Under the section titled “Jurisdiction and General Principles,” Article 6 defines the  types of crimes that would be considered by the international tribunal: wars of aggression, resulting destruction of public or private property, as well as devastation of cities, towns, or villages. The language Article 6 is peremptory throughout.

Under “Crimes against Humanity,” for example, the Nuremberg Charter specifically proscribes “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war.” The Charter does not allow any exceptions to the rule forbidding the programmatic slaughter and maiming of civilian populations and the destruction of their communities. Such a policy is always wrong, no matter who invokes it and regardless of any proffered justifications.

In an addendum to the “Crimes against Humanity” segment of Article 6, the Nuremberg Charter states, “Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such a plan.”

On the basis of Nuremberg Charter principles, the international tribunal handed down guilty verdicts against twenty-one of the original twenty-four defendants, including twelve death sentences. The rest received sentences ranging from ten years to life in prison. Of the 185 defendants tried between 1946 and 1949, twelve of them went to the gallows. In addition, the judges gave eight defendants life sentences and seventy-seven others prison terms of varying lengths of time.

How might the war in Gaza might be judged in the light of the Nuremberg Charter principles? The “Crimes Against Humanity” language furnishes no basis for the rationale that thousands of Palestinians must be killed or maimed, and their communities destroyed so that Israel may exercise the right to defend itself.

The Charter shows no interest at all in the historical context of civilian massacres. They are always evil, no matter which side in a given conflict bears responsibility for the outbreak of hostilities. By this reasoning, the tragic events of October 7^th cannot justify in any way the murder of innocent civilians as acceptable collateral damage in a war against Hamas.

According to the remorselessly unforgiving language of the “Crimes against Humanity” section of Article 6, the Hamas attacks of October 7^th also must be condemned without making any allowance for the extenuating circumstances of Palestinian oppression at the hands of the Israeli government. Israeli innocents died that day. There can be no moral justification for what happened to them.

Yet the Palestinians have been and remain among the most oppressed people on earth. The wretched conditions imposed by the Israeli government in Gaza constitute a longstanding scandal. The second-class and worse status of Palestinians in the West Bank and the terror visited upon them by fanatical Israeli settlers add to the combustible materials of a country always on the edge of war or revolution. The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has done nothing to alleviate any of the underlying causes of the events of October 7^th. The truly surprising fact of that day concerns why an uprising of some kind did not happen sooner.

For the Israeli status quo, the United States serves as chief funder, weapons supplier, and defender. It follows that in the long-term tragic plight of the Palestinians and now in the ghastly events unfolding in Gaza the pejorative word “accomplice” in the Nuremberg Charter applies to us. The metastasizing hatred in the Muslim countries, the Global South generally, and much of the rest of the world over the state terror unleashed against the Palestinian people will envelop us as well as the Israelis.

American complicity in actions deemed by Washington and the media  to be the last word in Russian barbarism when perpetrated against innocent civilians in Ukraine now appear to be perfectly understandable when they occur against innocent civilians in Gaza. We may be forgiven if we conclude from these facts that the American position on terrorism  amounts to a hand-on-heart declaration of loyalty to favored perpetrators of immoral violence while firmly standing on principle against the unfavored ones who invariably are discovered  to be homicidal maniacs following in the path of Hitler, or in the case of the war in Ukraine, Stalin.

Some of the defendants in the Nuremberg trials pointed out the inconsistency of the prosecution in selecting Nazi violence for special legal notice while ignoring cases of an equal or even more egregious character. They wondered, for example, how the international military tribunal sitting in judgment on them came to include Russian judges representing the greatest tyranny and worst mass murderer in history. They did not get very far with that strategy. The victors decide such matters according to their own interests.

Featured Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

Reprinted from Counterpunch with the author’s permission.

The normal professional ascent of a talented, energetic and ambitious academic suddenly shifted its trajectory in 1913. It did so sharply in two directions. Socialists and progressive liberals hailed Beard for his realistic analysis of the Constitutional Convention as the birthplace of a national government intended from the beginning to serve as the political adjutant of the country’s economic elites. For the left, Beard became and remained a heroic figure and an avatar for the way critical history should be written. Conservatives, however, never would forgive Beard for his portrayal of the Founding Fathers as an assembly of politicians—however brilliant and learned–acting of necessity in the aggrandizement of the elites who had sent them to Philadelphia in 1787, more or less setting the pattern of American politics ever afterward. For making such an argument and documenting it, he became the most famous and influential historian in the country, but also the most notorious and controversial.

The battles over Beard’s interpretation of the Constitution paled by comparison with the fallout from the part he played during the national debates over American intervention in the Second World War. By then he also was the country’s leading public intellectual. He used his influence to oppose Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s interventionist policy, arguing that this war—like the Great War that preceded it—primarily concerned empire. He based his appeal on the impartial foreign policy traditions enshrined in Washington’s Farewell Address. Forsaking those traditions in favor of supporting the British, French, and Soviet empires in a war that would be the most catastrophic in history seemed to him like the beginning of the end for an authentic American democratic civilization.

Beard despised the Nazis, but he thought that their defeat was only incidental to the chief aim of the United States government, to establish its hegemony over the world economy. As with the Constitutional Convention and all the American wars beginning with the Revolution in 1775, he understood the Second World War at its deepest level as an economic event. The spectacular rise of American government power that then began with the creation of the military-industrial complex would be the chief legacy of the war and make the United States a permanent garrison state on eternal watch for the welfare and augmentation of the corporate capitalist order. Beard did not get everything right about the Second World War, but he clearly saw the direction in which the country was headed.

In September last year, Beard came under attack on yet a third front, his alleged racism. The attack occurred in the pages of The New York Review of Books in an article by one of the country’s most eminent historians, Eric Foner. I wrote the following letter to the editors of that publication.

To the Editors:

In “The Complicity of Textbooks” (NYRB, September 22, 2022), Eric Foner asserts, “Charles and Mary Beard, in a textbook written in the 1920s, pretty much ignored the abolitionist movement, reflecting not only racism, certainly present in their book, but also the ‘Beardian’ understanding of history as a series of struggles between economic classes, with political ideologies being essentially masks for economic self-interest.”

The Beards certainly were not imbued with all the enlightened attitudes of our time toward human equality. As we might expect of most Americans born in the 1870s, it is unlikely that either one of them could pass a strictly graded sensitivity-training-in-the-workplace examination.

Nevertheless, the Beards did well in debates about human equality of their own time. Mary Ritter Beard advanced women’s history as a vital research field. The Rise of American Civilization, the textbook cited by Professor Foner and which she co-wrote with her husband, brought new attention to women’s issues.

Charles Austin Beard, the leading historian and public intellectual of the day, vigorously opposed anti-Semitism in American life. In 1917, he protested the firing in New York City of three left-wing Jewish school teachers—Samuel Schmalhausen, Thomas Mufson, and A. Henry Schneer—who, according to the New York Times, had been sacked for “holding views subversive of good discipline and of undermining good citizenship in the schools.” Beard vouched for these men and protested in a letter cited by the Times that there had been “no little anti-Semitic feeling in the case.” He also became involved in another notorious anti-Semitism episode more than twenty years later, the denial of an appointment for the historian Eric Goldman at Johns Hopkins University despite the unanimous backing from the history department. Beard, a visiting professor there at the time, criticized the decision as a flagrant instance of prejudice.

Beard also attacked anti-Semitism as an evil force worldwide. In the early- and mid-1930s when many in Europe and America cheered Adolf Hitler as a bulwark against Soviet communism, Beard relentlessly attacked the Nazi regime. He condemned the Nazis for their anti-Semitism and racist attitudes generally. Writing for The New Republic in 1933 and 1934, he condemned “the customary Nazi savagery in dealing with the Jews” and protested lectures by Nazi spokesmen trying to influence Americans “for the benefit of Hitler’s propaganda game.” In a 1934 address delivered at the New School for Social Research, Beard portrayed Nazism as “a low diabolical philosophy” responsible for a reign of terror in the heart of Europe. That October, he criticized Roscoe Pound, Dean of the Harvard Law School, for accepting an honorary degree from the University of Berlin. An honor from the Nazis counted against the recipient, in Beard’s moral economy. In a 1936 Foreign Affairs article, he castigated the Nazi system of education for its obsession with racial hygiene and program of crushing “all liberty of instruction and all independent search for truth.”

Did the Beards’ economic interpretation of the Civil War reflect racist motives as Professor Foner states? The Beards hated slavery as an irredeemably evil institution. Their account of slavery begins, “In the bitter annals of the lowly there is no more ghastly chapter than the story of this trade in human flesh.” Slavery comes up for sustained discussion throughout the first volume, always as a tragedy for the country. Among the Civil War-era writers the Beards admired, Ralph Waldo Emerson receives singularly high praise and not only for his penetrating discernment of the connections between property and politics. They also note with evident approval his “resounding blows at slavery as an institution.” They do present the pro-slavery case that the South made for itself, while pointing out that its self-deceptive nature led to the region’s crushing military defeat and long-term economic ruin. They also examine the North’s economic agenda, essentially following the reasoning advanced in brief by Henry Adams—an exemplary historian for them—in his autobiography. Adams synthesized in a single image the ultimate significance of the Civil War as the triumph of Northern economic interests: “The world after 1865 became a bankers’ world.”

The analysis by the Beards, however, cannot be attributed legitimately to racism. They wrote their book during the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Partisans of President Wilson’s interventionist policy in that conflict, they subsequently became disillusioned by the imperialist greed that triumphed at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.The war to make the world safe for democracy had taught the Beards to discount professions of idealism about freedom as a persuasive explanation of Washington’s wartime policies. To this rule, they did not make an exception for the Civil War. Not racism, but the logic of their conviction about war in general guided them in their interpretation of the Civil War.

Richard Drake
Missoula, Montana

The letter did not find favor with the NYRB editors. This outcome was perhaps understandable. The editors explain on their website that they receive thousands of such letters. Nevertheless, some effort needs to be made to bring fairness and accuracy to the debate about Beard. We owe him that much. He was, after Henry Adams, our greatest historian. His idea about following the money trail for a proper understanding of American imperialism and militarism constitutes a shaft of light in the fog of propaganda enveloping us today. Dismissing Beard as a racist in this day and age can be an effective—though historically irresponsible—means for getting rid of him once and for all. As ever since 1913, canceling Beard would come as a consummation devoutly to be wished by the guardians of our national mythologies.

Republished with the author’s permission from Counterpunch

To understand the real nature of the Palestinian problem, it is helpful to read what some independent-minded Israeli writers have had to say about the Middle East. In 2016, the University of Montana brought Avishai Margalit to speak in the President’s Lecture Series. A professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he is one of the most famous scholars in the world and an astute observer of life in Israel.

Much of Margalit’s talk concerned the intractable Palestinian problem. He focused not on Hamas, but on the supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu at home and abroad. Reformers in Israel faced insuperable obstacles from the deeply entrenched and increasingly powerful conservative establishment, made up of strongly religious elements, fanatical settlers and a repeatedly re-elected Likud government committed to maintaining and augmenting the repression of Palestinians. Uncritical American backing of Israel reinforced the impasse, he told us.

Similar testimony from other Israelis casts additional light on the underlying causes of the current violence in Gaza and Jerusalem. David Grossman, a prize-winning novelist, has been writing since the 1980s about Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians. “The Yellow Wind” (1987) and “Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel” (1992) bear witness to the suffering of these people. He more recently declared, “Today we are at one of the lowest points in the relations between Israelis and Palestinians. The idea of dialogue, reconciliation and peace seems farther away than ever.”

Amos Elon, who died in 2009, was regarded as one of Israel’s best journalists. In “A Blood-Dimmed Tide: Dispatches from the Middle East” (1997), he criticized “the self-destructive nature of Palestinian politics,” but added that Muslim extremism occurred largely because of Israeli policies in the territories. He predicted in a 2003 New York Review of Books article that if present trends continued, there would be endless terrorism with “results far more terrible than those we are now witnessing.”

Gideon Levy and Amira Hass report regularly in the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz about the torments of the Palestinians. In “The Punishment of Gaza” (2010), Levy castigates Israel’s 2009 invasion, which resulted in the killing of over one thousand Palestinians and the devastation of Gaza’s already woefully deficient infrastructure. Hass, the author of “Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege” (2000), has lived full-time among the Palestinians. She compares Israel’s policies with South Africa’s apartheid system.

Nearly a hundred years ago, at about the time the Palestinian problem first arose, the Jewish moral philosopher Martin Buber addressed the larger historical context of what ailed the world in the aftermath of the Great War. In “I and Thou” (1923), he described the postwar era as a uniquely sick age with a faith in violence as its real religion. He called for a moral revolution to overcome the evils engendered by materialism and, above all, the corrupting distortions of nationalism.

History has not relaxed its hold on us. The situation in the Middle East is a consequence of our failure to heed Buber’s call.

This Op-Ed was first published on May 30, 2021 in the Missoulian Newspaper.

Reprinted by the author’s permission.

Via Richard Drake

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Partners for Progessive Israel: “After the Ceasefire, What’s Next? A View from the Israeli Left”

A longtime political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Johnson was one of that institution’s most publicly visible conservatives during the anti-war protests of the 1960s. In “Blowback,” Johnson described himself as an Eisenhower Republican. He had believed in America’s anti-communist Cold War mission. After serving as a naval officer during the Korean War, he earned graduate degrees in political science at Berkeley and became a leading expert on China and Japan at his alma mater. He performed consulting work for the CIA where the term “blowback” was used to refer to unintended consequences of government policies.

Only after the end of the Cold War did Johnson begin to question the assumptions of the American foreign policy he had served in and out of uniform. He had understood the need for a far-flung American military presence to oppose the murderous tyranny of the Soviet Union. Why even after the Soviet Union had disappeared, however, did the United States continue to maintain an ever-increasing network of military bases? In “Blowback,” he set out to find answers to this question.

