An excellent book.
“World
War II was only one life span removed from the bloody hands of
Sherman’s Southern campaigns, even less than that from the warfare he
levied on the Plains Indians. At the close of World War II in 1945, the
Allies commissioned and erected an international tribunal to bring top
Nazis to justice.
The
Charter of the International Military Tribunal, known as the Nuremburg
Trial Proceedings, has an eerie and familiar reverberation to it. Title
II, Article 6-13 of this charter establish the jurisdiction of the
tribunal. Article 6 enables the tribunal to try and punish individuals’
crimes including:
(b) War Crimes, namely . . . murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of the occupied territory . . . killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
(c) Crimes Against Humanity: namely, murder . . . deportation, and other inhuman acts committed against any civilian population . . .
Clearly,
Sherman and Lincoln were guilty on numerous counts of the crimes listed
above. As the political head of state, Lincoln’s guilt of “crimes
against peace” and initiation and waging a war of aggression cannot be
controverted.
As
the war dragged on, the Lincoln administration began to view military
necessity in a different light. The objective of the war was to
reestablish political authority over the Southern States.
Gradually, any
action that would likely hasten this was viewed as militarily
necessary. Therefore, kidnapping, murder, torture, destruction of food
stores and livestock, and massive destruction of the means of food
production [including seizing slaves] came to be an acceptable
consequence of restoring lost federal authority.
As Grant’s aide said, the Southern people, not just Southern armies, had to be “annihilated.”
[It]
is important to expose the savagery of the U.S. Army toward the
civilians of the South because military commanders, political theorists,
and despots worldwide watch and learn from that which was tolerated in
the past in order to apply it to future wars.
The
federal government’s Civil War theory of military necessity and of
total war, originated by Americans to justify the butchering of other
Americans, opened Pandora’s proverbial box. Next time, the whole world
would be involved. In World war II, the justification for the haphazard
destruction of London and massive fire destruction of German and
Japanese population centers were the twin evils military necessity and
total war.”
(Lincoln Uber Alles, John Avery Emison, Pelican Publishing, 2009, pp. 250-253)
Just a niggling technicality is that there really are no such things as war crimes. A war crime is whatever the winner says it is, as in the case of Nuremberg. Under American jurisprudence, a law must be in effect when it is broken. Laws are by statute, enacted by congress. Thus, no one can be found guilty of a crime for an activity that was not against any law at the time it was committed.
ReplyDeleteNuremberg was a special case of the allies wanting to execute someone at the end of the war. Not a great moment in legal ethics.
Technically, Nazi Germany was a sovereign country, owing obedience to no higher law. Thus when their national leadership, according to their own laws executed various peoples and prosecuted war, they were acting perfectly legally. The idea of a trial afterwards is just stupid. There was no legal jurisdiction or statute for such a thing. It was created out of thin air and would have been denounced on principle if it had been applied to America, France, Britain or the USSR.
The same for Sherman. It was also OK for him to use the N-word. It is pointless to attempt to apply modern ethical standards to history.
--Hale
Finally someone with some greater knowledge! Since newreb took some of my points I'll conclude by simply saying, maybe we should hold Nuremberg trials of our own, under the same conditions of convening those courts and judge Sherman, Lincoln and the yankees the way the us gommot did the Germans. Then we can expand this to include practically every president after Lincoln, especially, FDR, Both Bushes and Obammie. Surely they would all hang! But this also proves the us gommit and Americans cannot live up to the standards it imposes upon others, even to the point of killing them from their self-righteousness attitudes they unlawfully impose against other sovereign people.
ReplyDeleteMichael-- Deo Vindicabamur