza’s destruction shows what happens when that principle is abandoned: the crimes of the past become a permission slip for the crimes of the present.
What Huckabee offers is not moral clarity but moral collapse. And if the world accepts his logic, “never again” will become nothing more than a hollow slogan. Becoming another casualty of the age of impunity.