Johnson began with a confession. Although abysmally ignorant about the dysfunction and oppression in communist societies, the Berkeley radicals had understood the nature of American capitalism better than he had. American foreign policy did make sense only in the light of economics. During the Second World War, the United States had taken the lead in creating the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as the financial means of creating a global capitalist order. To defend that order, an American empire of military bases would ring the globe. Everything everywhere would be a concern of the United States in its self-appointed role as the guardian of the status quo. The Soviet Union had been more a pretext than a reason for these worldwide operations, as the continued existence of an American empire of bases after the Cold War made manifest.

Keeping a lid on the cauldron of international problems stemming from a world order in which billions of people lived on less than two dollars a day and whole cultures suffered from the resentments of ethnic or religious marginalization would have the United States perpetually on the march fighting endless wars. This would be one form of blowback. Terrorism would be another.

Ironically, Johnson’s economic interpretation of American foreign policy resembled in some key respects the radical political views he always had opposed. Unlike the Berkeley radicals touting Herbert Marcuse and Frantz Fanon, however, Johnson looked to the country’s oldest traditions for inspiration. He found in George Washington’s “Farewell Address” a summa of responsible statecraft.

Johnson praised Washington for his sagacious criticisms of overgrown military establishments and for his support of a foreign policy predicated on the principle of no entangling alliances. The president wanted his country to mind its own business. He hoped that the government would devote its energies and resources to the cultivation of republican virtue in the American people, not detract from their well-being with initiatives favoring or demonizing foreign nations bound to involve us in expensive conflicts.

Our current leaders, Johnson contended, never would be quoting from Washington’s “Farewell Address” on foreign policy questions. It was much too subversive a document. The president’s address seemed to him a prophetic warning about blowback. Johnson thought that this forgotten legacy of the American Enlightenment should be the natural starting point for a sane foreign policy of peace and amity with all nations.

“Blowback” attracted little notice at the time of its publication, the year before 9/11. As Johnson later observed, it was dismissed as the compilation of “the oddball thoughts of a formerly eminent Japan specialist.” It took the destruction of the World Trade Center for the book to become a bestseller and achieve a large readership across a broad spectrum of political opinion, left to right.

A sequel appeared in 2004, “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic.” Here Johnson presented a survey of America’s world-spanning military bases and explained how 9/11 should be understood as a textbook instance of blowback. Terrorism attacks of this kind resulted from antagonistic reactions not to American values but to American policies formulated by a corrupt lobby-infested political system.

American foreign policy, Johnson argued, did not flow as a natural tributary from the mainstream of a republican culture promoting the common good of the people. Instead, the United States interacted with the rest of the world mainly according to the wishes of dominant lobbies working for the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, oil, and Israel — the chief architects, promoters, and beneficiaries of the American empire. These groups bore a heavy responsibility for our sorrows of empire: perpetual war, terrorism, the loss of democracy, disinformation, militarism, and insolvency. He concluded: “Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us.”

The third book in Johnson’s trilogy, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” appeared in 2006. The classical past provided a comparative framework for his critique of the American empire. Reading Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” he saw a parallel between ancient Rome and the United States, where republics had given way to militarized empires. Rome’s imperial system had ended in bankruptcy, defeat, and dissolution. The United States would end the same way, our national delusions about American exceptionalism notwithstanding. It took five hundred years for the Roman Empire to fall, but Johnson felt certain that Nemesis was already close to settling accounts with America.

In a valedictory book published in 2010, the year of his death, “Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope,” Johnson argued that for the republic to be revived, the country’s oligarchic political system would have to end. Money ruled and set the agenda for the presidents from both parties, including and above all in this book President Barack Obama. On foreign policy, Obama imperturbably inherited, maintained, and enhanced the militarism and imperialism of his predecessors. For the enormities of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Johnson did say that George W. Bush would rank as the country’s worst president, but he did not differ in principle on foreign policy issues from Clinton and Obama.

The commanding lobbies have had a cooperative partner in Trump as well. Typical of presidents since the Second World War, though with a style all his own, he has kept America on the course of empire. Yet Trump’s special devotion to the Israel lobby has resulted in his most serious foreign policy innovations. Of all the presidents, he has gone the furthest in linking America’s national interest with Likud Party aims. Exiting the Iran nuclear deal, recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel as well as its sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and imagining that lasting peace in the Middle East can ensue from a total disregard of Palestinian claims for justice expresses the perfect meeting of minds between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

The killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad earlier this year takes its place in the same series of Trump’s Middle East foreign policy decisions. Before giving this order, he doubtless did not pore over the “Farewell Address” for guidance. Apart from any moral, constitutional, and international law considerations about murdering a military officer and national icon of a country with which we were not at war, such a dramatically destabilizing act in a region already seething with anti-American discontents and vendettas is a taunt to the gods, daring them to do their worst with unprecedented blowback.

Reprinted with author’s permission from Responsible Statecraft

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Speaking Freely: Chalmers Johnson | Full Film | Cinema Libre Studio