Cowboys 'n' Injuns:

International Law and War Crimes: British and US

experience

The US and British financial and political elites are by their own
definition the 'good guys' and by dint of forceful marketing
through compliant historians and other media mercenaries have
established this perception in the minds of many of their own
citizens. They therefore logically have the right to define who are
'war criminals' - who should be subject to the international rules
of warfare and who not, as well as the right to kill and bomb
anyone they don’t like.

This situation, so obvious with respect to the illegal invasion of

Iraq, is actually not at all new. Bush and Blair, contrary to many
perceptions, followed the hallowed procedures of long-established
precedent.

In order to get a feel for the reality of the situation we need to

look back a few decades.

The Second World War is conventionally presented as a clear-cut

case of the congenitally good cowboys (dressed in white)
heroically battling - valiantly and ultimately triumphantly -
against the congenitally evil, stinky-smelly injuns. But in this
overall romantic Hollywood-type picture of the war there remain
certain fundamental awkwardnesses, which have not gone away
with the passing of time. One day they will yet come back to
haunt the makers of the beautiful, stirring movie.

For example, WW2 began with Britain’s guarantee to protect

Poland. After Hitler invaded, Britain accordingly declared war on
Germany. But when, just less than three weeks later, Stalin by
agreement with Hitler took the eastern half of Poland, comprising
slightly more than 50% of Poland, Britain completely forgot to
declare war on Soviet Russia. A very strange, publically-
unexplained amnesia. In due course of course Britain and Russia
became allies, and Churchill somewhat grudgingly acquiesced to
Roosevelt’s handing over Eastern Europe, including Poland
(forgetting (once more!) the guarantee to that country that
started the war) to effective Russian control at the Yalta
Conference. This was after a major Russian war crime had
become known to the Allied leadership in 1943: the cold-blooded
execution of 15 000 Polish officer prisoners at Katyn and other
locations. This particular amnesia also was not out of character -
Churchill's government had entirely forgotten about Stalin's
responsibility for the deaths of millions of 'kulaks' in the 1930's,
and his ruthless pre-war purges and destruction of all his political
enemies, real and imagined, within the Soviet system.

Another example of the awkwardnesses lies in the secret British

policy of so-called ‘area bombing’, adopted early in 1942 and
outlined by (Lord) CP Snow in the 1960 Godkin Lectures at
Harvard University (published in his book Science and
Government, Oxford University Press 1961). Snow had an
insider’s view of the development of this policy. He outlines how
the sinister Professor FA Lindemann (later to become Lord
Cherwell, Churchill’s chief scientific adviser), persuaded the
British Cabinet to adopt the policy of directing bombing
campaigns primarily against German working-class housing.
‘Middle-class houses have too much space around them, and so
are bound to waste bombs; factories and "military objectives"
had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since
they were much too difficult to find and hit’ (p 48). Snow asks,
'What will people of the future think of us? Will they say.. we
were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we had
resigned our humanity? They will have the right.' (p 49).
Fortunately, Snow needn't have worried. There have been and
remain such powerful vested interests committed to preserving
the myths of World War II that even the history departments of
universities have in most cases assisted with the coverup.

The respected British military historian Martin Middlebrook says,

‘In some ways, Area Bombing was a three-year period of deceit
practised upon the British public and on world opinion. It was felt
to be necessary that the exact nature of R.A.F. bombing should
not be revealed. It could not be concealed that German cities
were being hit hard, and that residential areas in those cities
were receiving many of the bombs, but the impression was
usually given that industry was the main target and that any
bombing of workers’ housing areas was an unavoidable necessity.
Charges of ‘indiscriminate bombing’ were consistently denied..
The deceit lay in the concealment of the fact that the areas being
most heavily bombed were nearly always either city centres or
densely populated residential areas, which rarely contained any
industry.. The vital links in the dissemination of this view were
the press and the radio upon which the public depended for all
wartime news.. Neutral reports [of the campaign against the
residential areas of the German city of Hamburg, for example]
that 20,000 or 30,000 people had been killed were dismissed as
‘Nazi-inspired stories’.. Liddell Hart, the historian [after the
Thousand Bomber Raid on Cologne with its claim of so many
acres of city destroyed] wrote: "It will be ironical if the defenders
of civilization depend for victory upon the most barbaric and
unskilled way of winning a war that the modern world has seen." ’
(Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg (1980) pp 343-4]. In his
foreword, Middlebrook notes ‘I am likely to be criticized.. for
choosing a series of raids which produced such extremes of
horror on the ground. But I must point out that a large proportion
of the raids carried out by R.A.F. Bomber Command in the
Second World War were devoted to this type of bombing. What
happened at Hamburg was when Bomber Command ‘got
everything right’ (p 12). Words cannot of course convey the
terrible, UTTERLY HELLISH reality of tens of thousands of terribly,
awfully burnt women and children, and even the appalling
photographs cannot convey the horror of the smell of burnt,
charred, bloated and rotting corpses, all members of people's
families, most of them non-combatant civilians of all ages, male
and female. This was unquestionably an extraordinarily
systematic and comprehensive terrorism conducted for years
against the civilian populations of two countries (Germany and
Japan) on a vast industrialized scale, making (in terms of
numbers of deaths) the attack on New York on 9/11/2001 seem
pathetically puny in comparison, however Hollywood-spectacular
the burning and collapsing towers may have been.

