August Friedrich Kellner Quotes
The butchering may continue as it will, it shall remain the historical guilt of the Western powers that they did not promptly provide the sharpest preventative measures against the continued attack-politics Germany undertook. Possibilities existed for this, but no measures were seized upon.
Kellner, Friedrich. My Opposition: The Diary of Friedrich Kellner -- A German against the Third Reich. Translated and edited by Robert Scott Kellner, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
The genocide when the Hutu tried to exterminate the Tutsis might have been curtailed with large nation intervention, but that would have interfered in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. Two important principles were in conflict. The rights of the Tutsi minority and the traditional prohibition of interfering in the internal affairs of another country. In this and many situations to follow, ranging from Darfur to Zimbabwe, the realization that the traditional prohibition against internal interference has to trump the most egregious violations of human rights.
The Ottoman Turks were slaughtering Armenians; the Russians had pogroms against the Jews, and the Blacks were being tortured or killed if they would not work for the Belgians in the Congo. TR was in favor of interventionism to protect populations and human rights. However, the then President, Woodrow Wilson, was far more timid. See {620612}
The Armenians were victims of ethnic cleansing where some were chased out and others killed.
The George W. Bush Administration told Congress and the people of the world that Iraq had developed weapons of mass destruction and were about to deploy them. We invaded Iraq and it turned out that there were no WMD’s in Iraq. No one knows if the all in the administration honestly believed the intelligence, how many doubted it, and how many others suppressed contradictory evidence of which there was much. Some members of the administration wanted an invasion of Iraq for other reasons, personal and economic.
This quotation is important for two reasons. First, it shows that there was a very hostile environment in Europe well before the assassination of the Archduke of Austria that “triggered” WWI. Second, that the Germans were racist before Hitler ever came on the scene. The Emperor demagogued the issue and took it to new extremes, but the evil was there. To the Germans, the Slavs and Russians were a lesser form of humanity than the Germans. The Austrians were threatening to attack Serbia and Russia. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled many ethnic Slavs, Russians and Muslims—the lower forms of humanity—and long before Hitler, Wilhelm and other leading Germans thought that the Germanic Peoples should rule that part of the world as the lesser “races” were not fit to rule.
This was unfortuantely true. At various stages of American History, we have sided with some terrible dictators and overlooked their gross human rights violations, war crimes and aggressions, on the theory that the enemy of my enemy is to be supported.
