War Crimes Quotes
On March 9-10, 1945, over three hundred B-29 Superfortresses, loaded with 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs flew over Tokyo bombing the city in waves for 6 hours. Over 250,000 buildings were destroyed and more people killed than would be in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki which were destroyed by atomic bombs. The fact that the Japanese would not surrender even after such complete destruction of their capital and largest industrial city, was used by American leaders in assessing whether to use the atomic bomb afterwards. There were many who believed that the atomic bomb would not be enough for motivate a Japanese surrender as Japanese culture prohibited surrender. Indeed, even after the 1st atomoc bomb, the Japanese did not surrender, and after the 2nd, the war council was split 3-3 and the Emperor historically broke the tie. Even the atomic bomb might not have worked. Later generations found this resistance to surrender hard to understand but Japanese culture was amazingly strong then.
14 Arab Armies in a coordinated attack on the 1 day old Israeli state, intended to massacre all the Israelis as demonstrated by this quote. Note that this kind of extermnination intent was advertised with pride. To everyone's surprised, the Jewish defenders not only beat back the viscious attacks but enlssarged their terroitory by capturing strategic sites from which the attacks had been launched. Many people credit to the Israely victory to the fact that they were litterally fighting for their lives. Defeat would have meant death for them and their families. The Arab armies, in contrast, were fighting for land that other Arabs claimed that should have been theirs. The willingness to stand and fight for this goal did not match the self preservation that motivated the Israelis--especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust killing 6 million Jews in WWII.
There are some who argue that the quotation was made earlier and was not meant as an incendary call for massacre of Israelis. It well may be that in his original thinking, he was predicting what would happen if the State of Israel was created, basing his thoughts on historical artrocieties of the past. And many think he was concerned about that possible outcome and was trying to avoid it. The import of the quotation was not necessaruly to hisltorically blame Assam for the point of view but to simply establish that there were many Arab voices calling for victories of history where there were massacres in the Middle East. And there were those who took Azzam's quotation and broadcasted it on Arab radio, calling for the very massacre that Assam may have been warning about. Note that this notion of Jewish massacre and extermination was also picked up 60 years later and called for by the President of Iran.
President Lincoln reversed this order. Most Northerners however sided with Burnside on this point. They saw little point to protecting traitors who were helping to kill their neighbors by encouraging the Southerners.
Saloth Sar Pol Pot. He was responsible for the brutal killing of over 1 million of his own people.
Mehmet Talaat Pasha was one of the national leaders who adopted the policy of extermination of the Armenians. The Christian Armenians, a minority in Turkey and its lands, were discriminated against like other non-Muslim minorities in the Ottoman Empire. But during the Turkish War with Russia, some Armenians defected and served on the Russian side. Many Turkish citizens took revenge on Armenians by means of murder and torture. Soon, the extermination of the Armenians became the official “Young Turk” government policy.
The First World War had recently ended with the mass of horrible casualties that resulted from the use of poison gas. Permanently debilitated veterans were trying to rebuild a life all over England. Many Englishmen wanted to ban English use of poison gas. Churchill objected as the Middle East was a cauldron of various forms of terrorism then in areas that the British were “responsible for” under the Peace Treaty. He argued that there was little difference be gas and shells, but that did not persuade many others. Churchill was outvoted and overruled and the British have never used poison gas since although they had a large supply and were prepared to use it in WWII if the Germans did. This quotation was a blot on Churchill’s reputation. One issue was whether or not it was human to use poison gas. Churchill was willing to say no where white Christians were concerned but was perfectly willing to use them on the “uncivilized”.
There were other factors which Stalin did not mention. There was a major factor of revenge and retaliation. The Germans had killed 22 million Russians (many murdered deliberately), and forced millions of others into slave labor. They had looted everything of value, artistically or commercially from Russian, homes, churches and other buildings. Many of the Russian officers believed that treatment of the Germans was only just given the barbaric behavior of the Germans and applauded by most of the German population.
Saloth Sar Pol Pot. The mass murders took place in “killing fields” where the victims were buried alive or hacked and bludgeoned to death and then buried in mass graves. The twisted logic was that the capitalists and educated people must be eliminated and therefore, cities must be eliminated. Pol Pot and his associates calculated that only 2 million people were really needed to run Cambodia if it was only a rural agricultural state. So anyone who did not farm or have those skills was unnecessary to their concept of a state. See {631144}.
Germany had some world class physicists. Our scientists, military intelligence people, and political leadership assumed that the Germans were also seeking to develop the Atomic Bomb. Ironically, it turned out that they were not, and what Truman reported in this quotation was untrue (although that was not fully known at the time.) Einstein and several of the scientists who were early pioneers in modern physics were Jewish, and Hitler referred to the study of nuclear fission and fusion as “Jewish Science.” As a result, the German government did not commit the resources to the development of an atomic bomb. Instead, they were betting on the development of the Jet Airplane which they succeeded in deploying against the Allies at the end of the war. But they did not have enough or enough pilots left alive to fly them, and Germany was overrun by the Allied Troops. Prior to Truman’s erroneous report about the German development of an atomic bomb, there had only been one piece of evidence that the Germans were not developing one. An OSS secret agent, Moe Berg, had talked with Werner Heisenberg, at a Swiss scientific conference during the war. He was going to assassinate the greatest of the German physicists if Berg thought he was working on a nuclear device. Berg concluded from his discussions that Heisenberg did not know enough about nuclear fission to have been working on that. Berg did not kill Heisenberg, and reported that he did not think the Germans were developing a bomb as if they were Heisenberg would have been deeply involved. However, the American intelligence people and the American scientists, did not trust Berg’s analysis and conclusion. Berg was not a trained scientist. He was a professional baseball player—the NY Yankee backup catcher to Bill Dickey. He was a college graduate, a brilliant guy and a very fast learner who had studied physics books and papers before his assignment. Berg turned out to have been right, but that was not confirmed until a few years after the war. Truman had relied on an incorrect intelligence estimate when he made this quotation. It was not the first such error of intelligence analysis in American history and it would not be the last.
Fundamentalist Muslims, like fundamentalist Jews, believe that all body parts must be buried together and these young Iranian “martyrs” were being blown to bits, thus denying them a proper Islamic burial. This was a problem which the Iranians remedied. What is fascinating about this quotation is that the proper burial was the only perceived problem that needed solving—not the fact that Iran was sacrificing tens of thousands of children to clear minefields with their bodies and certain death. The proprietary of this never received much thought. See {619826} for the leadership perception.
He was the Secretary of State in the War Office at the time. The Royal Air Force had suggested an experiment---gassing “recalcitrant Arabs” from the air. This predated Sadaam Hussein's gassing of Hussein's gassing of his own people by over 70 years.
Howe had written Franklin attempting to stave off a American break with England. Franklin, with the approval of the Continental Congress, replied.
Simon Bolivar and other freedom fighters in South America used this quotation to justify numerous acts of retaliation against the Spanish troops controlling their countries.
The second atomic bomb had just been dropped.
Germany had invaded and occupied much of Europe. These two fronts accounted for the majority of the German casualties. The Germans not only violated the Geneva Convention and the Laws of War repeatedly, but as you can see from this quotation, it was deliberate policy. Keitel was tried and hanged after the war. See {621438} .
Referring to the Mexican War:
