REVISIONIST NEWS PAGE II

 

Martyrs and Heroes of the Revisionist Resistance' Against the New World Order
        Sylvia Stolz Attorney for Ernst Zundel---The vassal justice system of the Bundesrepublik/present-day Germany has charged Ernst Zündel's defense attorney, Sylvia Stolz, with  denial of the Holocaust. Paul Fromm Canadian Free Speech Activist --- About 25 members of the violent "anti-racist" ARA attacked Paul Fromm's townhouse in the quiet historic community of Port Credit at 2:00 this afternoon. The police failed to keep them entirely off condo property, as the law requires, but did stop them about 100 feet from his door. Dr. Robert Faurisson beaten to near death by jewish "humanitarian" thugs ...Now on trial in France once again for his tenacious refusal to bow to New World Order holocaust dogma! Jürgen Graf --Holocaust Revisionist Historian--Over the past several years, the Swiss Juergen Graf has emerged as one of the most powerful voices in the revisionist community. Yet, in accordance with legislation specifically designed to shut down revisionist voices in the Alpine republic, Graf was found guilty of a Swiss "racial hatred" statute in 1998. His appeals exhausted, Graf was recently to begin serving his sentence, until he began to hear that some revisionists incarcerated in German speaking countries were not emerging from confinement alive. As a result, he has been forced to flee his native country, pursuing a now familiar odyssey for those who seek historical truth. David Irving was arrested in Austria on the 11th of November, 2005. Since the beginning of his arrest Irving was kept isolated from the outside world. For the first six days the Austrian government did not notify the world about his arrest. The news came out into the open when Irving’s own web page presented it. Based on the best available information Irving crossed the border to Austria from Switzerland and he was planning to deliver a lecture at the Olympia, a university fraternity group in Vienna. The subject of the lecture was: “the secret negotiations between Adolf Eichmann and the Jewish leaders in Budapest, Joel Brand and Rezsö Kasztner, the so-called "trucks for Jews" deal, and British knowledge of the scheme from codebreaking” (From Irving’s own web site.) Irving was already forbidden to travel to Austria, Canada, Germany and Australia. Germany fined him $6,000 in 1992 for stating that the Auschwitz gas chambers were a hoax. He lost his apartment in London when he lost a trial against Deborah Lipstadt a Holocaust advocate and the judge labeled him “an active Holocaust denier”. He was already arrested in Austria in 1984. The present charges were generated after two speeches in the country in 1989. (Vienna and Leoben) The arrest was received as great news by the international cabal of Jewish organizations: Shimon Samuels from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Lord Greville Janner the Chairman of the Holocaust Educational Fund of England, David A. Harris executive director of the American Jewish Committee, The South Poverty Law Center, ADL, etc. Only BBC’s legal affairs analyst Jon Silverman expressed some concern: “He remains a showman and may well relish the opportunity to grandstand before a wider audience if put on trial.”  Siegfried Verbeke --- That Father Stalin would be innocent of the planned starvation of up to eight million Ukrainian peasants, may still be proclaimed and commercially published by the likes of the Flemish communist Ludo Martens. That the Hutu’s have decapitated their Tutsi bro’s by the hundred thousands can also be denied in the official media circuit.That Hitler-Germany first gassed and then cremated a total of six million Jews is a statement that may not be refuted, denied, questioned, approved nor minimalized according to Belgian legislation of 1995. Although the Free University of Brussels claims to withstand “every form of dogmatic thinking” in its statutes, this is a mere fait divers [diversion], since hardly any academics protested the limits imposed on free speech and on academic freedom vis-à-vis the alleged “judeocide”. After a decennium of bullying, house searches, the Flemish revisionist publisher Siegfried Verbeke (pictured; founder of Free Historical Research, or VHO, which was previously shut down by the corrupt Jewish politician André Gantman) was convicted in the end and sentenced to one year and a half of probation and a rather large fine. The investigation that took seven years could hardly convince any serious jurist, but the judge must have felt the breath of the judeo-liberal ruling class down his neck. If this were not harsh enough, Siegfried Verbeke was arrested again on Saturday 27th of November 2004 in his Flemish town of residence, Kortrijk on the same charges. Given the recently established "European Arrest Warrant" Belgium will pass this martyr of free speech on to the Germans, who was very eager to prosecute him to even further lengths. The 63-year old revisionist scholar will then probably spend his last days in a German jail. In the best case scenario, he will sit in the same prison block as Ernst Zündel once he is extradited. Ernst Zundel Arrested For Thought Crimes Three Years Ago And Still Waiting For His Trial In Germany...I went outside with him, and there were a total of 5 men, one of them in uniform. (John later told me that the man in uniform was the local deputy sheriff.) Ernst stood by the hood of John's car with one of the officers handing him a pad with a one-page text that he was The Persecution Of Germar Rudolf--November 8, 2005..I just got a call from publisher Mr. Germar Rudolf from his jail (detention center), he left a message on my phone machine. In essence this is the bad news: Germar Rudolf's attorney informs him that he will be deported from the United States to Germany for 'Thought Crimes.' This will happen next Monday on November 14, 2005. Germar Rudolf will serve 5-15 years in prison for his writings (such as writings posted on his website) concerning the Holocaust. Gerard Menuhin, 57, caused uproar by suggesting that Germany was being blackmailed by an international Jewish conspiracy preying on the country's war guilt--The son of famous Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin lost his job in Germany over extremist statements. The board of the Yehudi Menuhin Foundation fired Gerard Menuhin as president after it learned of his anti-Jewish statements in far-right German publications. In columns and interviews in the National Zeitung newspaper, the Web site of the National Democratic Party of Germany and the monthly magazine Deutsche Stimme, Menuhin, 57, reportedly referred to “an international lobby of influential people and associations that put Germans under pressure for their own purposes.” He said Germans are under “endless blackmail” because of the Holocaust, and that “a people that allows itself to be intimidated 60 years after the end of the war with the events of that time is not healthy.”

