[Peace-discuss] War crime

[Laurie at advancenet.net]

I have the greatest of respect for the breadth and depth of Chomsky's and
your knowledge and critical abilities, the range and scope of your awareness
of the academic literature and historic official documents, and the ability
of you and Chomsky to remember what you have read.  

Your response that "it shouldn't be" in response to my comments about what I
view as historically the case obviously addresses the "should" question
where I was addressing the "is" question. Both are legitimate; but they are
different types of concerns.  Your focus is an ethical position which
presents possibilities at best; mine - in this instance - is an empirical
question that deals with empirical practices not principles and with
historic actualities not analytic potentialities. 

In part, I guess I missed the intent of, purpose behind, and rational for
articulating the quotes that you did without attaching any planned course of
future action to them or based on them. Elsewhere, I noted what I took to be
the two potential reasons for offering such quotes and why I did not think
that either are appropriately applicable to the setting in which the quoted
statements were given, namely this list.

As for Chomsky's quoted remarks ("If you assume that there's no hope, you
guarantee that there will be no hope.  However, if you assume that such
a thing as an instinct for freedom exists, then hope may be justified,
and it may be possible to build a better world), what I am speaking about
has little to do with questions of "hope". One can avoid entertaining
notions of hope and even find it futile while still attempting to build a
better world for want of something better to do, for the fun of it, for the
pain of it, or whatever. Are we engaged in these various empirical
political, economic, and social struggles in order to achieve "hope" or in
order to achieve something tangibly empirical or produce a concrete end?
Moreover, John is correct; I am not addressing "instincts for freedom" but
instincts for preservation, avoiding doubt and challenge, the appearance of
being in the right, legitimization, justification, esteem, acceptance, etc.
Frankly, I do not see where the "instinct for freedom enters" into this
discussion of Jackson's comment.

As for whether or not Jackson was being hypocritical or not, I am not going
to comment except to note that talk is cheap even if he knew what he was
doing and saying and felt it applied to the U.S. as well as everyone else.
The fact is that it was not the losers who were expressing this; it was the
winners.  The winners were judging and condemning real people in the here
and now for acts they committed against others in the here and now of that
time; they were not passing judgment about people and events long after the
offense had taken place and the victims were dead and could no longer
benefit from any remedies or retributions as would be the case when one lets
history judge the events and actions of the US or the winners sometime in
the distant future.  Why did the war tribunal not investigate and persecute
war crimes committed by the allied forces and hold the allied leadership
responsible for the conduct of the war by its troops. If merely starting a
war is under all circumstances a crime then why is it that only those who
started wars and lose then are held accountable but those who start wars and
win them are not until possible such time as it affords no one justice.  

However, my real point is that Jackson has expressed a hope and articulated
a moral principle and not a practice. However, he is not merely
pontificating and suggesting a universal principle that should hold for
everyone both in the present but in the future; but empirically he is a
practicing official involved in passing concrete judgments and extracting
concrete sanctions against real people who will suffer those sanctions and
who are living in his here and now - not in some future time when it will
have no tangible impact or bearing on them as would be the case if history
judged the actions of the Nuremberg Tribunal as being criminal and unjust
long after the victims had suffered and the members of the Nuremberg
tribunal have died and cannot be sanctioned.  In short, it is not history
that is judging the defendants at the Nuremberg trials but real live people.
The poisoned chalice is potentially only figuratively being passed to the
lips of the winners while being actually and literally passed to the lips of
the Nuremberg defendants (the losers) to use Jacksons words. If Jackson was
speaking in practical empirical terms and not in terms figurative principles
as a member of the tribunal, he would be holding trials of the allied
leadership for the violations of international law and crimes against
humanity which were perpetrated by their side and not just leaving it for
history to judge.  Moreover, history has shown that in the real world the
winners of WWII have not followed and implemented the self same codes that
they held the German leadership to with respect to both past acts and
current acts in which wars of one form or another have been provoked,
started, perpetrated, etc. directly and indirectly by the former WWII allies
or their proxies.  We still demonize others while seeing ourselves as
saints, we still use the spouting of principles to justify our actions while
reinterpreting their meaning when it is suggested that they apply to us as
well.


> -----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 5:44 PM
> To: Laurie at advancenet.net
> Cc: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] War crime
> 
> But it shouldn't be.
> 
> Chomsky remarked years ago, "If you assume that there's no hope, you
> guarantee that there will be no hope.  However, if you assume that such
> a thing as an instinct for freedom exists, then hope may be justified,
> and it may be possible to build a better world. That's your choice."
> 
> And I think Justice Jackson did realize what he was doing. He said at
> Nuremberg, "If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they
> are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does
> them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct
> against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us
> .... We must never forget that the record on which we judge these
> defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To
> pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips
> as
> well."
> 
> --CGE
> 
> Laurie at advancenet.net wrote:
> > 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
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