Post by Governor SwillPost by ScoutPost by Governor SwillPost by Mike PompeiiPost by Governor SwillBy the end of the century only China and the EU can seriously rival us.
We have fucked the EU big time. Without the cheap energy from Russia,
the Europeans will be under our thumb, totally dependent on us for oil
and gas. Consider them goners. Stupid Europeans. LOL
You must be young. WW II is still a living memory with a lot of Europeans.
Do the Germans have a living memory of the war crimes the US had
committed against them? The US firebombed German civilians and killed
millions of Germans. LOL
American Firebombing of Dresden, Cologne, Hamburg, and Berlin
https://www.google.com/search?q=American+Firebombing+of+Dresden,+Cologne,+Hamburg,+and+Berlin&source=lnms&tbm=isch
Yes, they do
No, they don't. LOL
If the Nuremberg Laws were Applied_…
Noam Chomsky
https://chomsky.info/1990____-2/
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American
president would have been hanged. By violation of the Nuremberg laws I
mean the same kind of crimes for which people were hanged in Nuremberg.
And Nuremberg means Nuremberg and Tokyo. So first of all you’ve got to
think back as to what people were hanged for at Nuremberg and Tokyo. And
once you think back, the question doesn’t even require a moment’s waste
of time. For example, one general at the Tokyo trials, which were the
worst, General Yamashita, was hanged on the grounds that troops in the
Philippines, which were technically under his command (though it was so
late in the war that he had no contact with them — it was the very end
of the war and there were some troops running around the Philippines who
he had no contact with), had carried out atrocities, so he was hanged.
Well, try that one out and you’ve already wiped out everybody.
But getting closer to the sort of core of the Nuremberg-Tokyo tribunals,
in Truman’s case at the Tokyo tribunal, there was one authentic,
independent Asian justice, an Indian, who was also the one person in the
court who had any background in international law [Radhabinod Pal], and
he dissented from the whole judgment, dissented from the whole thing. He
wrote a very interesting and important dissent, seven hundred pages —
you can find it in the Harvard Law Library, that’s where I found it,
maybe somewhere else, and it’s interesting reading. He goes through the
trial record and shows, I think pretty convincingly, it was pretty
farcical. He ends up by saying something like this: if there is any
crime in the Pacific theater that compares with the crimes of the Nazis,
for which they’re being hanged at Nuremberg, it was the dropping of the
two atom bombs. And he says nothing of that sort can be attributed to
the present accused. Well, that’s a plausible argument, I think, if you
look at the background. Truman proceeded to organize a major
counter-insurgency campaign in Greece which killed off about one hundred
and sixty thousand people, sixty thousand refugees, another sixty
thousand or so people tortured, political system dismantled, right-wing
regime. American corporations came in and took it over. I think that’s a
crime under Nuremberg.
Well, what about Eisenhower? You could argue over whether his overthrow
of the government of Guatemala was a crime. There was a CIA-backed army,
which went in under U.S. threats and bombing and so on to undermine that
capitalist democracy. I think that’s a crime. The invasion of Lebanon in
1958, I don’t know, you could argue. A lot of people were killed. The
overthrow of the government of Iran is another one — through a
CIA-backed coup. But Guatemala suffices for Eisenhower and there’s
plenty more.
Kennedy is easy. The invasion of Cuba was outright aggression.
Eisenhower planned it, incidentally, so he was involved in a conspiracy
to invade another country, which we can add to his score. After the
invasion of Cuba, Kennedy launched a huge terrorist campaign against
Cuba, which was very serious. No joke. Bombardment of industrial
installations with killing of plenty of people, bombing hotels, sinking
fishing boats, sabotage. Later, under Nixon, it even went as far as
poisoning livestock and so on. Big affair. And then came Vietnam; he
invaded Vietnam. He invaded South Vietnam in 1962. He sent the U.S. Air
Force to start bombing. Okay. We took care of Kennedy.
Johnson is trivial. The Indochina war alone, forget the invasion of the
Dominican Republic, was a major war crime.
Nixon the same. Nixon invaded Cambodia. The Nixon-Kissinger bombing of
Cambodia in the early ’70’s was not all that different from the Khmer
Rouge atrocities, in scale somewhat less, but not much less. Same was
true in Laos. I could go on case after case with them, that’s easy.
