Putin, Netanyahu, and Thoughts on Nuremberg
Thrasymachus was right
“Against war one can say; it makes the victor stupid, the vanquished malignant.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Human, All Too Human”
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin (2023) and Benjamin Netanyahu (2024) as war criminals.
With the U.S. tax-payer supporting the biggest, most wide-spread, most formidable war-machine on the planet, that set me to wondering if maybe the ICC is looking for war criminals in the wrong places. So, who is a war criminal?
The short answer is, “someone who commits “war crimes,” meaning, someone who violates the “rules” that are supposed to govern the conduct of war. That there are such “rules” is, of course, an incontrovertible fact. Who the war criminals are is a subject about which agreement greatly varies.
That there should be such a body of rules is a highly laudable notion. Since war, an inherently violent, destructive force, remains a permanent feature of the human condition who can object to efforts to impose limits on its conduct? One soldier killing an enemy soldier in combat, for all but uncompromising pacifists, is a morally justified act; a soldier raping and killing women in conquered territory is morally reprehensible, and, a “war crime.” The latter was a widespread practice on German women (“every German female from eight to 80,” according to historian, Anthony Beevor) by the Red Army on its way to Berlin in 1945. No “tribunals” that I am aware of were ever held to hold Russian war leaders to account.
So, here is a question. At the conclusion of a war, any war: what is the likelihood that both the winners and losers have reached that point without breaking any of the “rules”? I suspect that “no likelihood” is the response from anyone who has ever fought in a war.
What that means, practically speaking, is that when a war is over and mutual accusations of war crimes are forthcoming, someone gets to decide: who the rule-breakers (war criminals) are, the process for “legally” formalizing that decision, and what the punishment should be. Does anyone seriously think that that “someone” will not be the winner of the war? The loser has no decision-making, no bargaining power, particularly when he has unconditionally surrendered. Ask the Germans how it worked out for them. After seven years of Allied occupation, post WWII, and the moral cleansing they underwent, called “denazification,” the Germans were “led” to understand that the punishment that they, collectively, were experiencing was “just.” So completely did they internalize their guilt, they continue to punish themselves up to the present day. What the winners, however, were dissimulating in bringing the Germans to that understanding is this. That the Allied version of “justice” was the very same one that the Sophist, Thrasymachus, put to Socrates at the beginning of Plato’s Republic: “Justice is the advantage of the stronger.” This turned out to be a clever way of saying that those who believe that “justice,” as the outcome of competition for influence, rewards and power is something other than the prerogatives of the ones who come out on top, are dupes. “Justice” is whatever the crew running the show say it is.
Very cynical, but the WWII winners, who were all about “making the world safe for democracy,” were nothing if not consummately cynical while pretending to be doing “The Lord’s Work.” That cynicism was manifested at the beginning by a ploy – the production of a drama-spectacular, a morality play, for the whole world to experience. Its purpose was to convince the audience that the winners were holding the losers to universally recognized standards of moral accountability, standards scrupulously adhered to by the play producers.
That drama-spectacular was conducted by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946. Every aspect of it was a farce. The “International” composition of the IMT was limited to the four military powers (USA, UK, Soviet Union, France) that had defeated the Axis. Nuremberg was a show-trial not unlike those conducted by Stalin in the USSR in the 1930s: the plaintiffs acted as the prosecutors and judges; the defendants’ guilt was presumed; and the procedural machinery was rigged to disable the defense counsel.
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A reading of Victors’ Justice by Montgomery Belgion should dispel any illusion that Nuremberg and sundry military tribunals conducted by the victorious Allies were anything but legal lynchings. The “war crimes” that sent the German war leaders to the gallows and prison were, as Belgion notes in scrupulous detail, committed in abundance by the Allies.
[A]s regard the accusations and convictions of the former German leaders of the ‘war crimes’ of ‘murder, ill-treatment or deportation of civilians of occupied territory,’ and of the utilization of concentration camps to destroy opposition in occupied territory … these crimes were of a kind which the victors, who at Nuremberg were both prosecutors and judges, had committed also.1
Here is, perhaps, the most egregious instance of how Lavrentiy Beria’s “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” practice of “legal discovery” was embraced by the MIT.
