From Hiroshima, Nagasaki to Gaza: Western media’s persistence with Cold War propaganda

By Akhtar Pathan

KARACHI, Pakistan (MNTV) — For decades, the global memory of World War II’s greatest horrors has reflected a distinct geographical and cultural imbalance in the West. While the Holocaust has become deeply institutionalized in Western classrooms, museums, public commemorations and media, the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is often presented primarily through the lens of military strategy and the argument that the bombings hastened Japan’s surrender.

As the world marked the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, questions over that disparity remain unresolved.

Scholars argue that the devastation caused by the United States’ use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been understated and described too often in neutral, non-accusatory terms, without sufficient attention to the moral and ethical questions surrounding the deaths and suffering of civilians.

The bombs were dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and Nagasaki three days later. Widely cited estimates put the eventual death toll from the two attacks at more than 200,000, including those who died later from injuries and radiation-related illnesses.

For critics of the prevailing narrative, the issue is not whether the Holocaust should be remembered. Rather, they question why the Holocaust has come to occupy such a dominant place in global memory while Hiroshima and Nagasaki are frequently discussed as an unavoidable consequence of war.

They argue that this framing served two purposes: It shifted attention away from the humanitarian consequences of the atomic attacks while emphasizing circumstances presented as mitigating factors, including the argument that the bombings were necessary to avoid a far more costly conventional invasion of Japan.

At the same time, they contend, the Holocaust was elevated as the defining symbol of human suffering, making other large-scale catastrophes appear comparatively less significant.

Atomic attacks framed through military utility

The disparity, according to scholars of memory and historiography cited in the debate, cannot be separated from geopolitics, cultural proximity and the way Western societies construct their own historical and moral identity.

At the center of the argument is a difference in how the two tragedies are generally categorized.

The Holocaust is widely presented as an absolute moral rupture: an ideological campaign aimed at destroying an entire population and one that cannot be justified by conventional military objectives.

The atomic bombings, by contrast, have often been framed through military utility. Western educational narratives have traditionally emphasized President Harry S. Truman’s decision to authorize the attacks as a means of forcing Japan to surrender quickly and avoiding a potentially bloody invasion.

That interpretation has remained influential because it presents the end of World War II as a morally justified Allied victory. Giving greater weight to the humanitarian consequences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki requires a more difficult examination of the conduct of the victors themselves.

The historical record also shows that information about the effects of the bombings did not circulate freely in the immediate postwar period.

During the U.S.-led Allied occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952, American authorities imposed restrictions and censorship on Japanese media and other material. Hence, the suppression or limited circulation of photographs, medical reports and information about radiation sickness delayed broader international awareness of the long-term consequences of the attacks.

The emergence of the Cold War further complicated the issue.

The United States and its allies increasingly relied on nuclear deterrence as a central component of their security strategy. Treating Hiroshima and Nagasaki primarily as humanitarian catastrophes would have raised uncomfortable questions about the legitimacy of the nuclear doctrine that followed.

The two tragedies also produced different legacies for their survivors.

Historian Dr. Ran Zwigenberg, whose research examines global memory culture, has noted the emergence of Holocaust survivors as powerful symbols of moral authority in the late 20th century, supported by museums, memorials and school curricula throughout Europe and North America.

Japan’s atomic bomb survivors, known as hibakusha, faced a different experience. They encountered social stigma in Japan and were initially marginalized. Even as Japan’s peace movement developed, its ability to project hibakusha as universal symbols of victimhood was complicated by international criticism of Japan’s own wartime atrocities in Asia.

Geography also matters. The Holocaust occurred in the heart of Europe and was perpetrated by a highly modernized European state using the machinery of bureaucracy, administration and industrial technology. Its legacy therefore forced a profound reckoning within Western philosophy, theology, law and politics.

The Pacific War, by comparison, has often been treated in Western textbooks as a distant theater of World War II. This Eurocentric structure naturally gives European tragedies greater institutional attention and emotional resonance than Asian suffering.

‘For Western media, Japan equalled Nazi Germany’

Muhammad Osama Shafiq, director of the Institute for Media & Social Dynamics, U.K., and associate professor of mass communication at the University of Karachi, said the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had received less attention than the Holocaust because the global order itself determines which tragedies receive prominence.

“One of the fundamental reasons for this is that the people who have created the world order have their own standards of liking and disliking,” Shafiq said. “Those [groups and institutions] who spread this destruction are the rulers of the world at the moment, and they want to escape accountability for their actions.”

Shafiq said the issue of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was initially raised mainly by individuals and organizations with socialist backgrounds. Their criticism was loud at first, he said, but gradually weakened until it became largely a story of the past.

He also linked the treatment of Japan to its wartime alliance with Germany.

“Western media lumps Japan together with Germany, views it with the same lens and attributes to it the same cruelties the Nazi regime wrought upon its European subjects after victory,” Shafiq said.

As a result, he argued, Japan did not receive comparable sympathetic attention, and there was insufficient objective assessment of the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the atomic attacks.

Shafiq said the portrayal of the Holocaust as a uniquely defining event was also connected to the concentration of power over global media and the international order.

“They define what is important, what is not important or less important,” he said.

He argued that the facts surrounding the Holocaust should be fully brought before the world but maintained that an excessive focus on the issue had also developed. He criticized restrictions on Holocaust-related debate in many countries in the West, describing them as incompatible with academic freedom.

A ‘carefully woven’ narrative

Shafiq said the United States’ atomic attacks were frequently presented as the only realistic means of ending the war without an even greater loss of life.

Western media, he argued, often treats the suffering left behind in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the cost of an inevitable strategic decision.

“If you look at it closely, in the eyes of the West, Japan and Germany were one,” he said, arguing that Japan was viewed through the same moral lens as Nazi Germany.

He said the prevailing argument effectively held that the killing of hundreds of thousands of people could be justified if it prevented the deaths of potentially millions in a conventional invasion.

Shafiq also argued that the Holocaust narrative was used to justify a broader logic of preemption: If Nazi Germany could seek to exterminate Jews, he said, Western powers argued that similar threats could eventually be directed against other nations, peoples or religions.

From Hiroshima to Gaza

Shafiq sees parallels between the way the Holocaust and Hiroshima have been remembered and the Western response to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.

He described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a kind of replica of the Holocaust” and compared the response with the way Western nations retaliated against Nazi Germany.

“They think that the killing of every Muslim or Palestinian is the only solution to this problem, and [it was unavoidably necessary] so that they can be safe,” he said.

His comparison is part of a broader argument that colonial history has shaped Western media narratives in ways that influence how contemporary conflicts are understood.

Shafiq said the world had, in effect, “forgotten the apocalypse of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” while continuing to view contemporary events through the lens of the Holocaust.

He called for greater scrutiny of laws intended to protect Holocaust memory and for nations to be held accountable for large-scale human rights violations regardless of where they occur.

He argued that atrocities should be examined through facts, figures and universal human rights standards rather than through political or historical hierarchies of suffering.

 ‘Less objectivity and more propaganda’

Shafiq questioned the claim that Western media is inherently objective.

“The Western media calls itself objective, but it is not objective; it has less objectivity and more propaganda,” he said.

He referred to the concept of media framing, in which news organizations select particular aspects of an event and emphasize them in ways that can influence public perception.

“Media frames things in such a way that a small thing looks bigger and bigger things are made to look small,” he said.

Shafiq attributed the persistence of dominant narratives to media ownership, arguing that contemporary media organizations remain connected to older structures of Western influence.

He said he was not arguing that Holocaust narratives were entirely true or entirely false, but that the subject should be open to academic discussion.

“I am not saying that the stories are wholly right or wholly wrong; what I am saying is that I think an open debate should be held on this issue,” he said.

For Shafiq, the larger question is not whether one tragedy should replace another in global memory. It is whether humanity can develop a more consistent moral standard for remembering mass suffering.

“The debate on the Holocaust should be opened,” he said. “Only then can all the facts come to the fore and the world can see a truer picture of the humanitarian tragedy.”