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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

Honestly it is sickening that the supposedly mightiest military power in the last decades is incapable of holding its war criminals to account. During WWII generals (like Yamashita) were hanged for war crimes that happened in their area of responsibility (not even under their command and control), so nothing as a consequence for directly ordering a massacre or torture is simply unacceptable.

Edited to add: not only is it incapable of holding its war criminals to account, it has an explicit law to allow itself to invade anyone trying to do that (Hague invasion act). It's not incapable, it's hostilely unwilling.

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After WWII, no allied commanders were hanged.

What happened in Dresden, for example, was clearly a war crime, the biggest atrocity in one attack, one bombing run (not one bomb, but one attack), ever.

There is no honest judgement. There is no reciprocity. There is only the victors writing the history and punishing the non-victors, except the ones they pardon for being valuable.

The countries that suffered the worst from Nazi Germany (the countries that become post-war USSR, France) also had some of the lightest touches when it came to persecuting war criminals after WW2.

Why? Because the war didn’t happen in a vacuum. The decision became a practical one and there were more important things to do.

While it might have been a war crime the existing international legal mechanism were unable to deal with such war crimes. The Nürnberger Prozesse were not run by an international mechanism but by the allied forces. Similar in Japan.

I think what US lacks severely is humility. That big ego acknowledging that even they can and sometimes do fuckup big time, despite all good that is done. This very effectively prevents recognizing and addressing issues like these and much needed improvement.

It goes deeper - US needs allies, everybody does. But if you position yourself above everybody else and treat rest as sub-humans (which is what effectively various US laws state), people and nations will align with you only of its convenient for them, and not for 1 second more. You will receive a lot of hatred, open and hidden. Nothing healthy for long term empire.

I think we in Europe are somehow slowly starting to understand that. We have big powers like Germany and France, and a lot of smaller countries. If the big countries want to be respected and not treated like the USA (=someone who can help you but can become a bully in an instant when it suits them), they need to be more open and less egoistical. This needs to happen on a global scale, though, to really work.

No, Dresden was a big garrison city, manufacturing and transportation hub. Bombing it, as cruel at is was, served a purpose for the Allies to remove safe retreats for the Germans.

Lots of Dresdeners were supporters of faschism before the war and after the war. A quite vocal minority still supports neofaschism up to this day. In the 90ies they installed the myth of the "holocaust bombing" as an allied war crime, trying to turn themselves into the victims of war.

> Lots of Dresdeners were supporters of faschism before the war and after the war.

Loads of Afghans support the Taliban. Doesn't mean firebombing any city there is the proper answer to anything there.

And loads of people support the US government, the Russian government, the British government, and so on and so on. All of those countries have some absolutely massive atrocities under their belts.

And absolutely none of it is deserving of burning the flesh off civilians and children.

This equivocation between Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust (not a war crime, but a crime against humanity) on the one side, and whatever excesses the allies committed, is deeply misguided. And I say that as a German.

There is obviously an element of “the victor gets to write history” to the Nuremberg Trials. But there is still an underlying, objective truth of grave injustice, and the trials did the best that was possible under the circumstances to capture it.

Dresden, Nagasaki, My Lai, the Iraq war in its entirety: all of these were wrong, to different extends and for differing reasons. The industrial slaughter of more than four million people, intended to wipe out a culture and motivated by nothing but shallow hatred, still stands apart, incomparable.

Mỹ Lai doesn't belong on that list. It was straight-up indiscriminate rape-and-murder of an entire village--and is just the best documented episode of many in that war. The tactical or strategic justification for the action was a stretch, at best. If anything it should be grouped with German actions in Belgium in WW1, or the Japanese in Nanking.

>After WWII, no allied commanders were hanged.

>What happened in Dresden, for example, was clearly a war crime, ...

It would only have been a war crime if the city was undefended. Since Dresden had AA guns and fighters defending it those attacks were not war crimes. Bear in mind the same test was applied to german bomber attacks, no germans were convicted for the bombings of Coventry or London, so there was no inconsistency in the way bomber attacks by the two sides were treated.