At the Nuremberg trials, captured German leaders were convicted

of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’ as defined in the
London Charter signed on August 8 1945 by the Allied powers.
The judicial procedures that were followed remain interesting.
The Trials were judicial in appearance only. The judges were not
neutral. The victors in the war commissioned their own judges,
who were under pressure to provide justification for Allied
policies. The Allies themselves were guilty of major war crimes,
the most outstanding of which were
 • the fire-bombing of the civilian residential areas of Dresden
(no military significance) under Winston Churchill’s orders
(David Irving The Destruction of Dresden (1966) pp. 96-
100), Alexander McKee Dresden 1945 (1982) p 300, 306,
310); and
• the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6
and 9 1945, in spite of the fact that Japan had signalled her
willingness to capitulate some weeks previously (Robert
Junck Brighter than a Thousand Suns (1958) pp. 189-191,
Martin J Sherwin A World Destroyed (1975) pp. 235-237).
To summarize the sequence of the important dates concerning
the atomic bombing:
• Mid-July 1945: Japanese government communicates to US
government their willingness to negotiate capitulation;
• August 6 1945: US drops atom bomb on Hiroshima;
• August 8 1945: US signs the 'London Charter', or Charter
of the International Military Tribunal defining war crimes,
including Principle 6 (b) ‘wanton destruction of cities,
towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by
military necessity.’
• August 9 1945: US drops atom bomb on Nagasaki.

With reference to the atomic bomb, Admiral William Leahy - Chief

of Staff to both Roosevelt and Truman - commented, 'My own
feeling was that, in being the first to use it, we had adopted an
ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Age. I
was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be
won by destroying women and children.' (Liddell Hart, History of
the Second World War (1970) p725-6, JFC Fuller, The Decisive
Battles of the Western World, 1792-1945 (1970) p584).
Awkwardly enough, for the sake of judicial impartiality, Churchill
and Truman should themselves have been executed at
Nuremberg for these undoubted crimes. In addition to finding
ways to justify their own conduct, Britain and the US also needed
to distract attention from two other aspects.

There were the major crimes committed against humanity by

their ally the Soviet Union (including the Katyn-related cold-
blooded massacres of 15,000 Polish officers). There was the
characteristic decision of Franklin Roosevelt and his New York
advisors to hand over Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union at the
Yalta conference. This was in spite of Stalin’s pre-war record of
show trials, liquidation of his enemies in the armed services and
his outstanding crime against humanity, the ‘collectivization of
the kulaks’. This caused the deaths of millions of Stalin’s own
citizens, not in war but in a time of peace, through hunger and
police action. The US, through its support of the Soviet Union
during the war, effectively assisted, set up and established its
own powerful adversary for the 40-year-long Cold War with the
associated arms race and third-world proxy wars. This was in
spite of Stalin's history, well known to both the US and UK
governments before the war began.

The role of the Holocaust has been absolutely and critically

essential to distract attention away from these issues and
preserve (ironically enough) the racist myth of an ethical war
fought by the good clean cowboys against the congenitally and
incorrigibly evil, filthy injuns. The Holocaust allegation has been
not only the ‘hoax of the twentieth century’ [Professor Arthur
Butz of Northwestern University in The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century] or ‘the greatest robbery in the history of mankind’
[Norman G. Finkelstein of the City University of New York in his
book The Holocaust Industry, p 139] but also, ironically enough,
a fundamentally and radically racist blood libel by the most
stridently anti-racist people in the entire world.

For example at Nuremberg (understandably, in view of Hiroshima

and Dresden etc) the absolutely fundamental legal principle of tu
quo que was denied. ‘In the course of the trial, the Tribunal
showed itself to be very receptive to prosecution pleas that tu
quo que arguments (i.e., that the Allies had committed the same
acts as the defendants) should be inadmissible.’ (Bradley F Smith
Reaching Judgement at Nuremberg (1977) p 102). During the
Nuremberg Trial the German general Alfred Jodl petitioned for
certain documents related to wartime crimes committed by the
Allies. ‘This request set off an amazing flurry of excitement
among the prosecutors and on October 30, Jackson and Maxwell
Fyfe (US and British prosecutors) had a worried discussion on
how to deal with this incident, which they held to be the
beginning of the long-dreaded Nazi 'attack on the prosecution'.
The two prosecutors agreed that the best way to deal with Jodl’s
request and any other such 'attacks' was for each prosecutor to
narrow the case as much as possible so that Allied actions
would not be touched upon and then to urge rejection of all
defense petitions like Jodl’s on the grounds that they were
not relevant to the case.’ (Smith p 210.) Needless to say Jodl
amongst others was executed by hanging.

The Eichmann trial conducted by the state of Israel is interesting

in the same way. Once again the judges were not neutral,
belonging to the same party as the accusers. They were entirely
subordinate and subject to political pressure to provide
justification for the establishment of the Israeli State on
somebody else’s territory. Hannah Arendt says
‘German witnesses for the defence were excluded from the
outset, since they would have exposed themselves to arrest and
prosecution in Israel under the same law as that under which
Eichmann was tried.’ (p 129); ‘It quickly turned out that Israel
was the only country in the world where defence witnesses could
not be heard, and where certain witnesses for the prosecution
could not be cross-examined by the defence. And this was all the
more serious as the accused and his lawyer were indeed not ‘in a
position to obtain their own defence documents’.’ (p 220-221);
‘Israeli legal procedure ran counter to Continental procedure – to
which Eichmann, because of his national origin, was entitled – in
that it required the defendant to provide the evidence for his
defence, and this the accused had been unable to do because
neither witnesses nor defence documents were available in
Israel.’ (p248). Just why was all this legal illegality and judicial
irregularity necessary, we might ask?
Needless to say, Eichmann was hanged.