If I wanted to find American war crimes though, one could look a few decades earlier in the Philippines or a couple decades later in Vietnam. I guess it's different when you drop things from planes. But I don't think the Enola Gay crew are really that guilty. Britain and France seemed to be the most justified in the entire situation with bombing German and Italian citizens, but their hands are so dirty from global imperialism that it's kind of a joke to think of them as innocent in any sense. It's hard to match the minds next to the pilots of these kinds of things. And of course Hitler and Mussolini were terrible.
Japan was pretty horrendous itself to everyone, but so where the Russia (perhaps the most to their own population). And note, if I do think it falls into war crime, know I don't really have much judgment against it. I wouldn't consider it mass murder on the crews part, but I wouldn't consider it less than mass manslaughter? It's a pretty grey area. Then again, I didn't mean to insist the crew specifically was. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.Ĭlick to expand.I don't know if I could do that. No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.
War crime - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaĤth Geneva Convention - Article 33. He was convicted and beheaded for crimes that "he as a knight was deemed to have a duty to prevent", although he had argued that he was only "following orders".
The trial of Peter von Hagenbach by an ad hoc tribunal of the Holy Roman Empire in 1474, was the first "international" war crimes trial, and also of command responsibility. I found this while I was looking up some info about it though, I kinda thought was funny. however, war crimes have been around for quite a while. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice."įourth Geneva Convention - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaīut this wasn't completed until 1949. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the conventions states that parties to a conflict often would resort to "intimidatory measures to terrorize the population" in hopes of preventing hostile acts, but such practices "strike at guilty and innocent alike. The conventions, to counter this, reiterated the principle of individual responsibility. Additional concern also addressed the United States' atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which, in turn, caused death and disease to millions of Japanese civilians as well as their decedents. Entire villages or towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there. In World War II, Nazis carried out a form of collective punishment to suppress resistance. In the First World War, Germans executed Belgian villagers in mass retribution for resistance activity.
By collective punishment, the drafters of the Geneva Conventions had in mind the reprisal killings of World Wars I and World War II. Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions collective punishments are a war crime. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
I thought the movie Fog of War, with interviews with Robert McNamara, was particularly eye-opening.Ĭlick to expand.4th Geneva Convention - Article 33. We did this under the guise of 'stopping the spread of Communism'.
We maintained that venture for 12 years before we ended up directly fighting the war when French conceded to the will and self-determination of the Vietnamese people. And we were quick to help France to maintain a brutal dominance over Vietnam before Japan took over, and after we liberated Vietnam from Japan. We were also devout to maintaining naval dominance and employing economic imperialism around the world, especially in China. We were devout to stopping the Axis, since they could have possibly taken over the whole world over time, for all we know. A lot of dickheads made dick moves all over the world during WW2. Had we not dropped the bomb on them, we probably we would dropped enough mustard gas to slaughter entire populations. After all, we were firebombing wood cities killing half the populations of every equivalent large cities in America at the time, before the bomb. The world did not sound like a thrilling place to be 1900-1960. We, apparently, make all kinds of exceptions. I've always just thought of all war activities that are usually crimes defined by the state carried out in hopes to influence foreign governments? Anything you would do in war to anyone would be considered a crime now.