The London Charter of the International Military Tribunal decided that at Nuremberg only the crimes of Axis powers would be prosecuted and that among those crimes would be a newly invented “crimes against humanity.” This decree was issued Aug. 8, 1945, 48 hours after we dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima and 24 hours before we dropped the second on Nagasaki.
We and the British judiciously decided not to prosecute the Nazis for the bombing of London and Coventry.
It was an understandable decision, and one that surely Gen. Curtis LeMay concurred in, as LeMay had boasted at war’s end, “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”
After the war, a lone Senate voice arose to decry what was taking place at Nuremberg as “victor's justice.” Ten years later, a young colleague would declare the late Robert A. Taft “A Profile in Courage” for having spoken up against ex post facto justice. The young senator was John F. Kennedy.
- Victor's Justice Vs. Morality: The Hitchens Conundrum, Global Research, June 26, 2008.
About the author:
Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.
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