Ford was only there for a very short time so he didn’t have time for a
lot of crimes, but he managed one major one. He supported the Indonesian
invasion of East Timor, which was near genocidal. I mean, it makes
Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait look like a tea party. That was
supported decisively by the United States, both the diplmatic and the
necessary military support came primarily from the United States. This
was picked up under Carter.
Carter was the least violent of American presidents but he did things
which I think would certainly fall under Nuremberg provisions. As the
Indonesian atrocities increased to a level of really near-genocide, the
U.S. aid under Carter increased. It reached a peak in 1978 as the
atrocities peaked. So we took care of Carter, even forgetting other things.
Reagan. It’s not a question. I mean, the stuff in Central America alone
suffices. Support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon also makes Saddam
Hussein look pretty mild in terms of casualties and destruction. That
suffices.
Bush. Well, need we talk on? In fact, in the Reagan period there’s even
an International Court of Justice decision on what they call the
“unlawful use of force” for which Reagan and Bush were condemned. I
mean, you could argue about some of these people, but I think you could
make a pretty strong case if you look at the Nuremberg decisions,
Nuremberg and Tokyo, and you ask what people were condemned for. I think
American presidents are well within the range.
Also, bear in mind, people ought to be pretty critical about the
Nuremberg principles. I don’t mean to suggest they’re some kind of model
of probity or anything. For one thing, they were ex post facto. These
were determined to be crimes by the victors after they had won. Now,
that already raises questions. In the case of the American presidents,
they weren’t ex post facto. Furthermore, you have to ask yourself what
was called a “war crime”? How did they decide what was a war crime at
Nuremberg and Tokyo? And the answer is pretty simple. and not very
pleasant. There was a criterion. Kind of like an operational criterion.
If the enemy had done it and couldn’t show that we had done it, then it
was a war crime. So like bombing of urban concentrations was not
considered a war crime because we had done more of it than the Germans
and the Japanese. So that wasn’t a war crime. You want to turn Tokyo
into rubble? So much rubble you can’t even drop an atom bomb there
because nobody will see anything if you do, which is the real reason
they didn’t bomb Tokyo. That’s not a war crime because we did it.
Bombing Dresden is not a war crime. We did it. German Admiral Gernetz —
when he was brought to trial (he was a submarine commander or something)
for sinking merchant vessels or whatever he did — he called as a defense
witness American Admiral Nimitz who testified that the U.S. had done
pretty much the same thing, so he was off, he didn’t get tried. And in
fact if you run through the whole record, it turns out a war crime is
any war crime that you can condemn them for but they can’t condemn us
for. Well, you know, that raises some questions.
I should say, actually, that this, interestingly, is said pretty openly
by the people involved and it’s regarded as a moral position. The chief
prosecutor at Nuremberg was Telford Taylor. You know, a decent man. He
wrote a book called Nuremberg and Vietnam. And in it he tries to
consider whether there are crimes in Vietnam that fall under the
Nuremberg principles. Predictably, he says not. But it’s interesting to
see how he spells out the Nuremberg principles.
They’re just the way I said. In fact, I’m taking it from him, but he
doesn’t regard that as a criticism. He says, well, that’s the way we did
it, and should have done it that way. There’s an article on this in The
Yale Law Journal [“Review Symposium: War Crimes, the Rule of Force in
International Affairs,” The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 80, #7, June 1971]
which is reprinted in a book [Chapter 3 of Chomsky’s For Reasons of
State (Pantheon, 1973)] if you’re interested.
I think one ought to raise many questions about the Nuremberg tribunal,
and especially the Tokyo tribunal. The Tokyo tribunal was in many ways
farcical. The people condemned at Tokyo had done things for which plenty
of people on the other side could be condemned. Furthermore, just as in
the case of Saddam Hussein, many of their worst atrocities the U.S.
didn’t care about. Like some of the worst atrocities of the Japanese
were in the late ’30s, but the U.S. didn’t especially care about that.
What the U.S. cared about was that Japan was moving to close off the
China market. That was no good. But not the slaughter of a couple of
hundred thousand people or whatever they did in Nanking. That’s not a
big deal.
https://chomsky.info/1990____-2/