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Comment by JumpCrisscross

4 days ago

> I would give anything for our leadership which is launching this illegal war to be sent to the Hague

Simpler: send them to prison at home. There is no world in which the Hague can enforce its law in America without the U.S. government's consent. At that point, skip the extra step and make war crimes actually illegal.

The only force that can do anything about this, is the American people.

Which is why they have been subverted and subjugated and all their will usurped.

  • >Which is why they have been subverted and subjugated and all their will usurped.

    But America's armed populace and the stalwart vigilance of its militias are supposed to make that impossible.

    Americans were more up in arms (literal and figurative) over Obamacare and Covid lockdowns than anything Trump has done, domestically or abroad. The only rational conclusion is that they're either complicit or else they simply don't care.

    • Americans are the most propagandized peoples on the planet. Those bullets can’t stop information, and there is a massive information war going on to keep the American people divided.

      Those who could effectively field a real protest or uprising are either too busy trying to keep their credit cards from defaulting, or are living on the streets addicted to drugs. General strikes? Forget it, America doesn’t have the infrastructure in place (local food sources) to sustain such a thing…

  • The American people voted for this man in a free and fair election. No subjugation or subversion needed.

    • This man did not say he was going to bomb anything until after he was voted in, so the American people were - once again - completely duped by their own hubris.

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    • A third of the American people voted for him, based on a campaign which promised a completely different economy than he has delivered (remember when people were pretending Biden had an egg-price level in the Oval Office?) and no foreign wars. It is unreasonable to look at that election and say a plurality voted for this.

    • The entire media apparatus is owned by oligarchs: from Fox News to Twitter to Meta, now CNN... All are relaying non-stop right-wing propaganda. There can be no real democracy while information is this captive.

> war crimes actually illegal.

To be clear, war crimes are illegal here. They can carry the death penalty.

I think there's a strong case to be made for Pete Hegseth to be executed for his crimes, according to US Law.

But you're right. There's no expectation that the Hague enforce international law without the consent of the US Government. Our government should either try our leaders in our courts, or hand them in manacles and chains to the ICC and The Hague.

But I agree, I don't expect the international community to be able to do this over our objections. It's something we must do.

  • > war crimes are illegal here. They carry the death penalty.

    Asking to learn: under what law?

    • 18 U.S. Code § 2441 - War crimes

      https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2441

      ---

      There are also provisions in the UCMJ that are applicable to members of the military

      ---

      (I also had a consequential typo in my earlier post, which I've now edited. I originally wrote they "carry the death penalty", but I meant to write "they can carry the death penalty", and it depends on the specific circumstances of the war crimes committed.)

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I don’t think the US is going to be allowed to act outside the ICC for too much longer. All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again.

The US previously never faced real pressure on this, a new administration would see it as an easy win.

  • > don’t think the US is going to be allowed to act outside the ICC for too much longer

    The U.S. is not a signatory. (Most of the world's population isn't subject to ICC jurisdiction [1].)

    > All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again

    Nobody is treating the ICC seriously [2].

    To be clear, this sucks. But it's America joining China and Russia (and Iran and Israel and India and every other regional power who have selectively rejected the rules-based international order).

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Statute

    [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/27/world/middleeast/france-n...

    • > The U.S. is not a signatory.

      Being a signatory is not required for being subject to ICC jurisdiction, though it is one route to being subject to it, and, in any case, not being a signatory is not an immutable condition. So the upthread suggestion that “All of your former allies are going to insist on it before they will even think about treating your normally again” is not rebutted by observing that the US is not currently a signatory of the Rome Statute.

      > But it's America joining China and Russia (and Iran and Israel and India and every other regional power who have selectively rejected the rules-based international order).

      No, the US despite rhetorically appealing to it when other countries are involved, has led, not followed, in rejecting the rules-based order when it comes to its own conduct.

  • The "allies" would have mass riots and six-digit death tolls (shortly after an initial 3-6 month period of adjustment) without the supplies of LNG, fertiliser and payment clearing services the U.S. exports. America has the rest of the west by the balls, with maybe the exception of Australia and Japan. Nobody will even give the C-levels responsible for Grok arrest warrants for the many serious crimes their product carries out.

  • I hope to god the next administration actually holds the criminals in the current administration accountable. Gerry Ford set a disgusting precedent when he loudly said that those who hold the office of the President should never be be held accountable for their actions.

    • He believed that within the limits of the political culture of America introducing accountability would lead to a tit-for-tat cycle of imprisonments and executions by each party against the other under the cover story of accountability, with the possibility of gradual escalation towards an end state of states mobilising armored brigades against each other to siege cities and cleanse target populations. Like the Congo, or Rhodesia. His memoirs are wacky stuff.

    • unlikely. trump didnt held obama accountable for all sorts of crazy things that happened during his administration (bombing libya, drone striking a us citizen minor, using USAID to mount a fake vaccination campaign for DNA surveillance in pakistan e.g.). why would the next administration hold trump accountable?

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  • Europe is not the military power that once was at the beginning of the 20th century... aging populations, economic decline, trade deficits, their former colonies are now independent, they haven't waged war in a while.

  • ICC is a joke though. It can only accomplish anything if the home country of the perpetrator is cooperating. Those allies also have much politically important economic and geopolitical concerns than prosecuting war criminals (unfortunately only small minorities in western countries care about things like that at all)

  • No, they wouldn't. Not if they're the Democrats as we know them. They fight tooth and claw against the new normal, until it's the new normal, and then they fight tooth and claw to defend the new normal. There's very little principled opposition to Trump in the corridors of power. There's plenty of opposition, but it's more about which horses have been bet on.