In the Netherlands, since the beginning of 2021, the presidency of the parliament is in the hands of the political party ‘D66’. In March this party grew and now has one sixth of the seats in parliament. It is also the party that most explicitly supports the transfer of national sovereignty to the European Union. This party is led by a woman who some years ago returned from the middle-east where she had lived an important part of her life and married an aide of terrorist leader Yasser Arafat.
Wikipedia pages exist about the aforementioned chairwoman. The English one mentions about her personal life: “Bergkamp is openly lesbian. She is married and has two children.” The Dutch page gives a little bit more information about her background: she is the daughter of a Dutch woman and a Moroccan man and when she was 20 years she changed her family name from the Arabian to the Dutch one. In an interview with a women’s magazine she claimed that the reason was that the family name of her father was hard to pronounce and write correctly …
As chairwoman of the gays and lesbian organization, she embraces the transgender-narrative bij the way.
She nowadays actively blocks the use of the word ‘tribunal’ in parliament.
Reason: when in 2022 someone writes or talks about tribunals in general or even about a Nuremberg 2.0, this always refers to the way governments and pharmaceutical companies have been and are still furthering and abusing the fear of viruses. Especially the virus SARS_CoV_2, also known as the Wuhan-virus.
Back in 2019 however, the word ‘tribunal’ was used by members of parliament in another context. May that year, I published an article about so-called ‘Tribunals’, titled ”Why there will not / should not / could not be a Nuremberg trial against IS” in Dutch. The greater part of the rest of this article is based on that one.
Thanks mainly to the Kurds and Assad, IS seemed to have been defeated – at least in Syria.
In response to the horrors that had taken place in the Islamic ‘State’, particularly towards Yezidis, journalists and members of parliament in the Netherlands and other European countries, then spoke about the need for an International Tribunal, similar to ‘Nuremberg’.
Those ideas never really materialised.
Of course they did not: those were weightless ‘trial balloons’ floated merely to ‘prove’ some sort of virtue.
Hiding behind a very special cornerstone
How many Dutch and European politicians had thought for more than a minute or two before coming up with those empty statements? Was it a consequence of their Eurocentrism that they only compared IS with Hitler-Germany and not (also) with Hirohito-Japan?
And the few times that their cry about a tribunal was not purely for the stage, what was the concrete content?
I came across only one that had some. From a German (CDU/CSU) politician: the explicit statement was that the IS scum – no matter how heinous their crimes and how many people had been victims of torture, rape or murder by their hands or orders – should definitely not get the death penalty. When I read that, I immediately thought back to the articles I wrote some time before about judicial activism in general and about the Vice President of the European Court, Angelika Nussberger from Germany, in particular [1].
According to this lady, the Human Rights Declaration dated from “just after the war“.
Then there were ‘war-criminals’ … When she starts talking about the ‘death penalty’ in a video lesson of hers, which can be found on UNWebTV [2], she has to take an extra breath to get these words across her lips: “execution of the death penalty was not a violation of human rights“. However, she continues with: “Today, we see the death penalty not only as a violation of human rights, but a ban on the death penalty is one of the cornerstones of the ‘European Human Rights ‘protection system’.”
A state that allows the death penalty [‘allowing’ she says, literally] cannot even be a member of the convention… Please let that “the” before the word “war” sink in. According to people like Nussberger, we have some kind of a worldwide ‘protection system‘ nowadays ….
No real plan
I admit it: my claim that a statement, referring to some type of Nuremberg-style Tribunal,was only a form of virtue-signalling, was partly inspired by my distrust of most western politicians in general. Certainly not only because of that, however. If these politicians were not just concerned with coming across as people who really, really do care about the victims and about eradicating the breeding ground for organised crimes against humanity, they would act differently.
If you are a politician and you are really serious about a tribunal, then you quietly build an international political base for a tribunal and then come out through a meaningful forum, with a group that has some authority. You then come up with a proposal. A global proposal perhaps, but one that has at least some substance to it in terms of powers, funding and, of course: intentions. And above all, you stopped to think about what had been achieved and what had not been achieved, and you studied the criticism – already at that time – of that Nuremberg approach of Hitler’s Germany. And you thought about the differences in the approach of Hitler-Germany on the one hand and Hirohito-Japan on the other.
