Only the U.S. would actually sanction someone for trying to indict a war criminal.
The problem is that only the US has the power to material harm people to such a degree by doing so.
The amount of control that Big Tech has consolidated into a handful of US megacorporations is a massive danger to the entire world. The US devolving into an overt kleptocracy is a huge threat to freedom everywhere. Who can push back? Obviously not China or Russia, where the problems are even worse.
Of all the wealthy world, the EU basically stands alone as the only entity that has strong enough democratic institutions, capital, and expertise to plausibly develop some kind of alternative.
Why not China or Russia or any other country with the capability? Competition is good even if some or all of the players are bad individually.
The "The Hague Invasion Act", where the US authorizes itself to invade an ally (the Netherlands) to break war criminal suspects out of prison, was signed in 2002. The US has always been a "rules for thee but not for me" type of place and the digital sanction discussed here fits in a long line of behaviors by the US government. Trump has changed the scale and intensity of it all but the basic direction has always been the same.
And they basically put it into writing, they're not the only country that would do something if an active duty military officer was arrested.
Here's a map. [1]
[1] https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2024/05/ICC-Mem...
I think it looked like that, because the US always been very effective at propaganda, and until the internet and the web made it very easy for people to communicate directly with each other without the arms of media conglomerates. It's now clearer than ever that US never really believed in its own ideals or took their own laws seriously, there are too many situations pointing at the opposite being true.
Don’t get me wrong - Jim Crow was horrific. But it was state level after effects of the civil war and failure to establish absolute dominance over the southern states in reconstruction. Cultural problems we fought a civil war over and we’re still dealing with today. But one difference of the goal with slavery and Jim Crow is subjugation not extermination
It's thanks to the US, that crimes against humanity is only considered when there is an active war of aggression, precisely because Jim Crow was a current thing at that time.
As are the Japanese.
So yeah, the US didn't spend years doing horrible stuff to humans like the Nazis did, the US wasn't exactly an angel in that conflict, by a long shot. But neither was pretty much any nation, I guess it kind comes with the whole "world war" thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
100k dead, 1M homeless, mostly civilian.
However, one main difference people in this thread seem to forget is that America’s civilian kills were about dealing damage to an enemy country within enemy territory. It’s horrific but the main difference was that Germany mass executed and actively tortured civilians within its own territory. America never did that and as horrific and regrettable Japanese internment camps were, and full of racism and prejudice, and failing to even uphold the Constitution and just being abject failures in treating people humanely, comparing them to Nazi concentration camps indicates a complete and utter failure in understanding how different the situation was; America was not trying to actively exterminate Japanese citizens within its borders as a matter of policy.
The closest American came to Nazi Germany was the persecution of black people within its borders but even while Nazi germany was inspired by Jim Crow in terms of how to treat Jews, it’s a failure to recognize that Nazi Germany ran off with the idea when they started setting up death camps. The closest American came to that was lynchings which never reached the scale or official government sanction that concentration camps did.
The closest American could be said to have done that was the Trail of Tears and their treatment of Native Americans; American has always struggled to contain the racist instincts of a significant part of their population but it is not unique in this challenge.
Collateral damage is one thing, the deliberate targeting civilians en masse is another. I understand the US Armed Forces and IDF currently justify their excesses by blurring the two concepts together, but they are legally distinct concepts.
That's some position to take.
They're still there last time I checked. Hiroshima has a population of ~1m. Nagasaki closer to 300k.
> how that isn't a "Crime against Humanity"
An invasion of Japan would have cost an order of magnitude more lives. It was the 4th year of an extremely bitter conflict that Japan started. There were no real good options on the table. Only "shit" and "extremely shit".
This is an argument by equivocation. There’s still a “World Trade Center” in NYC but it’s not the one that fell in 2001. Nor does saying it’s so restore the dead to life.
> An invasion of Japan would have cost an order of magnitude more lives. It was the 4th year of an extremely bitter conflict that Japan started. There were no real good options on the table. Only "shit" and "extremely shit".
This is a legal defense strategy that was never heard before an international tribunal because, notably, one was never held.
I don’t have the energy to skim through the Nuremberg transcripts right now, but I also believe “it was the best of bad options” was a legal defense attempted there, with mixed results.
