← Back to context

Comment by coldtea

13 hours ago

>But the whole point of Nuremberg was to prevent this, the whole idea of international law was meant to prevent this.

The whole point of Nuremberg was to put on a show against the defeated, and establish the "good guys" who now run international order.

Acts like Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the rest of allied abuses weren't on trial there or elsewhere.

Yes, imagine the ICC existed in 1945 and ... let's say ... Bolivia ... petitioned for the arrest of Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower over the Dresden bombing and whatever else.

Better, imagine the ICC ordered the arrest in 1943 of Franklin D. Roosevelt over ... let's say ... the forced relocation of Unangax̂ (Aleut) villagers in the Alaska Aleutian Islands.

The result wouldn't have been better for the ICC than the Gaza warrants.

You were there? No? You watched the taped proceedings then?

I don't think you appreciate the way justice becomes irrelevant in fascist and tyrannical countries.

The 'show' of fair justice, dispensed with care and deliberation, is something you seem to take for granted.

In most countries you get put up against a wall, and shot, for saying the wrong things about the right people.

I find your argument uniquely cowardly: Power without justice is a recipe for tyranny. And the position that tyranny should be the norm is something an evil or cowardly person espouses.

Yes, there is plenty of atrocity. Pretending the allied behavior is as atrocious as Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, or Hitler, is pretentious relativism.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden

    In "The White Man's Burden", Kipling encouraged the American annexation and colonisation of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago purchased in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898).[1] As an imperialist poet, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up the enterprise of empire yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured, and paid in building an empire;[1] nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase "the white man's burden" to justify imperial conquest as a civilising mission that is ideologically related to the continental expansion philosophy of manifest destiny of the early 19th century.[2][3][4][5] With a central motif of the poem being the superiority of white men, it has long been criticised as a racist poem