Or perhaps better worded: Nazi-Germany and Shinto-Japan.
Two down, one to go
If you want to think about the difference in approach between the two, you should first watch this preview: Reel America: “Two Down and One to Go!” (1945)
It is a preview of an information film [3] for American soldiers that lasts half an hour. It is from shortly after the final victory over Nazi Germany, 8 May 1945. Most of the film is about the question of who will be allowed to go home and who will be sent from Europe to Japan. Almost in passing – because it was so obvious – we see why the Allies first focused on the European/African front and only then on the Asian [4]. That front was so much further away and there was no ally in Asia close to Japan; certainly none comparable to the pincers of Churchill’s Britain and Stalin’s Soviet Union. In passing, this puts a spotlight on the idiocy of people who decades later went on to suggest that the Americans and British should have continued to wage war against the communist Soviet Union after the victory over nazi Germany …
Focusing on the victims or on the perpetrators?
The definitely worth reading article, from which I have reproduced the accompanying photo above in modified form, is entitled No Nuremberg for ISIS victims as US preps exit and has the subtitle Even as the US and its allies declare victory, Yazidis fear a future without justice. Two passages from the article are crucial to my story:
1. … as the international community appeared poised to leave them [the Yazidis] with hoards of hardened ideologues in their midst.
2. “We do not have the legitimacy to convict them [the men and women who came to the caliphate to participate in killing men and making women sex slaves] and lack logistical support to hold them for a long time,” SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel told Kurdistan 24 in a December 2018 interview.
The article also mentions that Trump has urged European and other countries to take back those scum to try them in their ‘homeland’ … (Did The Donald underestimate the ‘wokeness’ of European politicians?)
More like Nazi Germany or more like Shinto-Japan?
In the two quotations you can already see an important field of tension: is it about ‘compensation’ for the (next of kin of the) victims or tackling the perpetrators and the ‘breeding ground’? The same field of tension is encountered when you take a closer look at how Germany and Japan were dealt with in the aftermath of World War II. In the run-up to the Nuremberg trials, great emphasis was placed on the suffering of civilian victims, especially the Jews of course.
It is good to realise that the targeted slaughter of civilians, especially in China and around Nanking, was carried out on an even greater scale by Shinto-Japan than by Nazi Germany. Shinto-Japan’s brutality rivaled that of Nazi Germany, up to and including Mengele-like experiments.
When Hitler saw the collapse of the Millennial Reich approaching, he sulked that the German people deserved defeat because they had not obeyed him enough. Shinto-Japan reacted differently.
The statement by General Homma pictured here (also taken from the clip mentioned) is, as far as I’m concerned, a little more in line with the IS approach than Hitler’s is. The savagery described in this text about the Nanking massacre in the late 1930s, also reminds one of IS more strongly than the industrially organised nazi-Holocaust does. The same applies, for example, to a video about the huge number of Korean sex slaves. Sex slaves who were called ‘comfort women’ in other countries for inimitable reasons: Footage of Korean women sexually enslaved by Japanese soldiers in WWII revealed for the first time.
The Shinto Declaration
The breeding ground of the extremely cruel Japanese imperialism with its divine (!) emperor, was largely formed by a form of Shintoism: a kind of religious thought. The aim of the Shinto Directive was no more and no less than to banish that form of Shintoism. (Here is the text of that Shinto declaration itself).
The emperorship as such was not put to an end. He was not even indicted in the Tokyo Trials! The first article of the Shinto Directive of 15 December 1945 states its purpose. The purpose of the coercive measure is described in four lines.
The first began quite remarkably with: “… in order to free the Japanese people from … “. It sounds like the fiercest but empatic criticists of muhammedanism talking about Arabs and other people in countries dominated by Islam!
The third line speaks of “…preventing the perversion of the Shinto theory“.
The whole statement is only five pages long. In essence, the new Japanese government was ordered to specify in detail within three months how this dishintoisation would take shape.
