In war only the losers are guilty of crimes against humanity
Like those who try to play down, excuse, or partly deny the mass murder of Jews and others by the Nazis, defenders of President Harry Truman’s decision to annihilate so many innocent civilians in Japan seek to excuse it on the grounds that it happened in the context of a brutal war.
They point to Japanese atrocities against civilians in south-east Asia and the Pacific, and to mortality rates in Japanese POW camps, and use these wrongs to cloak the atom bombings with the mantle of righteousness.
But it was Japan’s military forces, not elderly men and women, nursing mothers, children in school classrooms, or babies in cradles who committed war crimes and abused Allied detainees. Did the crimes of a military junta justify the horrific killing of so many men, women and children?
The truth is that it is the victors in any war who decide questions of innocence or guilt. After World War II, German leaders were put on trial at Nuremberg. And Japan’s wartime leadership faced a similar tribunal convened in Tokyo.
None of the Allied leaders or military commanders faced trial, despite the fact that they had sanctioned crimes similar to those for which so many Germans and Japanese were either hanged or given lengthy prison terms.
The defendants at Nuremberg stood condemned for having “conspired in the planning and waging of aggressive war.”
The other two counts in the indictment referred to “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.”
The Allies brought hypocrisy to a fine art. To begin with, the presence of a Soviet judge on the tribunal made a mockery of the proceedings. The USSR had also invaded Poland in 1939. This act of aggression was overlooked.
A selective amnesia seemed to prevent the tribunal from even mentioning this anomaly: the Soviets aided and abetted Hitler in his conquest of Poland and then had the nerve to sit in judgement over their former partners in crime at Nuremberg.
Before the trials took place at Nuremberg, the Allied leaders drew up a document that came to be known as the Nuremberg Charter. It defined a war crime in terms that clearly ought to have left the Allied leaders themselves open to prosecution: “wanton destruction of cities, towns, and villages” and “devastation not justified by military necessity.”
In defining ‘crimes against humanity,’ the charter referred to “inhumane acts committed against any civilians before or during war.”
The atom bombings of two Japanese cities should therefore, if we accept these definitions, be held to have constituted both a war crime and a crime against humanity, as can the Allied bombing of Dresden in which over 100,000 people died.
Yet nobody has ever served a prison term, let alone been hanged, for having authorised the obscenity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
German naval commanders were jailed for their involvement in the waging of “unrestricted submarine warfare” (ie, the sinking of unarmed merchant ships) despite the fact that US submarines had done exactly the same in the Pacific.
Japanese leaders were also tried and executed in large numbers for war crimes, even as survivors of the atomic Holocaust mourned those who had been incinerated by America’s ‘wonder weapons.’
Truman had no regrets about killing civilians. The Tokyo trials, like those at Nuremberg , had more to do with revenge than the administration of justice.
Alas, it is the losers in a war who still face such charges. Why are Serbs and Rwandans brought to task, but not the Red fascists in China and American war criminals?
Why are 90-year-old Germans and Ukrainians being hunted down while Russian leaders and commanders responsible for war crimes in Chechnya are at large?
Why can’t Americans be tried as war criminals by the International Criminal Court?
Answer: because no country can invade and occupy America. You have to lose to be a war criminal.
John Fitzgerald
Lower Coyne Street
Callan
Co Kilkenny
