From: ahk@chinet.com
Rhino wrote:
>On 2026-01-08 2:43 p.m., Adam H. Kerman wrote:
>> Rhino wrote:
>>> On 2026-01-07 10:52 p.m., Adam H. Kerman wrote:
>>>> BTR1701 wrote:
>>>>> Jan 7, 2026 at 4:23:37 PM PST, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
>>
>>>>>> . . .
>>
>>>>>> Capturing [Maduro] and putting him on trial is a violation of
>>>>>> international law.
>>
>>>>> Isn't that what they did with the Nazis at Nuremberg?
>>
>>>> He's saying specifically that a head of state is immune from prosecution
>>>> by a foreign government. Killing him as an act of war is not a violatiom
>>>> of international law. Putting him on trial is.
>>
>>>> It makes no sense.
>>
>>>> I've never studied what law Nazis were charged under.
>>
>>> 30 odd years ago, I read a book about the Nuremberg Trials written by
>>> one of the American prosecutors, who was very very old at the time of
>>> writing and publication. I still have the book: The Anatomy of the
>>> Nuremberg Trials by Telford Taylor. (I see it is available on the gray
>>> as an audiobook.) If I remember correctly, he acknowledged that there
>>> really wasn't much proper legal basis for the court and its proceedings.
>>
>>> I've just grabbed the book and I see that Chapter 1 talks about the
>>> legal foundations of the trials. (I'm speaking of the famous first set
>>> of trials that dealt with the top Nazis; there were 11 other sets of
>>> trials afterwards dealing with lesser figures.) Already I've found a few
>>> passages that talk about precedents for the trial.
>>
>>> I'm not about to type out the whole first chapter or even major parts of
>>> it but these snippets should address the point at hand.
>>
>> Thank you for typing this out.
>>
>>> ========================================================================
>>> The ideas which led to the expanded principles of the Nuremberg Trials
>>> were largely developed by a group of New York lawyers during the autumn
>>> and winter of 1944-1945, most notably by Henry L. Stimson, John J.
>>> McCloy, Murray Bernays, William C. Chanler, Samuel Rosenman, Robert H.
>>> Jackson, and (though we do not usually think of him as a lawyer)
>>> President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
>>
>>> Initially, and in my view most important, was the decision of Stimson,
>>> then Secretary of War, to pass over the military courts-martial
>>> generally used for the trial of military crimes and establish an
>>> international court. On September 9, 1944, he wrote to the President: "I
>>> am disposed to believe that at least as to the top Nazi officials, we
>>> should participate in an international tribunal to try them." The result
>>> was the unprecedented creation of the International Military Tribunal,
>>> the most important and, I believe, successful new entity in the
>>> enforcement of the laws of war.
>>
>> Huh. I thought Stalin had pushed for this, since they love their show
>> trials.
>>
>The show trials were the exact OPPOSITE of anything resembling proper
>judicial procedure. The defendants had essentially been tortured into
>confessing and the defense attorneys appointed for them had a habit of
>condemning their clients even more viciously than the prosecutors!
>
>The show trials didn't even miss a beat when important evidence was
>shown to be false. For example, Trotsky's son was part of one of the
>trials and he admitted to having met with other conspirators at the
>Bristol Hotel in Copenhagen on a specific date. Later testimony revealed
>that the Bristol Hotel had burned down a few years BEFORE this meeting
>and had never been rebuilt. This was just ignored and the conviction
>rendered regardless.
>
>>> ...
>>
>>> But what law was the International Military Tribunal enforcing? Ordinary
>>> courts and trials were based on the statutes of sovereign nations.
>>> However, the IMT was no ordinary court. It was established by the United
>>> States and three major European nations, and the laws by which the IMT
>>> was bound were not the laws of those or of any other nations. For its
>>> rules on crime the IMT looked primarily to the international "laws of
>>> war", violations of which are called "war crimes".
>>
>>> ========================================================================
>>
>>> At which point he launches into pages of discussion of events going back
>>> as far as the Thirty Years war (1618-1648) that dealt with previous
>>> attempts to deal with war crimes.
>>
>> I had no idea. Talk about your disaster, a war to suppress the expansion
>> of Protestantism ended up expanding it, while killing more than half of
>> the adult male population of central Europe. The Peace of Westphalia
>> established the principle of international law that boundaries, no
>> matter how disruptive they are to peace and commerce, are inviolate and
>> you aren't allowed to go to war over them.
>>
>> Hahahahahahahahahahaha
>>
>>> ...
>You mean the way Hamas honoured the borders of Gaza and stayed strictly
>inside them on Oct 7, 2023? Or the way Trump honoured the borders of
>Venezuela and left Maduro alone?
>
>Yeah, that's definitely not one of the better-observed principles of
>modern nations (or wannabe nations in the case of Hamas).
I wasn't even thinking of outside Europe, but of the hundreds of
subsequent European-wide wars. The Counter-Reformation was all about
Christians slaughtering other Christians to impose religion in war after
war after war. Europe would be a lovely place if not for its kings, the
Pope, and other dictators.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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