[Peace-discuss] War crime

[Laurie at advancenet.net]

Statements are so easy to make and good quotes are so very easy to come up
with; but it comes clear in the light of historic actions that they are
mainly rationalizations and legitimizing explanations that people use to
justify their own behaviors while condemning others' behaviors.  One should
have asked Jackson why the U.S. government and its officials were not taken
to take under the law for starting many of the Indian wars.  It couldn't
have been because the white man won or could it? 

To further play devil's advocate, one could questionably make a case for the
fact that the Allies at the conclusion of WWI set the conditions that
provoked the start of WWII, although not necessarily the strategies,
tactics, and inhumane behaviors.  How again did the indiscriminate inhuman
violence perpetrated against certain classes or populations of civilians by
the Germans differ from that the Americans against the American Indians, the
Japanese-Americans, against Mexican-Americans and the Chinese in America,
the residents of Dresden, or the cities on which the atomic bombs were
dropped?  One does not have to restrict this to the U.S.; one can turn to
the Spanish Inquisition, the UK in Northern Ireland or India, the French in
Algeria, etc.

It is all about power politics where the winner defines the rules of right
and wrong.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net [mailto:peace-discuss-
> bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C. G. Estabrook
> Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 3:16 PM
> To: Peace Discuss
> Subject: [Peace-discuss] War crime
> 
> 
> We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen
> leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they
> started it.
> --U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. representative to
> the international Conference on Military Trials, August 12, 1945
> 
> 
> To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an
> international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing
> only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the
> accumulated evil of the whole.
> --Nuremberg War Tribunal regarding wars of aggression
> 
> 
> ###
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss