WW II leaders tried by allies not war criminals

[Youenn]

Abe says World War II leaders tried by allies cannot be considered war criminals

Saturday, October 7, 2006 at 08:08 EDT

TOKYO — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in the Diet on Friday that Japanese World War II leaders tried and convicted by the U.S. and its allies cannot be considered war criminals.

Referring to the 14 Japanese convicted as Class-A war criminals by the tribunal's justices from 11 nations and who are now enshrined at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, Abe said they had stood trial for crimes against peace and humanity "but it was a concept established at that time, and based on the principle that crimes and penalties must be defined by law it is ridiculous to call them criminals. That also was the case for my relative."

Abe, 52, is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, who served in the wartime cabinet and helped supervise the industrialization of Manchukuo, the puppet state Japan set up in northeastern China.

Kishi was jailed by U.S. forces as a top war criminal after the war, although he was not tried by the Tokyo tribunal. He later served as prime minister from 1957 to 1960.

Abe said that war criminals should have been freed when Japan signed the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, which ended the U.S. occupation of Japan.

"Japan was not in a position to lodge objections over its relations with other countries when signing the treaty," he noted. "These people were not tried under Japanese laws, and I, as prime minister, must not decide whether they are war criminals or not."


Japan Today - News - Abe says World War II leaders tried by allies cannot be considered war criminals

[Menydh]

Didn't they act against the war conventions of Geneva?

[Susano]

And against Human Rights. Which I do consider absolute and fully overruling any national souvereignity. It is true that it is problematic that they were judged by foreigners, but I do not see the possibility of an alternative at that time.

There were enough war criminals in the Japanese and German armed forces of the time, and it was right they were sentenced. The only problem is that the Allied War Criminals have never been tried.

[Menydh]

I consider the rights to national sovereignty, ethnic preservation, social cohesion and family integrity as human rights if not higher. Actually, human principles.

[Susano]

That is besides the point. You do not need to commit war atrocities to hold up those ideals, and if you do, any protection granted by thosem especially by "national souvereignity", should be naught.

[Kernunnos]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

I consider the rights to national sovereignty, ethnic preservation, social cohesion and family integrity as human rights if not higher. Actually, human principles.

The judges that sat at Nuremberg had no right to put anybody on trial.

Actually they were judging people by law principles that they were making at that moment: they were applyng penal law made after the facts.

This is recognized by jurists universally as a crime: a retroactive penal law is a crime.


Imagine: you act according to the law, than the government changes, and your legitimate acts become illegal. But not only the government starts prosecuting people who acts in the newly forbidden way, they put on trial and sentence to jail also people that did similar things when they were legal.


This was also the opinion of all the famed law professors of catholic tenets that I was listening to in my first university experience, many years ago.

Furtherly, the soviet judges sitting at Nuremberg should have been sentenced just by the same laws that they were making and applyng to the vanquished national socialists: they were exactly the same stalinist inquisitors that had just sent thousands of innocent peoples to the gulag or directly to deah on false accusations during the Stalin's prewar purges, that had continued also to a little extent during the war.

Actually they might have been condemned just for having fabricated evidence against politically persecuted soviet citizens, so breaking even the existing soviet laws.

[Susano]

Actually they were judging people by law principles that they were making at that moment: they were applyng penal law made after the facts.

True, but that was the only way to convict them, and conviction and punishment they deserved. What does it matter if there were no laws? Those people had their hand in the murder of millions! Their punishment for that should not be prevented by some meager principle; humans stand above principles.

[Susi]

The murder of millions of whom?

[Susano]

I first wanted to write "Does it matter?", but then realsied you might mean your question in a completly different way. Well, please explain how you mean that...

[Susi]

Murder of millions of whom?

This is a pretty clear question. You referred to the murder of millions but neglected to mention whom is in the millions of people. It could be anyone really, and blaming the deaths of all the soldiers in the World War II on Germany didn't work in WWI, and it wouldn't have really worked in WWII... it would have just caused more bitterness on the German side. (Treaty of Versailles anyone?)

[Susano]

Well, I know it sounds clichee, but what about the Holocaust? Okay, no war crimes, but it also was part of the Nuremberg Trials. Or what about the genocidal acts of SS and, to soem degree also teh Wehrmacht in the occupied Soviet Territories?

[Susi]

You haven't answered "of whom?".

And you're not providing detailed examples. Please go more into this so my small womanly brain can understand.

[Kernunnos]

Originally Posted by Susano

Well, I know it sounds clichee, but what about the Holocaust? Okay, no war crimes, but it also was part of the Nuremberg Trials. Or what about the genocidal acts of SS and, to soem degree also teh Wehrmacht in the occupied Soviet Territories?

The soviet judges at Nuremberg were morally responsible of political genocide on such a scale that they could appear in kangaroo courts, not in any serious tribunal.

The treatment of the internees of teh national socialist regime seems not to have differed from that of the soviet camaps during the purges of 1938 (average survival time of a prisoner in the worst camp: two months).

In the previous years, in siberian camps prisoners would often resort to cannibalism just to survive.

If we go back to the nineteenth century, the vanquished indians in the USA were subject to a sort of ethnic cleansing.

Shall we remember the infected blankets given to the indians by a general with the purpose to annihilate them?

Which is the people on earth that has no skeletons in the closet?


Nuremberg remains a jurisdictional monstrouosity, regardless of the entty of the crimes committed by the national socialist caste.

A german tribunal manned by german judges would have been sufficient and more morally and legally constituted.