Do You want to make sure that war crimes and mass murder don’t occur at regular intervals?
Easy breezy. Punish their moral authors. Punish them capitally. Punish them publicly. And punish them wherever and whenever you can. But for the love of humanity, don’t let the murdering bastards who pulled the trigger get away with murder.
Because when you do that, you guarantee they’ll re-offend. This is what always happens. It doesn’t matter if it’s the guillotine executioners chopping King Louis’ head off and then plying their trade for the ‘white terror’ during the Restoration.
It doesn’t matter if it’s Nazi henchmen taking Hitler’s Final Solution to fruition during WW2, only to find gainful employment in the Federal Republic of Germany or in East Germany under Stasi. The same can be said about the Tsar’s, Soviet and Russian state’s spies, executioners, and official agents of mayhem. You see, criminals are the only true globalists or globetrotters. For crime is crime, no matter how you slice it, everywhere on this Earth.
This is equally true about North Korea’s, Spain’s, China’s, Vietnam’s, Myanmar’s, or France’s armed forces in the 20th century. And yes, since no country is truly blameless, the same can be said about the USA, or Portugal, Haiti, South Africa, and almost all other countries. All of them have, somehow, sometime, somewhere, committed atrocious, heinous crimes against humanity, for which there are no excuses and there can never be any justification or atonement.
From a moral standpoint all that matters is that we, the people of the world, decide to stop repeating our mistakes, which have allowed these crimes to occur time and again.
For make no mistake, my friends, we are solely to blame for what the powers that be decided to do throughout history. But a head cannot act upon a thought, can it now? It can merely formulate an idea, a notion, which it then transfers to the peccant organ via a network of synaptic nerves. The head commands. The hand or foot strikes. It has always been thus. It’s quite ironic that people have never figured out to apply the law at macrocosmic level, that is to war crimes and mass murder and such. Yet, a caught murderer is sure to withstand trial after apprehension, and suffer the penalty decided in a court of law or its equivalent.
And as strange as it may seem, no criminal has ever escaped its fate by claiming he was obeying orders. Although, in most cases incriminating another party would lead the prosecution to expand the circle of the accused accordingly. No factual murderer can ever invoke a third party being the moral author of their crime. No such alibi can exonerate the factual perpetrator of a murder.
At best, the moral instigator of a murder or series of murders, would find themselves join the actual murderer on the bench of the accused. Worst case, they’d both come to a swift and joint demise.
And yet, when it comes to judging the war criminals of WW2, the defeated German and Japanese commanders were put on trial, with only the highest ranking receiving their comeuppance.
Not only that. Hitler and, only to a minuscule degree Tojo, would justly receive the vast majority of the blame for their capital crimes and sins. Their subalterns?! Not so much. Oh they were indicted all right and some even found guilty and executed. But given the extent of the war crimes and crimes against humanity they perpetrated, only a few percent of the guilty ever received a sentence for their murders.
The Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946) were supposed to show how justice was served and order restored after more then a decade of lawlessness in Europe and Asia (1930s-1945).
Yet somehow this did not provide the sense of epic justice or even managed to curtail a repetition of such war crimes. Soon after the Trials, the world was engulfed in the Cold War that saw the murder of innocents on a scale never even dreamt by the likes of Hitler, Togo, Stalin or Pol Pot.
And this all happened because we only ever punish the people who give the orders.
I come before you now with this here realization.
If we always punish the evil head and maybe the eyes and ears, then what happens is that when a new chief honcho rears it’s ugly head, the old hands and feet will do what they know best: switch allegiance, take new criminal orders and blame it on the new boss when and if it goes South.
What I suggest we do differently from now on is to punish the small people, you know, those little nimrods who actually pull the trigger on a row of unfortunate people, or drown pregnant women in a river, or bludgeon old people to death at the end of a road, or gas inmates in an underground abattoir.
For those of you who think Hitler and people in charge are the supreme and only evil, I suggest you watch this closely. Play this scene on repeat a few times. Take it all in. And then decide if the small people, you know the soldiers, the civilians who have always claimed they were following orders, should get an out of jail free pass.
But then, when you do give them amnesty, or a reduced sentence, or you just pardon and acquit them on account of following orders in times of war, or some such BS, then you should not wonder why you need to fight another war to rid the world of such monsters, every twenty years or so.
We should not claim ignorance when in truth most people don’t really want to see justice served. How could we ever say that?! When most of us choose to ‘blindly’ follow that stupid Gandhian exhortation falsely claiming that “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind in one eye!” Forget the pun, but I couldn’t abstain.
They mistakenly feel that justice is best served by cutting the sinful head who imagined the Holocaust, and by moderately punishing the obedient servants of such monstrous master. Most people cling to that moronic Ghandian saying because it justifies their pusillanimity. Most people are cowards like that. They can surely kill when ordered to by ‘their superiors’. But God forbid they actually sentence those who carry out those orders. That would mean acknowledging their Guilt. And that People Can Never Do.
This is a grave error and a massive shortcoming of the human condition. This is why we never learn from our past transgressions. If we applied the same shortsighted principle to private murders, society would be running rampant with sociopaths and psychopaths. Oh, I forget myself. It already does anyway. My bad!
I guess I’m saying that a world striving for justice and progress must learn to stop repeating the same mistakes every generation or so.
By harshly punishing, including using the death penalty in a liberal manner on the actual authors of war crimes, mass murderers everywhere will finally get the memo informing them that their days are numbered.
They will get the gist of what’s coming to them, and yes the death penalty as horrible and final as it is, is the only deterrent in this type of situations. When you are dealing with torturers, sadistic murderers operating and licenced to kill, death penalty is the only thing that can get those pesky mental cogs of theirs rolling. And when they do, the killers themselves will revert to the good old survival instinct mode, which will tell them to put the mallet down, make them not pull the trigger, and better yet, it will make them think killing human beings is not a healthy occupation.
In fact, we must make murder the most unhealthy activity known to mankind if we are to change they way politics and our lives are run.
All lives matter, folks, all lives matter. And we must own this self-evident truth if we want to put a stop to ritual mass murder on this beautiful and lonely blue planet of ours.
The Alternative
We continue to condone mass murder, ethnic cleansing, genocide, pogrom and other unspeakable acts of cruelty by ignoring the facts on the ground. Fact is that any mass crime has one or more instigators, and many, many more willing enablers, who make it happen. Each such crime has a moral author, a murderous henchman or woman, and lots of small evil side-kicks. It is my belief that each time we let the little guys get away with murder, we do so because of our own moral failures.
We crave, we really crave for absolution and so we contrive to assign blame in a few ‘strategic’ quarters, and we go the extra mile just to be able to rationalize and focus blame by placing it at the feet of a chosen Scapegoat. His or her name is of no consequence. We do so because we are morally inept creatures, who would sell their soul to the Devil, just to be able to make it into the Afterlife. When we choose to place all that concentrated guilt in one place or on one person, we delude ourselves into believing that we are blameless. We have no sins. We cannot sin. How could we sin? After all, we did not shoot the innocent. We did not betray them to the Beast.
It was Him or Her that did it. By narrowing down the circle of the Accused to One or a Few Figureheads, we declare our Innocence to posterity. In Truth, since the circle of the Accused comprises of Those Who Killed or Maimed a lot of people as well as Those Who Stood By Watching the Victims Led to their Deaths, we are all Judges, Juries, and Executioners. We are all guilty for allowing this to happen. We are all guilty for not cutting down the peccant parts of the body politic.
We are all guilty for not pruning the seeds of evil from our midst.
Götterdämmerung 