Recently someone pointed out this article to me. It is an essay by Noam Chomsky on what if the rules at Nuremburg were applied to allies today.
http://www.chomsky.info/talks/1990—-.htm
The article is largely a list of war crimes somehow attributed to the U.S. The implication is that the Nuremburg trials were unfair to the Axis.
If Chomsky is arguing that the leaders of America since WWII should be hanged for crimes against humanity, I have to question his sincerity. Is it only U.S leaders, or all leaders who gave some support to a violent regime? Wouldn’t this include a rather large number of leaders? Who would carry out this justice if most of the world is in on it? Is Noam so disappointed at the outcome that he would rather the allies lost so they would not have the opportunity to do this? I would like to think not.
Also, if so many nations engage in this behavior, or support those who do, might it been necessary to combat a greater evil? As an example I’ll mention another of the participants at Nuremburg, the Soviet Union. This state committed atrocities of the same type AND scale as the allies. If Chomsky feels that Hamburg is equal to Auschwitz in type, then Stalin equaled it in scale. And yet he has a judge presiding of Nazi’s. Furthermore the U.S. supported this state during WWII as did France and England. Would Chomsky insist that the allies arrest and try their leaders in the middle of the war, or afterward? Was it so obvious that we could win without Stalin? I think not. The western Allies’ use of violence was nowhere near as gratuitous as the Nazis. The terroristic acts of the Allies were performed to end violent action on the part of the Axis. After the cessation of violence the Allies stopped attacking civilians and helped reconstruct those societies’ social institutions. It was not unreasonable to think these attacks may have stopped the war early, or even prevented the defeat of the west. In light of that I understand why these people may have been driven to do them, but Nazi fears of Jews or Stalinist fears of small property-owners is not enough to justify genocide, or the invasion of Poland. Such a purge of leadership as Chomsky may suggest would demoralize the west’s resolve to combat genocidal totalitarianism.
We should remember thought that the Nuremburg trials were by many standards a kangaroo court, and some involved may not have deserved their fate, and these are further tragedies of the time. On the other hand, it did devastate the leadership of these murderous regimes and probably sped up the transition to liberal democracy.