For News Relating To The Persecuted Heroes Above Please Click On The Respective Pictures Above

Go to:

REVISIONIST NEWS PAGE I

Holocaust Remembrance: Behind the Campaign...Institute for Historical Review (Video)...Mark Weber provides a lucid, thoughtful and carefully referenced look at "Holocaust Remembrance." In this 22-minute video presentation, the IHR director explains how this campaign is an expression of Jewish- Zionist power, and how it furthers Zionist and Israeli interests.

 

Mainstream Mum
on Jewish Terror Attack

German Lawyer Charged
After Ending Legal Filing With 'Heil Hitler'

Tuesday , March 20, 2007

Latvia caught in
'historical minefield' over SS past

By Ben Nimmo
Mar 16, 2007, 19:44 GMT

Mainstream Revisionism
Horrors Visited On Germany In 1945
The Independent - UK 3-9-7
 

OPEN LETTER about Revisionism
in the Light of Anti-Imperialism
2-27-07

Virtuous Leaders or War Criminals?
by Chris Leithner -- Lew Rockwell.com

No Connection
Between Holocaust Conference

And Iran's Nuclear Issue
By Frosty Wooldridge 2-19-7

Carter enters lions' den
Despite criticism, his book
is work of a true patriot
By Paul Findley

A Jewish academic has shocked Italy
by claiming Jews murdered Christians
for their blood in the Middle Ages
so it could be used in rituals.

Iran Revolution Ends The 'Holocult'
Dr. Sahib M. Bleher writes
that the Iran conference on the Holocaust
cuts the Achilles heel of the current Anglo-Zionist world order

Bernard Schaub's presentation
at the Iranian Holocaust Conference

Dec. 11-12, 2006

UA Drafts Holocaust
Denial Resolution

By Justin Bergman
1-22-7

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN IRAN . . .
By Michael Collins Piper

Deborah Lipstadt is less popular
than Chicken Manure

By Curt Maynard

Holocaust naysayer ousted in New York
 

Berlin seeks to bar Holocaust denial in EU
By Dan Bilefsky / Published: January 12, 2007
 

Designer monsters
By William Blum

What is Holocaust Denial?

The Psychology of “Holocaustianity”
Address to the Teheran Conference
December 12, 2006
 by Lady Michèle Renouf, London, U.K.

Neturei Karta Head Returns
After Tehran Conference

Israel NationalNews.com 1-8-7

The Holocaust Wars
Written by Paul Eisen
Thursday, 22 June 2006

 

 

 

Mainstream Mum
on Jewish Terror Attack

 

Mark Glenn – American Free Press April 26, 2007

Paul Fromm, a noted free-speech activist in Canada, was physically assaulted by members of the Jewish Defense League, a group classified by the U.S. government as one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations operating on U.S. soil. Fromm spoke with AFP from his home in Toronto about the event.

