Conservative pundit Candace Owens responded to a hit piece published by Newsweek accusing her of “Soviet propaganda” for questioning the devastating firebombings of the German city of Dresden.
“Newsweek ran a piece accusing me of spreading ‘Soviet Propaganda’ for saying the bombing of Dresden was a war crime,” Owens said.
“Um…who wants to tell them? Lol.”
“I literally laughed out loud at the headline. Unbelievable historical oversight,” Owens added in a reply.
Newsweek ran a piece accusing me of spreading “Soviet Propaganda” for saying the bombing of Dresden was a war crime.
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) April 25, 2024
Um…who wants to tell them? Lol pic.twitter.com/ane1RyTKjP
The Newsweek piece offered a broad survey of critics of Owens’ recent remarks over the actions of the United States in World War II.
The controversy stemmed from Tucker Carlson’s criticism of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where he expressed moral opposition.
Owens agreed with Carlson, adding a humanitarian critique of the allied firebombing of Dresden.
“What happened in Dresden was, is, and will always be a war crime,” Owens wrote.
“You’re a sick person if you believe that innocent women and children and refugees deserved to be incinerated because of a government that the overwhelming majority of them didn’t even vote for.”
However, critics of Owen’s remarks are not entirely without basis, given that Criticism of the firebombing of Dresden was used to demozae te West by the East German state.
“It is true that much of what has been thought and said about Dresden since its destruction owes a great deal to the efforts of first Nazi and then Communists propagandists,” writes historian Frederick Taylor in his book Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, as quoted in Michael Kramer’s “The WWII Bombing of Dresden: Propaganda and Mythology.”
“This fairy tale of the Red Army as Dresden’s wholly benign liberator and savior was one small but vital part of a rapidly growing tissue of myths, obfuscations, and suppressions, which was soon to make east Germany very different from the west. To talk about the atrocities committed by the Red Army during those early months became taboo. To talk about the western Allies’ bombing of Dresden was, however, soon permitted,” Taylor continues.
But the Soviet adoption of this narrative is ironic and opportunistic:
Resist The Mainstream noted:
The firebombing of Dresden was specifically requested by none other than Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin (a man not known for his scruples about mass civilian deaths) at the Yalta conference, and the request was duly obliged by the Man of Steel’s British and American allies. Owens is perhaps too hasty in dismissing these critics merely on the basis of the U.S.S.R.’s loyalties in World War II, as the facts of the war did not prevent Communist propagandists from exploiting the tragedy for their own narrative control. Regardless of these scruples, the incident underscores a growing trend of questioning established narratives about the supposedly heroic side of World War II, which have been increasingly challenged by pundits and intellectuals on both the right and the left.
In March a discourse about the moral rectitude of the Second World War went viral when AJ+ promoted a video calling the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a “war crime.”
“[The United States] doesn’t want to raise questions about the accepted notion of World War II as a good war,” historian Naoko Wake says in the AJ+ clip.
Oppenheimer has been released in Japan, eight months after its global release.
— AJ+ (@ajplus) April 1, 2024
We spoke to historian Naoko Wake to learn why the U.S. refuses to take accountability for the war crimes it committed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and why all of this is relevant to us today. pic.twitter.com/sQQS8SWyLd