That logic seems very flimsy. Every city had AA guns and fighters protecting it. In the same way that massacring a bunch of civilians in a village that was defended by armed soldiers is still a war crime.

For a counterpoint, Alexander Löhr was hanged in Belgrade after the war, in part because of the bombing of the city he commanded.

>That logic seems very flimsy....

Maybe, but that was the legal standard at the time. I've no idea what the charges and evidence were levelled at Löhr beyond the few lines in Wikipedia, except that his fate seems richly deserved for numerous reasons and it seems likely many of them had a perfectly valid legal basis. If there were any lapses in legal nicety, I shed no tears over the matter.

It wasn't the legal standard at the time.

The defense used was generally that there were legitimate military targets (eg arms factories).

From the Hague Convention of 1907 regarding ‘the Laws and Customs of War on Land’:

Article 25 The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.

This was not considered to restrict aerial bombardment as early as the first world war, drawing on precedent based on naval bombardments which could target undefended facilities provided they were of a milirary nature.

Article 2 of the Hague Convention No. IX of 1907 on naval bombardments in time of war allowed naval forces to fire on certain objects even when the locality concerned was not defended.

[snip]

Generally speaking, it was possible to observe a steady shift, for bombardment to be permissible under inter- national law, from the requirement that a locality be defended to that of the presence of a military objective. 5 By the time the First World War ended, therefore, the law of air warfare had virtually lost its sole codified basis: the prohibition on dropping explosives from aircraft had become invalid and Article 25's field of application had turned out to be extremely narrow. It had been replaced by the very imprecise prin- ciple of the "military objective"

If you continue reading that document it becomes clear there were multiple attempts the codify the rules (eg the Washington Conference talks, the Hague Commission of Jurists) none of which were ratified.

However, the 1922/23 "Hague Rules of Air Warfare" (which were not ratified) are notable in that the discard the idea that defense makes any difference and switched entirely to the military objectives view, with carve-outs to try to protect civilians and monuments.

https://international-review.icrc.org/sites/default/files/S0...

So they made it easier to justify attacks, and harder to prosecute such attacks as war crimes? In any case as to legitimacy[0]:

In 1946 the Nüremberg International Military Tribunal stated with regard to the Hague Convention on land warfare of 1907: "The rules of land warfare expressed in the Convention undoubtedly represented an advance over existing International Law at the time of their adoption ... but by 1939 these rules ... were recognized by all civilized nations and were regarded as being declaratory of the laws and customs of war" (reprinted in AJIL, Vol. 41, 1947, pp. 248-249). The International Military Tribunal for the Far East expressed, in 1948, an identical view.

[0] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/195

> So they made it easier to justify attacks, and harder to prosecute such attacks as war crimes?

Yes.

It's worth noting that the idea of "international law" really only became a thing with the Nuremberg trials. Before that it was assumed people would do the right thing, or something...

I agree you could make a reasonable case that the allied bombing campaign on Dresden at al should have been war crimes, but the fact is they were not, and nobody at the time had any expectation that they could or would be. There would have been no legal basis, even a flimsy one, for prosecuting them as such.

> It would only have been a war crime if the city was undefended.

There's no treaty or legal doctrine arguing that. That seems to be something you've made up.

The generally accepted argument for strategic bombing being a war crime is that it targets civilians which is outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

AFAIK that had never been tried in a court but that's the logic. The "it was defended" argument isn't a factor in any legal discussion I've seen.

You've seen legal discussions of WW2 war crimes, but have really never heard of the Hague Convention?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32219225

While it's good of course that the courage and sound judgement of Hugh Thompson be recognized, remembered, and celebrated, My Lai isn't a story about a hero.

It's the story of abominable war crimes committed by abominable US soldiers who were never held accountable for their abominable crimes.

Those generals were on the losing side ... when you are winning it is a bit more complicated.

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