The former German leaders were accused of a particular ‘war crime,’ not only of which no German was guilty, but for which one of the powers conducting the prosecution and represented on the bench was actually responsible. (83)
The reference is to the murder of 15,000 Polish officers in 1940 by Stalin’s NKVD at Katyn. The Soviets continued to pin it on the Germans up until 1989 when Gorbachev finally officially confessed. The Americans and British at Nuremberg knew the Soviets probably did it, but FDR and Winston didn’t care and the “show had to go on.” Stalin got grumpy when he didn’t get his way, and Stalin’s good humor was a high priority for the Allied leaders, those guys, you remember, don’t you, who were trying to liberate all of Europe from the grip of … What was it now? Ah yes. Tyranny.
So much cruel irony here to digest from grasping the truth that behind the sanctimonious veil of Nuremberg justice was the untouchable quest for vengeance on behalf of the Jews. Across the passage of time, “when poetry comes down to facts,” as Ezra Pound wrote, suspicion tends to fall on those long favored. Eighty years after the end of WWII and the “orthodox” narrative of singular German guilt and unique Jewish suffering, the “Holocaust” seems to be losing a bit of its guilt leverage. It appears that the Jews are doing to the Arabs in the Levant what the Germans were punished for doing to them. Netanyahu has become a terrible embarrassment to liberal-left leaning American Jews for whom IDF operations in Gaza look way too much like what we are taught the Germans were doing in Poland.
Which brings us to 2025 and “war criminals,” Putin and Netanyahu, both with outstanding “arrest warrants.” That said, it is questionable as to whether the ICC, constituted only twenty years ago, is a real criminal court. It prosecutes individuals for crimes, but its jurisdiction is limited to the 123 state signatories to the Rome Statute that created it. The United States, China and Russia, among many other countries, have withdrawn or are not signatories to the Statute which makes the “I” in the ICC a misnomer, and which means that unlike a domestic court it lacks the enforcement powers that would make it a real court.
Nevertheless, the ICC would be the source of embarrassment for the U. S. regime. From Newsweek:
President Joe Biden said in March that the court’s action [of 2023] against the Russian president [Vladimir Putin] was ‘justified’ and ‘makes a very strong point …’ Secretary of State Anthony Blinkin then urged all ICC signatories to comply with the arrest warrant.
Then along came Bibi. From Aljazeera:
ICC pre-trial judges issued arrest warrants on Thursday for Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for charges of using starvation as a method of warfare as well as the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts…. With a few exceptions, US politicians from both major parties expressed outrage at the court’s decision, with many questioning the court’s legitimacy. The administration of President Joe Biden was quick to voice opposition to the ruling.
We fundamentally reject the court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials,’ White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters. ‘We remain deeply concerned by the prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision.’
This risible, glaring piece of hypocrisy demonstrates that the ICC, like the United Nations and other international bodies that presume to police the world, operate with a pseudo-moral authority that allows the states to pretend to adhere to the norms of “civilized” people everywhere while letting the strongest ones get along with pursuing their self-interest at the expense of the weaker ones.
So, the response of the world’s super power, the Great Pretender as far as civilized norms go, to the two ICC rulings turns out to be: “for our friends, anything; for our enemies, the law,” to paraphrase Oscar Benevides. So much for the “rules based international order” that guides U.S. foreign policy.
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Still, the two “war criminals” are “at large,” so to speak. It remains for them to be apprehended, tried and convicted in a court of law. Until that happens, basic jurisprudence says that they are “alleged” criminals. So, when you start speculating about how to get them beyond the “alleged” qualifier and to their “just deserts,” this is where you realize that the whole idea of an international criminal court that brings powerful individual offenders to justice is a fantasy.