Article 4 is also striking: the Japanese teachers were also directly addressed. They are personally responsible for acting according to the letter and spirit of the regulation!
Similarities and differences
Take note: the Tokyo War Crimes Trials were in many ways similar to the Nuremberg trials: Definitions were nearly verbatim to those contained in the Nuremberg Charter. Both involved four types of charges:
1. crimes against peace (i.e., the planning, initiating, and waging of wars of aggression in violation of international treaties and agreements),
2. crimes against humanity (i.e., exterminations, deportations, and genocide),
3. war crimes (i.e., violations of the laws of war), and
4. “a common plan or conspiracy to commit” the criminal acts listed in the first three counts.
Precisely when one refers to Nuremberg and Tokyo in connection with the crimes of IS, two differences are rather striking. The first is the unusual combination of tackling the underlying religious ideology, but not the divine (!) imperial power itself.
Also, the approach to Japan was formally a matter of several countries but in practice almost entirely a matter of the US alone.
On the other hand it was precisely the involvement of multiple countries’ legal systems that was presented as a problem in the Nuremberg approach to Nazi Germany. There is a wry irony in consulting this history site on that issue of more than one country setting up a tribunal.
I mean: take note of that comparison with the exemplary handling of those responsible for the Armenian genocide by the then Turkey under Kemal Mustapha (better known under his nickname Atatürk) alone!
There were many legal and procedural difficulties to overcome in setting up the Nuremberg trials. First, there was no precedent for an international trial of war criminals. There were earlier instances of prosecution for war crimes, such as the execution of Confederate army officer Henry Wirz (1823-65) for his maltreatment of Union prisoners of war during the American Civil War (1861-65); and the courts-martial held by Turkey in 1919-20 to punish those responsible for the Armenian genocide of 1915-16. However, these were trials conducted according to the laws of a single nation rather than, as in the case of the Nuremberg trials, a group of four powers (France, Britain, the Soviet Union and the U.S.) indeed with different legal traditions and practises.
Judicial activism, or: don’t mention the war
The suggestion – already made those days – that the Nuremberg trials were ‘unfair’ because convictions would result from different laws than those in Nazi Germany, and even laws from four different countries, was one thing. In addition, it was also suggested then, and would possibly be put forward even more forcefully today, that it was a case of ‘victor’s justice‘. That people were stricter with the Nazis than with their own soldiers and that the Soviet Union was not treated harshly enough; for example, in connection with the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in which Hitler and Stalin had agreed to literally tear Poland apart.
The type of arguments that are used by all those silly politicians, historians and judges who think that ‘the law’ shóúld be leading and therefore cán be leading.
This judicial activism is extremely dangerous.
To charge it, but not even that strongly: in such a world it fits to pretend that there are no wars. As if there had not just been a (world!) war in which the winners were right. It is the same world in which one can be proud of jointly pronouncing very strong condemnations.
Therefore, we should not aim for an approach to IS scum similar to that of Shinto-Japan, and certainly not similar to that of Nazi Germany. Nor can an approach similar to this succeed. The approach was dictated at the time by the occupiers of Germany and Japan, and there is absolutely no question of Syria, Iraq or even just the former territory of the Islamic State being formally occupied from abroad. Assad has stood his ground. A very large number of IS fighters are prisoners of war with the Kurds.
In 2019 IS was not eradicated completely: recently IS fighters attacked a prison in Syria to liberate the criminals who were not killed in the war and escaped the death penalty. The attack cost the life of terrorists and of the Kurdish defenders of civilization. Many members of the IS-scum are still at large. Now some people in the west get worried that they will return to their homelands on their own initiative to attack targets there in the name of Allah or Mohammed ….
Unfeasible
The approach that I myself liked to have seen was not at all politically feasible. Therefore, I just quoted a few sentences about it; Derived from Chapter IX of my E-book ‘IS, the Kurds and the Caliphate‘ (you can read that chapter Disbelief more condemnable than evildoing here).
In a nutshell: IS did not pervert the original Muslim teachings and practices, but rather adheres to them in an ‘exemplary’ manner. At the same time, Islam is an ideal vehicle for all kinds of dictatorships, even for people who are not ‘religious’ at all.
