Growing up surrounded by World War II veterans, most of whom refused to discuss their service fighting the horrid fascist enemies, as kids we turned to the movies to learn about war. The WWII Vets I knew did not brag about their “lethality,” or their “warrior ethos.” Most of them refused to talk about it at all, apparently regarding their service as at best a necessary evil, not something to celebrate. That was the difference between America’s great citizen soldiers and Nazi Germany’s warrior culture that elevated war to be the highest achievement.
In America we watched movies where the evil Nazi U-Boat captain would surface his sub after sinking an allied ship, and then grin while he ordered his crew to open fire on the survivors desperately clinging to wreckage in the roiling, often burning ocean. This was the stark difference between America’s heroic citizen soldiers and the murderous Nazi legions. America fought to liberate all humans from evil, Nazi legions lived to kill--even unarmed, unthreatening, defeated opponents. That was why America fought, to rid the world of such cruel, heartless, ignominious, berserker warriors without honor.
The fathers returned from the war preferred to shake the dirt of the necessary evil from their boots and return to the noble, humble work of building a better world for their kids, as plumbers, electricians, carpenters--any profession other than killer. The horrors of war were not to be celebrated. If anything, they had fought, as so many noble soldiers before them, to end war. I was told by one Vet that on his return from war he had jettisoned all his medals and awards from battle because, “I never want anything to do with that again.”
After World War II America led the allies to enshrine in the law of nations a rule of law governing the difference between civilized warfare and barbarians, such as Nazi U-Boat captains, or the cowards in the SS who machine gunned unarmed civilians into mass graves. The resulting Nuremberg Principles emerged as a towering achievement of civilized nations. In the future even war itself would be subject to law. No future Hitler’s illegitimate orders to murder would be followed by honorable soldiers. Those who followed illegal orders would be tried as war criminals. America hung such spineless criminals after Nuremberg Trials.
Such humble heroes, so different from the grinning Nazi U-Boat captain enjoying murdering helpless US Sailors swimming in the sea after the sinking of their warship, seemed to bring the light of a new sun into the world. A world where war, if tolerated at all, was to be subject to law. A just war, fought for human liberation or not at all, was to be fought justly, by honorable soldiers who would do the job and then, like Cincinnatus, return to their farms and plows to feed their fellow humans. Such humble heroes were all around us as we grew up sheltered by their courage, their strength, their morals and their decency. This allowed us to dream, to build, to go to the moon, inhabit space, while on earth science cured many diseases, comforted the sick, and the only war was the war to end poverty.
Murder most foul, the double-tap murder of helpless survivors of boat sinkings, had been abolished from the earth.
A new birth of decency, of hope, of a world that could be united under law, for the uplifting of all people, repudiating the barbaric Nazi “berserker warrior” rose over the earth like a new sun. Imperfect? Certainly. Much hard work remained for true leaders to guide the great mass of humanity upwards remained. But the greatest generation, now mostly passed from the earth, established a pinnacle of accomplishment and achievement.
Murder most foul cannot be allowed to tarnish their admirable heroism. Double tap murders, whether on the high seas, or in marketplaces to which first responders rush, peopled with women and children injured by a terrorist bomb, only to be unscrupulously targeted for a “double tap” are beneath contempt. Those who order such crimes are either repudiated by decent human beings, or the world descends into utter madness. Allowing double tap murder sinks American greatness and restores Nazi U-Boat barbarism most foul.
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Kary Love, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Michigan attorney who has defended nuclear resisters and many others in court for decades.
Venezuela, wars of aggression, and Nuremberg law
by John LaForge
“To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
These words, spoken by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson at the opening of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal of Nazi war criminals, might give pause to White House and Pentagon strategists who appear anxious to launch a U.S. war on Venezuela, if only they had a fear of violating international law.
With a U.S. President who self-enriches and hurls insults like a gangland mob boss, it’s become routine to watch the White House orchestrate criminal acts in broad daylight: kidnapping college students using masked agents and unmarked vans; ordering mass arrests and detention of Spanish speakers without charges; flying kidnapped persons in chains to foreign countries and foreign prisons without due process or appeal rights; blowing up dozens of unknown persons in Caribbean fast boats and broadcasting the murders like a bloody video arcade.
The Trump Administration’s vicious crime spree in the Caribbean, and its videotaped made-for-TV propaganda, appears to be the conditioning of public opinion regarding state-sponsored killing of nameless suspects. At the same time, the yahoo murders may be a new version of the Pentagon’s endless “war on terrorism.” The civilian fast boat victims being killed are of course labeled “terrorists”” the broad-brush painting of all targeted persons or groups which is precisely where George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four begins at page one. “Terrorist” is the universally applicable smear and epithet that justifies any and all manner of political and military murder.
Last weekend the gangster prez hinted at possible U.S. military strikes inside Venezuelan territory, and last week the White House declared Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro to be the “head of a foreign terrorist organization.”
This patent absurdity is an echo of the State Department’s February decision to return Cuba to the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, and is reminiscent of drug trafficking charges leveled against President Manuel Noriega of Panama as a pretext for the 1990 U.S. military invasion of his country. Demonizing the state and heads of state to be attacked is historically a necessary precursor to all such U.S. invasions, be it Vietnam, Panama, Somalia, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Syria.
Outlawing not only aggression but preparing aggression
Significantly, Justice Jackson and the Nuremberg Tribunal went far beyond condemning wars of aggression as the “supreme international crime.” The Nuremberg Charter, Tribunal and Judgment explicitly set out to criminalize the inchoate crimes of planning and preparing illegal wars.
In his opening statement at trial, Justice Jackson said: “A fundamental provision of the Charter is that to plan, prepare, initiate, or wage a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances, or to conspire or participate in a common plan to do so, is a crime.” (This then-new binding preventative language may have moved the U.S. War Department in 1947 to change its name to the Department of Defense.)
Nuremberg’s U.S.-sponsored and binding international prohibition of military “plans and preparations” for wars of aggression is being blown to bits like the boats in the Caribbean, shredded by the Navy’s string of high-tech multiple murders.
President Trump said on Sept. 5, “I sort of made up my mind” about initiating U.S. war on Venezuela. While Venezuela has not attacked or threatened the United States, the Pentagon has 15,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors, an aircraft carrier battle group with its 75 fighter jets, seven Navy warships including missile-firing destroyers, and a Special Forces Operations “mother ship” positioned in the Caribbean. And the naval armada has even been dubbed “Operation Southern Spear” rather than “Southern Shield” by a Secretary of Defense who’d prefer being titled the far uglier and more menacing Secretary of War.
The White House claims to justify its massive tinder box of war machinery with obvious lies about fighting U.S. fentanyl deaths which are being caused by “narco-terrorists” and “unlawful combatants” from Venezuela. That country’s 300 billion barrels in oil reserves are never spoken of publicly by President Drill Baby, but U.S. corporate control of this gargantuan prize is the only reason the White House promotes the fiction that U.S. drug problems come from anywhere other than Mexico, Columbia, and Afghanistan.
Mohandas Gandhi reminded us of the very least we that should expect of ourselves when inside a tyrannical political environment powered by a firehose of lies. “The first principle of valid political action in such a society then becomes non-cooperation with its disorder, its injustices, and more particularly with its deep commitment to untruth.”
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John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Co-director of Nukewatch a nuclear power and weapons watchdog group.