But let’s play pretend for a moment and begin with Putin. Let’s pretend that, miraculously, Ukraine turns the war around and defeats Russia. Putin is toppled, seized by the victors and put on trial. That tribunal would be composed of NATO, EU member countries with maybe Zelensky or Lindsey Graham as the prosecutor. The Western media giants New York Times, London Times, Fox News, etc. who, from the war’s outset condemned Putin as a war criminal, would dominate the press coverage. Is there the slightest doubt that Putin would not be found “guilty”? The trial’s script would copy Nuremberg II, Putin as Hitler redux brought to “justice” by the “rules based international order” sheriffs.
However, just like Nuremberg I, the twenty-first version would be a show trial – a parody on the first go around, even more conspicuously a sham – with the U.S. and its European vassal states stage-managing the charade, and the rest of the world looking on, confirming its view that the Western leaders act more like Mafia bosses than statesmen.
Now we come to Netanyahu. Let’s pretend he visits Canada, a Rome Statute signatory, is arrested and put on trial. Here is where the fantasy of impartial international justice crashes against the reality of American “justice is the advantage of the stronger” foreign policy. You see, without the U.S. government’s financial, military and diplomatic support for Israel, Netanyahu wouldn’t be the “war criminal” he is accused of being and Israel on its own would have to treat the Palestinians like human beings or die. The American President, Secretaries of State and Defense would be in the dock as co-defendants. That would never happen because the U.S. is the world’s strongest nation, and despite its high minded “rules based international order” folderol, it operates on its strength, not on principle. Think of Thrasymachus.
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Back to 1945 and Nuremberg for a moment and what message to the world the stage managers wanted the Trial to convey. It would be that: justice had been served; right had prevailed over might; morally accoutered guardians were now in charge and would build institutions for a new, peaceful, law-governed world order.
The Nuremberg Trial, as Belgion states, had two pretexts.
“One was that it would contribute to the prospects of peace. The other was that it would assist to broaden and spread the rule of law.” (23) Are you laughing yet, reader? I swear, I’m not making this up. Belgion goes on say that: “a priori both pretexts are open to being doubted.” Yes, more “doubt” than he could have imagined. He wrote this in 1949. We now have eight decades of a posteriori confirmation to show how delusional the pretexts were and how baseless the hope for the righteousness of the new guardians would be. As for “peace,” without mentioning the Cold War and the dozens of hot wars, post-1945, there are currently two conflicts sponsored and funded by the U.S. that pose serious risks for escalation to WWIII. As for the “rule of law,” the draconian Covid-19 lockdowns showed how quickly the mask comes off in the so-called “democratic” polities to reveal the venality and corruption of the bosses, how open their contempt is for those who put them in power, and how little we can do about it.
With respect to “war criminals,” whoever and wherever they are, it is chimerical to believe that these post-WWII constructed international bodies like the United Nations and the ICC can function as legal entities that will bring miscreant state actors to justice.
The reality is that nation states will fight to keep their sovereignty. The big, powerful ones will act to serve their perceived self-interests and not worry too much that their morality-talk has no bearing on what they actually do.
Russia will defeat Ukraine. Putin will remain popular with his own people and go down in history as the man who brought Russia back to life after the Soviet collapse in 1991. Unlike the National Socialist leaders, never will he face prosecution by American jurists as so ardently desired by the Neocons like Tory Nuland, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan.
Netanyahu’s future is less certain. He is hated by many of his own countrymen, and his grip on power is entirely contingent on the eschatological lunacy of a massive block of American Christian Zionists and the machinations of Neocon, Zionist Jews. The former serve as useful idiots for the later, and it is the political influence of these strange bedfellows that keeps the money and weapons flowing to the Chosen People. If and when it stops, Netanyahu will fall, and we could only hope that he finds the end of a rope or life in a miserable little prison cell. Divine justice, perhaps.
Montgomery Belgion, Victors’ Justice, Paul Bondarovsky, publisher, 2017; originally published by Henry Regnery Company, Hinesdale, IL, 1949 p. 83, original italics)