- Principles of the Nuremberg Charter and Judgment, Principle VI b (1950)
We've finally become the barbarian horde that the world has always feared.
How so? At home, the Bushites are implementing their fascistic militarization of US culture. [1] Abroad, their minions have been implementing the illegal conquest and occupation of Iraq with horrific impact: (A) the indiscriminate slaughter of more than 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilian noncombatants [2]; and (B) the unnecessary destruction of the world's most important museums, antiquities, and archeological sites [3].
Focusing for the moment on the latter outrage, the pre-war Bush administration and the Pentagon were repeatedly warned by world-class scholars and international officials that: (1) Iraq is literally the cradle of human civilization; and (2) the invading US military must not allow Iraq's priceless patrimony to be disturbed, looted, or destroyed. [4]
Moreover, international law prohibits belligerent occupants - like the US military in Iraq - from confiscating, destroying, or damaging historical monuments, antiquities, works of art, and institutions devoted to the arts and sciences. Regardless of their ownership status, such cultural properties are to be treated as private property, and therefore beyond the reach of the occupant. For the applicable laws of war, see Article 56 of the 1907 Hague Regulations, and the 1954 Hague Convention Relative to the Protection of Cultural Properties in Case of Armed Conflict. Additionally, any violation of the law of war constitutes a war crime. [5]
Furthermore, the Pentagon's thuggish brass and ignorant field marshals have been willfully implementing the destruction of the world's oldest archeological sites.
For instance, they've constructed a vibrationally-pulverizing US air base adjacent to the Ziggurat. And they've been conducting archeologically-damaging military operations next to the Biblically-significant ancient cities of Ur (the patriarch Abraham's birthplace) and Babylon (site of the Babylonian Captivity and the Handwriting On The Wall). [6]
To place the magnitude of the Bushites' outrageous war crimes against 5,000 years of human civilization in proper perspective: (A) an Oxford scholar says "You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale"; and (B) a Boston University professor of archeology calls it "the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years." [7]
Outside the USA, the world is quite understandably outraged at the ghastly carnage and wanton destruction wrought by this depraved war against the cradle of civilization. Inside the USA, the morally-blind American people are yawning
indifferently: "Pass me the chips and the remote, dude. We're gonna watch the next episode of 'Empire'!"
It couldn't be clearer that the American people don't realize - or don't care
- that their own nation is committing numerous war crimes and is on an unsustainable collision-course with the rest of humankind. If they did, they'd be idiomatically stating the obvious: "Something's gotta give, or this planet's toast!" [8]
ENDNOTES
[1] Evan Augustine Peterson III's two-part OS essay, "American Militarism"
[Part 1: concludes that the military-industrial complex's consolidation of political and economic power, combined with its corrupting secrecy, has produced our war-dependent economy. Part 2: defines "militarism"; concludes that the regressive right is deliberately implementing the militarization of American culture, and that the federal government's massive over-investment in defense is tipping the balance away from a democratic republic and toward neofascism.)]:
A. "Part 1: Is The USA Addicted To War?" (May 2005):
http://orbstandard.com/news/peterson/peterson_is_the_us_addicted_to_war.html
B. "Part 2: On Celebrating Militaristic Nationalism" (July 2005):
http://orbstandard.com/news/peterson/peterson_on_celebrating_militaristic_nationalism.html
[2] Evan Augustine Peterson III's 10-31-04 NFPNZ essay "A Question Of
Conscience: How Many More? British Study Concludes That 100,000 Civilian Deaths Have Been Caused By Iraq War Violence" [This disturbing study is the tip of the evidentiary iceberg, when one considers the large number of prosecutable war crimes that have been committed by Americans in Iraq - like their illegal invasion, routine acts of torture in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, indiscriminate applications of lethal force in sieges like Fallujah, widespread use of napalm bombs and depleted-uranium munitions, etc.]:
http://nuclearfree.lynx.co.nz/howmanymore.htm
[3] UCSD Professor Emeritus Chalmers Johnson's must-read 7-8-05 CD/TP essay, "The Smash Of Civilizations" [Reports in lurid detail the Bush administration's "privatization" of the antiquities trade in Iraq, and the US military's wanton pillaging and intentional destruction of Iraq's 5,000 year-old cultural heritage (all of which are war crimes).]:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0708-29.htm
[4] Chalmers Johnson, ibid.
[5] Consider three authoritative definitions of "war crime":
A. "The term 'war crime' is the technical expression for a violation of the law of war by any person or persons, military or civilian. Every violation of the law of war is a war crime." Source: U.S. Dept. of Army, Field Manual 27-10, The Law Of Land Warfare 178, para. 499 (1956).
B. "War crimes: Violations of the law and customs of war." Source:
Principles of the Nuremberg Charter and Judgment, Principle VI b, 5 U.N. GAOR, Supp. No. 12, at 11-14, para. 99, U.N. Doc. A/1316 (1950).
C. "War Crime. Conduct that violates international laws governing war."
Source: Black's Law Dictionary, Seventh Edition (St. Paul, MN: West Group, 1999), p.1577.
[6] Chalmers Johnson, ibid.
[7] Johnson, ibid.
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