MY Government Today Prepared to Do Something for Which We Hanged Germans

This is one of those pieces where past and present collide, and it ain't pretty. When we forget history and someone or something smacks us in the face with it.  This is how far we are willing to go, and to hell with history? Speech by U. S. Nuremberg Prosecutor:

After listening to that great introduction, you must have expected someone to come in here ten feet tall. Well, I used to be ten feet tall, but the problems of the world wore me down.
You've heard from two courageous young authors, Sandy Davies and David Swanson. Everybody's young compared to me - I'm going to start my 92nd year in a couple of weeks. They have the courage to speak out and call the government liars and then list the specifics about it. In my introduction to Sandy’s book, Blood On Our Hands, I asked: "Whose blood? On whose hands?" It's your blood, young people. And whose hands? Well, those who are responsible.
What can I tell you that may be useful to you? I will try to give you my personal impression of how it is that we get ourselves into this predicament. I witnessed the horrors of World War Two. I was honorably discharged as a Sergeant of Infantry, and the War Department awarded me five battle stars for not having been killed or wounded. I had seen horrors which are really indescribable - the inhumanity of human beings to other human beings.
The first thing to understand is the mentality of those who made the war and the atrocities possible. The crimes of war are not limited to one particular country or one type of person. And I thought I'll talk to you about someone you've probably never heard of and a trial you've probably never heard of before. I was the Chief Prosecutor in a murder trial that convicted, 22 defendants convicted of murdering in cold blood over a million people, including hundreds of thousands of children, shot one at a time. What kind of people can commit such abominable crimes and for what reasons?
The lead defendant was a gentleman was SS General Otto Ohlendorf, Doctor Otto Ohlendorf, father of five children. He was polite and I'm sure he was kind to his cats and dogs. He sent his top secret reports to SS Headquarters in Berlin, saying how many Jews , Gypsies and others his men had killed in which town as the Wehrmnacht advanced into Poland and the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for them, we fond the complete daily top- secret reports of the massacres.
The quadripartite trial by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg in 1946 was followed by a dozen lesser-known subsequent proceedings designed to reveal the involvement of broad segments of German society in the commission of Nazi crimes. The man in charge of these subsequent trials, which followed the IMT trial where Robert Jackson was the Chief Prosecutor, was a distinguished lawyer, General Telford Taylor. We discovered this set of reports from these killing squads called Einsatzgruppen (literally Action Groups), which was a name deliberately designed to disguise their mission, They were composed of four units totaling about 3000 men assigned to follow the German troops into Poland and Russia and annihilate all the Jews, as well a Gypsies and some others. I was in charge of the US army office in Berlin assigned to collect evidence for the additional Nuremberg trials. I presented the newly discovered evidence to General Taylor and urged that we start a separate trial against the Einsatzgruppen mass murderers. Taylor recognized the significance of the evidence but was hesitant. "We haven't prepared it. The Pentagon hasn't approved it. We don't have staff. We can't do it." I replied, "You can't let these murderers escape."
I had won a scholarship at Harvard Law School on my exam in criminal law. I had always been interested only in crime prevention as a career. Taylor asked: "Can you do it in addition to your other work?" And I said, "Sure!" So I was appointed Chief Prosecutor, I rested my case in two days. We gave the defendants copies of every piece of evidence we intended to produce. Their arguments in rebuttal took about five months. Their alibis didn't stand up.
The lead defendant, Dr. General Otto Ohlendorf, explained why it was that he reported that 90,000 Jews had been eliminated, they never used the word "murder" - He calmly declared that it was necessary in self-defense...
"What do you mean, 'self defense'? Germany attacked Poland, Norway, Holland, Sweden, and France, etc. Nobody attacked Germany. Where's the self-defense?"
"Well," he said, "we knew the Soviets were planning to attack us, so we had to attack them in self-defense."
"Well, why did you kill all the Jews?"
"Well, everybody knows the Jews were in favor of the Bolsheviks, so you have to kill all the Jews too."
"Why the little children? Why did you kill all the little children?"
"Well, if they grow up and they become enemies of Germany when they find out what happened to their parents that would be dangerous a threat to our long-range security, so we'd better get rid of them too."
He was saying to me, "Don't you see the logic of it all?" And so he explained that.
I said, "Didn't you have any qualms about killing all these people, little children and all that?"
"No," he said, "because we relied on the head of state, Hitler. He had more information than I had, and he told us that the Soviets planned to attack, so it was necessary in presumed self-defense."
In our military jargon, we call such assaults a "preemptive first strike", The US military policy today does not preclude first strike by the United States in order to prevent a presumed attack from another side. That Ohlendorf argument was considered by three American judges at Nuremberg, and they sentenced him and twelve others to death by hanging. So it's very disappointing to find that my government today is prepared to do something for which we hanged Germans as war criminals.
After long deliberation, I concluded that the best and perhaps the only way to prevent mass atrocities was to stop war-making itself. Stop war-making?. Well, how do you stop war-making? Is it possible?

Of course, this will never happen, too much money to be made. 

Please read the rest for yourself, HERE. It is important and fascinating, at the same time.

And so it goes.
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