EDIT: I’m being rate limited, so I can’t answer any more questions today. But suffice it to say that in Truman’s place I would have extended the relative protection that Kyoto received to every large Japanese city and contained the air force to bombing primarily military and industrial targets, with the understanding that precision bombing was not as advanced in 1940s as it is today.
Here is a more in depth analysis of options other than nuclear bombardment (though it only discusses nukes, which is not the primary locus of my criticism). https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-altern...
Also I did not say they were “erased from the map,” that was a different commenter.
Japan had dispersed industrial production widely by that point, including into workshops in people's homes. The Allies were already doing regular bombing.
Japan outright refused to surrender. They had a faction that tried a coup to prevent the surrender even after the nuclear bombings. Regular bombs would surely not have been enough. Strategic bombing doesn't work.[1]
What's your next idea?
I read the article you posted with alternatives. Delaying the second bomb - good idea, but it still means one was dropped. Allowing the Soviets to invade - it's hard to say having Japan divided for 40-odd years like Germany ended up would've been a better outcome, but idk perhaps.
1. https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
Of course this argument never uses the much more horrifying and abysmal firebombing of Tokyo, because it doesn't come from a place of historical knowledge, but rather trite lies.
Hell, the Allies told Japan (literally) "Surrender or face prompt and utter destruction", while Japan knew they were utterly cooked and already lost the war like a year ago, and they simply ignored it. Japan was not totally ignorant of the concept of a nuclear weapon either, as they had competent physicists and a low effort nuclear weapons program.
If you do not want your city turned to ash, do not START a war of aggression on your neighbors and the damn world because of imperial ambitions, and then do not continue such war long after it was clear you had already lost, including instructing and training your citizens to die en masse for the emperor.
The Japanese were actively trying to erase a billion people. Actions have consequences.
There was no end to Imperial Japan without just staggering death of japanese people. It doesn't matter whether that death came from Chinese soldiers or nuclear fire or Russian waves or American Marines.
If you don't want people to kill you, start by not becoming an absurd cartoon villain.
Imperial Japan was the exact horrific Fascism as the Nazis, and anything less than unconditional surrender was unacceptable.
Internment was fucking awful, and I think it's very telling we never interned German Americans even though we knew Germans DID sabotage US industries during WW1 but I guess Germans are too white for the racist Americans who thought Hitler was a cool guy to get uppity about.
For what it’s worth, I did try to limit my claims in this thread to the notion that maybe the firebombing of Tokyo was a crime against humanity, and avoid yet another pointless relitigation of the use nuclear weaponry.
I don’t know what to make of your whataboutism, however. Nobody here is arguing that the Tokyo tribunal should not have been held, as far as I can tell.
The situation we find ourselves in is that the American of today does not represent us well. I have hopes for the future, but time will tell.
>The situation we find ourselves in is that the American of today does not represent us well.
The system can't represent a contradictory set of ideals.
That's great, too bad none of those people sit in positions of power or anywhere near your government, because from the outside for the last two decades or more, those ideals are not visible to us at all, neither when we look at the foreign policy nor internal.
I'm sure the tides will eventually turn, but we're talking decades more likely than years, since it's been turning this direction for decades already, and I don't see it tipping the balance in the other way even today or the near-future. GLHF at the very least, I do hope things get better for everyone.
I just don't get it - unless all those ideals were just a show from the start.
There does seem to be some slight improvements of this situation as of late, video game companies and other obvious sectors getting more unions. But still, even on HN you see lots of FUD about unions, I'm guessing because of the shitty state of police unions and generally the history of unions in the US, but there really isn't any way out of the current situation without solidarity across the entire working class and middle class in the US, even if they're right, left, center or purple.
The No Kings protest was estimated at 7 million people.
Go out, stay out until change is enacted. It's called striking, and if you had any sort of good unions, they'd be planning a general strike for a long time, and it should go on until you get change.
You know, like how other "modern" countries do it when the politicians forget who they actually work for.
Add in how large the US is, it's population size, distribution, how far most people live from Washington D.C. and a cultural knee-jerk response to anything remotely seen as bullying of digging their heels in or fight back means they're far, far more difficult to do effectively here than in "modern" countries.
Yeah, but thankfully, solidarity kind of solves that, as people fired from their jobs because they're striking would be supported by the community. But, if the country doesn't have a history of having built such a community, often with big help from socialist and left-leaning groups, the options you have available today are kind of few.
But best day for it is today, even if yesterday wasn't very good.
It was just an astroturfed Democratic party rally that drummed up participation by mass text spam from Indian call centers. The turnout was positively geriatric.
Incidentally, the Democratic Party has started running into a severe issue with text spammers and fake orgs asking for donations and raking in millions, and the people doing it are people who are actually involved with the party.
Those Constant Texts Asking You to Donate to Democrats Are Scams
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/mothership-strate...
The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine
https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mothership-vortex-...
We are a nation of selfish, narcissists that have no concept of consistent long lasting care based communities.
What little care we give each other is mediated through transactions or cult based social alignment.
Everything else is fantasy coping mechanisms to maintain in/out group distance so that people feel temporal “safety”
It looks like Musk was able to buy Twitter and, together with the other media magnates, force a massive societal change in USA. At least from the outside looking in, before this year USA seemed to be a democracy (with some factions doing their best to subvert that) and the Constitution seemed to be a widely supported basis for that democracy. But now, the Constitution has been torn to shreds and seemingly with massive support from people who will call sand wet and water dry if Trump tells them communists don't agree with it and that his clever uncle told him so.
Which is why, from its very inception, the US has employed mass genocide at home, invasions & regime changes in the America's, then post-slavery apartheid at home, with invasions & regime changes in the rest of the world.
That's not anti-American rhetoric. That's just historical fact.
So, commingled with those facts, where does "law, love & fair play" come in. If you're honest, THAT was the propaganda. And the above realities, that was the truth.
The America of today IS the America it has always been. Its just that the propaganda mask can't be reattached with more duct tape. America started by geniciding non-whites at home, and rounding up & dragging non-whites TO America, in chains.
Now it's genociding non-whites abroad (primarily the Middle East), and rounding up & dragging non-whites FROM America, in chains.
When you focus on the common threads throughout American history, and strip away the fluff, you realise ... that's the real America (which still has the largest slave labour force in the world, through indentured workforces via its prison system).
The thing the person you're replying to points out is that, while you may be earnest in your comment and representative of a majority of US citizen, that is not how the US as a country has worked for a very long time, and it was possible because you and your fellow citizen were either too ignorant or not involved enough.
I'll simply point to the history of Central and South America as evidence of my claim.
Why did good honest people of the US reelected Bush Jr. after the illegal invasion of Iraq when no WMD was found?
The US looked like it stood out but it has its own internal and external legal problems such as slavery, Native American repressions, the legacy of slavery, anti-Asian policies, coup-ing foreign countries, etc etc etc
The US obeyed its own (highly immoral) laws on slavery, genocide of Native Americans, etc.
I'll give you the point about promoting coups in foreign countries (couping is actually the verb).
More generally, as a foreigner who now lives in the US, I held Americans to a higher standard than, say my own government or major other governments. Not anymore, I feel like there’s just different trade offs in living in different countries.
What has changed is we know about it.
The US took everyone's gold under the bretton woods system, and then Nixon "temporarily" ended dollar gold convertibility when France asked for it's gold back.
You're in a bubble.
Do the right thing to serve their own interests.
That's… kind of the point? To not have to kill and destroy each other to settle disputes.
Isn't actual law a social contract aswell?
Yet two of the most powerful thugs: Putin and Netanyahu won't go near an ICC signatory state.
Also, if look at the exact plane movements of his visits, they specifically avoid the air space of countries that do take the ICC seriously.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_prime_mi...
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/netanyahus-jet-largely-avoid...
Its been very useful at doing the same thing the ad hoc international war crimes tribunals that preceded it did but with greater regularity and without as much spinup/winddown costs for each conflict they address.
> The very concept of an International Criminal Court, operating in some idealistic moral space above war and diplomacy,
That's not its concept or where it operates, though.
> If everyone agreed to arbitrate world matters in the ICC, why even have militaries?
I think you’ve confused the ICC with the ICJ or the UN itself. The ICC does not exist to arbitrate disputes between nations in place of settling them by war.
One country's war criminal is another country's military hero. Same as it ever was.