On the basis of these two points of departure, Trump should (have) enter(ed) into consultations with Modi (Prime Minister of India) and subsequently also with the leaders of Russia and China, about an approach of worldwide mohammedanism. However, Duterte (Philippines) and Bolsonaro (Brazil) might have had the balls for it, but Putin, Trump, Modi and even Netanyahu or Xi Jinping did not. And a global approach led by the first two …
What then?
The indescribable IS crimes against humanity took place against people in Iraq and even more so in Syria. Partly due to the wrong choices in the West, in western Europe in particular, Assad has been driven into the hands of Iranian extremists, thereby also fuelling Iranian aggression against Israel. The IS prisoners of war form an enormous burden for the Kurds. A burden in money and troops, while they are attacked by NATO ally Turkey.
Assad and the Kurds must be supported in the capture and trial of the terrorists (including the female ones). With money and investigation capacity. Excluding the death penalty for terrorists should (still) be out of the question.
Back to SARS_CoV_2
Using the word “tribunal” in the context of Covid-19, Wuhan virus, forced vaccination, lockdowns, censorship of dissenting scientists, banning effective medicines, gain of function, FurinCleavageSite etc, has a huge advantage: it shows the panic among those responsible, who up till now thought they could get away with anything. Those who protest strongest automatically place themselves in the camp of the suspects.
It also rightly emphasises the international aspects, the dominance of those aspects even.
On the other hand there is zero chance that in the near future a coalition of powers will evolve that is comparable, not even remotely to the occupying forces of Germany and Japan after 1945.
So, in my view it is not useless to collect information ‘as if’ it was a form of preparation for a tribunal. At least it keeps the pressure on. However, another strategy is wiser, in my opinion: remember what I wrote about judicial activism as, greatest thread for civilization next to nihilism and sinister forms of ‘cooperation’ we were not able to imagine until very recently.
Such a strategy would involve the following: focussing on the origin of the pandemic and all forms of high-treason related to it. Fortunately, more and more better informed, more honest, investigative people do not shy away from the question: did the virus escape from the Wuhan laboratory or was it deliberately released? Can we afford not to even ask that question?
The highly experienced New York Times investigative journalist Nicholas Wade -who is still alive- only indirectly addressed the latter question in this interview in 2021. Available data ‘firmly in favour’of theory COVID-19 came from a lab in Wuhan.
He limited himself to the slightly less alarming scenario of not deliberately letting escape the virus. He explains in a deadly calm manner that people can also start working ‘with good intentions’, in order to develop viruses that are particularly dangerous for people. To, as it were, get ahead of virus mutations or the transfer of viruses from animals to humans – very ambitious indeed – so that ‘the medical world’ could prepare for it.
In other words: an accident that is ‘only’ due to too few strict safety measures can also lead to millions of (premature) deaths! The reason Wade didn’t go into that even more alarming scenario—the development as a biological weapon—is extremely important, although not so much in the context of health care.
In the direction of the vicious communist rulers of China, it may be justifiable to maintain the image that we do not or hardly suspect them of the most horrific.
I feel obliged to at least remind you of that possibility too.
Notes:
1) See in particular the paragraph ‘Crime out of date’ in part 2 of a series entitled Elephants in courtrooms. Link to a video about a long text dealing with the not so European ECHR here.
2) The video has been published through the United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law
3) The complete information film for American soldiers in 1945 can be viewed here
For a number of reasons, the information film is striking. At 2 minutes 15 the general says that Europe was liberated from Nazism by The United Nations.
I should better write ‘The united nations‘ without the capital letters, because that organisation did not yet exist at that time! I also find it very special how extensively the American soldiers were questioned about who they thought should be allowed to go home first.
4) The painful necessity to make these kinds of choices was also emphasised in the speech Churchill gave to the American Congress (House of Representatives and Senate) on 26 December 1941, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbour.
In the category ‘My painting(s)‘ you can find my painted tribute to Winston Churchill giving that specific speech to American Congress.
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