Of all the tweets I’ve ever tweeted–and I’ve tweeted many–by far the ones that have gotten the most exposure were a couple of tweets I hastily banged out a year ago while Twitter was collectively melting down over police brutality in Ferguson and the mainstream media’s stubborn reluctance to make a big deal over it.

I can still see them being linked every time someone says #AllLivesMatter in response to the #BlackLivesMatter refrain, most recently at Martin O’Malley’s incredibly unfortunate response to #BlackLivesMatter activists at Netroots Nation. (Whatever else you can say about him, we can at least be sure Governor O’Malley doesn’t spend much time on Twitter.)

It shouldn’t be rocket science why invoking “All Lives Matter” is, at best, insensitive and, at worst, an active attempt to derail activism and deny reality. Nobody is disagreeing that all people’s lives do, in fact, matter and ought to matter equally.

The point is that right now they are not treated as though they matter equally. Some people’s lives are treated as precious, others as disposable garbage. If you really do believe all lives matter, then your focus should be on black lives, which are demonstrably the most neglected lives in our country and, for that matter, the world. Treating a focus on black lives as a “special interest” or parochial concern requires willful ignorance about what kind of world we actually live in.

The charitable interpretation is that #AllLivesMatter folks just aren’t aware of this–they conceive of our justice and law enforcement system as a basically decent system that basically works the way it should where any instances of police brutality or unjust killings are unfortunate exceptions to the rule. They think of activists as just taking a few of those exceptions and singling them out because the victims “happen to be black.”

You can push back on this with statistical evidence — statistics that aren’t new or shocking to anyone, that have been known for years before putting names and faces to them like Mike Brown and Sandra Bland made them go viral. You can point to the obvious signs of a culture of racism, the ever-present context of a racist history in which these events occur. You can demonstrate that you’re not “picking and choosing” victims by signal-boosting just as loudly when a white teenager is killed, demonstrating that it’s not that you don’t care about white victims, but white victims are comparatively rarer.

You keep tweeting and keep marching and keep writing articles and books hoping that you will eventually “raise awareness” enough that the #AllLivesMatter crowd will stop their pointless derailing and actually act like all lives matter.

For some of them, this might work. But I’m coming to think that for many, it doesn’t–because they do not, in fact, believe that all lives matter, and consciously or unconsciously are excluding quite a lot of people from the “all” in that phrase.

Look at President Bush’s invasion of Iraq and President Obama’s withdrawal, both of which are being furiously relitigated at the moment in the run-up to the Republican primaries. Both pro-war and anti-war pundits talk endlessly about the 4,491 American deaths in that war, either arguing that withdrawal “saved more American lives” or caused those Americans who had died to have “died in vain.”

Going totally unmentioned are the more than 100,000 Iraqi deaths (we think, no one has been able to keep accurate count) in that war, the majority of whom were civilians, killed by violence in the war, and the untold more who died from disease or privation. This is a number at least 20 times as high as the number of Americans killed, possibly 40 times as high.

But we treat our people’s deaths as fundamentally more meaningful than theirs. Even the liberal anti-war crowd reflexively talks about “American troops” being killed and “the deaths of American citizens.” Whatever you think of the war, the American troops who died volunteered to go and made the choice to be there, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis–including Iraqi children–died with no choice in the matter at all.

It’s not new. I write this on the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing on August 6, 1945, shortly before the Nagasaki bombing on August 9. The estimated deaths from those two bombings–the only time in history nuclear weapons were used in war–are around 250,000 people, almost all civilians. Two whole cities, snuffed out in a flash of light.

This is more than half as many as the total deaths of US servicemen in the entire Second World War (407,300). This is double the total number of US servicemen who died in battle in the Pacific Theater (106,207).

This was an atrocity that even in the wave of jingoistic celebrations that marked the end of the war in the United States still gripped the imagination with just how horrible a weapon the A-bomb was, how indiscriminately destructive, how lingering the effects of radiation sickness and cancer and poisoned soil.

And yet we justify it.

After a period of time in which Hiroshima was a useful symbol for peace activists afraid of a future nuclear exchange to invoke, our present relative confidence we won’t be nuked ourselves has ushered in a new age of Hiroshima apologism. In the 1990s, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union and when America was riding high on a wave of optimism off of our Cold War victory, the Smithsonian tried to put up a historical exhibit showing the Enola Gay and was shouted down because any mention of the deaths in Hiroshima or the suffering of the survivors was seen by protesters as an unpatriotic attack on our troops.

Even today, I’ve seen people passing around Paul Fussell’s decades-old piece for The New Republic which uses a lot of words to tell us that war is hell, we’d understand why Hiroshima needed to be nuked if we were American GIs, and that the critics of the bombing are all privileged civilians who weren’t there. (This ignores that one of the greatest critics of the bombing and one of my personal heroes, John Rawls, very much was there, abandoned the military due to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and wrote his landmark “A Theory of Justice” partly in reaction to America’s moral myopia over the bomb.)

Over and over we hear it, that the bombing was justified because it “saved American lives”; we hear floated the idea that a half million American soldiers or more would’ve died in the invasion of the Home Islands (more than had died in the entire war up to that point), that Japanese civilians would have fought to the last man, woman and child, etc., etc. Usually left out of these debates are the fact that any American analysis of Japanese ferocity in the face of invasion was tainted by quite fanatical racism, the same racism that led to the incarceration of 120,000 Americans for no military purpose. Minus such racism the idea that every single person in Japan would’ve picked up gardening implements and kitchen knives to fight to the death—the assumption on which the enormous projected death tolls depended–seems unlikely.

But to me that debate isn’t the point. The point is the speedy use of the bomb almost as soon as it was ready, less than a month after the first successful Trinity test — that no time was given for a negotiated surrender, no consideration was given to testing the theory of ferocious, intractable Japanese resistance before resorting to nuclear force. Any such delay would have cost more American lives — therefore the decision to vaporize two cities had to be made instantly.