The National Guard of this country has murdered American citizens on numerous occasions in our country’s history without a peep about prosecution later on from anybody. Don’t expect it to change this time. And really don’t expect them not to fire. These Weekend Warriors love the idea of killing Americans. It’s what they dream of.
Wait until he finds out his holy document was concocted by genocidal enslavers… Functioning as intended.
Nazis are Nazis. They knew what they were doing from the get go. They were just too cowardly to say it out loud.
Punch Nazis. Or they will punch you.
The only reason such a rationalization was ever brought forward is because they were brought to face judgement by a group of powers seeking to enact some form of justice for the atrocities committed.
IOW, “just following orders” will never be a defense offered if there’s nobody to put them on trial.
It’s a huge assumption that there will be anyone to put those kind of people on trial in the US and dispense any meaningful justice at this point. Current dems won’t do anything. Current judges can’t seem to pass sentences that stick.
Won’t or can’t. The dems are minorities in all branches. A bit late to be beating the blame game on the dems after they were voted out of literally all power.
And the only judges who are doing anything right now is a trump and bush appointed judges in which are just facing appeals. So that’s not on the dems either.
You really need to stop blaming dems for all the reps doing bad things.
I didn’t blame the dems for doing bad things. I blame the dems for doing nothing, or doing ineffective things. Especially when they did have the opportunity to do so.
Yeah, they can’t do anything now because they didn’t take advantage when they could.
Presidential Executive Orders
I will NOT thank you for your service, I will resist you and shame you to my final breath for letting the allure of guns and patriotism lead you into at best complacency towards fascism.
I mean we’re talking about the US here which explicitly reserves the right to invade the Netherlands if any of their soldiers end up in The Hague for any reason.
This excuse didn’t work in the Nuremberg trials so…
Yes that’s literally what OP’s pic is saying
The British soldiers at the Boston Massacre and Nazi war criminals of the Holocaust had their day in court.
That’s what due process is. Everyone -everyone - enemy or not, gets a trial. That’s how it should be, that’s how it needs to be, or there is no justice.
That’s why “expedited removal” is nothing but fascism. No due process, no justice at all.
It is important to add that even though the US has committed atrocities, for decades, from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos through Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza; illegal invasion, torture, genocide, war crimes; nothing meaningful ever came from it. There has never been Nuremberg trial equivalent for the United States, and there never will be. Every single president since Eisenhower, every single one, no exceptions, has been a war criminal by the standards of the Nuremberg trials and the Tokyo tribunal, and not one of them ever spent even a day in court for it.
There are no consequences for war crimes committed by Americans. None. Aside from 9/11, but the ones who died, the ones who suffered, were not the ones responsible for the atrocities committed by the US. So sure, “just following orders” isn’t a valid defense, but you won’t need one anyway.
Skipped right over killing 25% of the Korean population that just happened to be so unlucky to live in the northern half at the time, as is tradition. No one remembers the Korean war for some reason.
I remember, but pragmatism wins over factual correctness sometimes. If you’re trying to convince someone that American imperialism is bad, and they get a whiff of what they might misconstrue as being pro North Korean, they dismiss what you’re saying outright.
I also didn’t mention Indonesia, Timor, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, and so and and so forth. And that’s not because I don’t think America is responsible for truly gut wrenching things there (I think Guatemala is especially egregious), but because people aren’t as familiar with these as they are with the Vietnam War and the war on terror. And the latter two have the added benefit that it’s generally agreed upon by liberals (after the fact, of course, never during) that they were a bad thing.
Understandable
It’s known as the forgotten war for a reason, mostly because it wasn’t as big as WW2 and not as much of a clusterfuck as Vietnam. For all the shit that happened it basically just returned to status quo, honestly out of all the non Korean participants it was most notable for the Chinese. For UN forces it was a test run and for the Soviets it was a decent area to test new post WW2 tech and dump some surplus.
The Nuremberg trials did not happen because the Nazis were wrong. They happened because the Nazis lost the war.
Remember that in reality the US saved the top Nazis and made them head of NATO.
What? Really? Source/subject?
Yep. Unfortunately they were very smart in the science department.
Bullshit, I’ll take Alan Turing and Einstein over any german ww2 scientists, I call BS this is a narrative people want to be true and frankly it is a creepy impulse.
I’m not saying it was right. I’m saying why they thought it “justified.”
As long as you are saying that, I just fear without that context it becomes a dangerous narrative that also totally ignores the genius of so many people who fought against fascism that we have swept under the rug.
In Alan Turing’s case the sweeping under the rug involved being murdered by the English government for the crime of being gay even though he fucking handed the war to the allies and invented a functioning computer.
Wasn’t he chemically castrated??
Yes, in a way that destroyed his wonderous mind, it was murder by english fascists afraid of the power of queerness, plain as day.
Strange that he couldn’t be a hero while literal fascists were publicaly “rehabilated” (read “normalized”) in the US and UK :( ??
While true, most of them are likely one paycheck away from having their family living in the streets. That’s a powerful deterrent against refusing orders that the US has somehow mastered. That too.
“I was just living paycheck to paycheck” won’t be a valid defense either :P
Of course, but most people will prioritize their own family members over others. It’s an explanation, not an argument against being moral.
My go-to in nuance situations that require clarification is “explanation is not justification”
Except it will. As will “I was just following orders”. It works for cops. It worked in Vietnam. Hell, it even worked for the majority of Nazi’s; only a small percentage actually faced reprocussions for their actions.
Welcome to real history, where the good guys don’t always win and the bad guys don’t always lose.
The same applies to most gang members.
That’s only partially true.
For starters, nearly everything German soldiers did was legal under German law.
Side tangent: GDR soldiers who killed civilians trying to flee the country could easily be prosecuted after reunification because this was explicitly illegal under GDR law.
It’s harder to prosecute “legal” crimes. It requires establishing there are “natural laws” which stand above any law humans put in place. For instance, slaughtering civilians is one such violation of “natural law”. It’s more complex but that’s the rough summary.
Besides, most German soldiers simply became prisoners of war and faced little to no legal consequences. The Nuremberg trials were mostly for those who gave the illegal order - no one has time for millions of legal cases.
I have little to no clue about US law but as far as I can tell, executive orders are legal until deemed illegal by a court. The order would therefore have to violate “natural law” - not the constitution - or be so obviously illegal beyond any reasonable doubt to allow for prosecution of those who follow it. Both of those are a very high bar to clear.
This is a reason why I kinda like the psudo religious concepts that back US founding documents.
Now before everyone gets to typing about annoying evangelicals or whatever (trust me I understand) you don’t have to believe in christianity or any other religious institution for the “natural law” concept to work. All it takes is an understanding that human rights are a default and don’t magically disappear because your area’s govt says so.
It’s summed up nicely by this quote from John Locke.
“And where the Body of the People, or any single Man, is deprived of their Right, or is under the Exercise of a power without right, and have no Appeal on Earth, there they have a liberty to appeal to Heaven, whenever they judge the Cause of sufficient moment.”
All it takes is an understanding that human rights are a default
Unfortunately, there is considerable disagreement about what the default human rights are.
However it was deemed a valid defence in the trials of US war criminals in the Vietnam War.
Remember that we had to fight a world war before we got to decide that just following orders wasn’t an excuse?
There are steps between ‘Human rights and abuse of power’ before we get to ‘put on trial for atrocities’. We’re not preparing for those steps right now.