On April 19, Fromm—well known to readers of AFP for his work with the Canadian Association for Free Expression—was en route to the College of Teachers where hearings were being conducted in what is now known to be a Zionist-instigated attempt to revoke his teaching certificate. At the center of this inquisition are Fromm’s outspoken views with regard to free speech, immigration and, last but not least, his association with Ernst Zundel, currently serving a five-year prison sentence in Germany for questioning the Holocaust.

Fromm’s troubles began in 1991 when he became the target of a six-year campaign of leaked news stories and harassment by the Canadian Jewish Congress and the League for Human Rights of B’nai B’rith (adjunct of the Anti-Defamation League) to pressure the Peel Board of Education to fire him for his political activities.

Underscoring the vindictive nature of this campaign is the fact that Fromm’s activities took place on his own time and off school property.

By 1997 the various Jewish pressure groups—always lecturing others on issues such as hate, intolerance, censorship etc.—in addition to threatening him with violence, had succeeded in having him fired from his job under charges of “persistent disrespect for multi-cultural and ethno-cultural equity.”

Not content with merely having him fired, now these groups want his teaching certificate revoked so he can’t teach anywhere in Canada.

When Fromm arrived on the morning of April 19 for the hearing, he found 10 JDL thugs waiting there already, waving Israeli flags and other Zionist-oriented placards hypocritically mentioning the word “terrorism” on them.

Once the JDL thugs recognized Fromm, one of them shouted “There he is,” at which point some of them began trailing him.

When Fromm attempted to get onto an elevator filled with office workers three of the thugs forced their way on, as did two uniformed police officers.

Not comfortable being in such close proximity with individuals noted for their violent tactics, Fromm attempted to step off the elevator before the doors closed. When he tried stepping off, one man grabbed Fromm and growled at him, with the two uniformed Toronto police officers present,

“You’re not going anywhere. You’re going with us” in what was an obvious threat to kidnap him. He then grabbed Fromm by the throat and started choking him. One of the policemen intervened and attempted to pull the JDL thug off Fromm. The moment the elevator doors opened the fight poured out into the lobby, allowing Fromm to escape, at which point the police were fist-fighting with JDL operatives who served up a stew of vulgar shouts and four-letter words that for obvious reasons of decorum cannot be reprinted here.

At the end of it one officer was slightly injured, and the JDL assailants were arrested by Toronto Metro Police and charged with not only assaulting Fromm and the police officers but also with obstruction of police duties.

Fromm is talking with a lawyer over the possibility of adding attempted kidnapping charges. Since that time Fromm has received harassing phone calls to his home. The incident has received scant coverage in the press, which is careful not to paint the Jewish lobby in Canada unfavorably. The coverage it has received has been slanted and skewed to where it has been characterized as a “confrontation with activists” rather than as an assault by known terrorists.

The hearings into Fromm’s teaching career continue on May 1. Fromm has demanded that the same college requiring his presence at the hearings assure that the safety of his person is provided to prevent a recurrence of the recent events.

In pursuance of revoking his teaching certificate, Fromm is accused of “unbecoming conduct.” During his 24-year teaching career as an English instructor, Fromm had been hailed by Robert Lee, director of education in Peel, Ontario, as “an exemplary teacher” and repeatedly received high commendations on his work.

Fromm’s statement to AFP is unequivocal: “Zionist terrorism has got to stop. Whether it is assassinating Arab leaders in the West Bank and elsewhere, or assaulting and intimidating supporters of free speech, it has to be resisted if civilized society is to prevail.”

This attack comes on the heels of the burning of anti- Zionist Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss’s synagogue in New York City. Folks, the JDL is dangerous and active.
http://americanfreepress.net:80/html/jewish_terror_attack.html
 

 

 

German Lawyer Charged
After Ending Legal Filing With 'Heil Hitler'

Tuesday , March 20, 2007

AP

 

BERLIN — 

German prosecutors on Tuesday charged the former lawyer for far-right activist Ernst Zundel with incitement, accusing her of denying the Holocaust and ending one of her legal filings with "Heil Hitler."

 

Attorney Sylvia Stolz represented Zundel in his first trial, which collapsed after Stolz was banned from proceedings on grounds she was trying to sabotage the proceedings.

Zundel's second trial at the Mannheim state court ended last month with his conviction for incitement for denying the Holocaust. The 67-year-old, who was deported from Canada in 2005 and also once lived in Tennessee, was sentenced to the maximum five years in prison.

Mannheim prosecutors said in a statement that Stolz herself has now been charged with incitement, attempting to thwart a prosecution and using symbols of a banned organization.

During Zundel's trial, Stolz repeatedly disputed the Nazis' mass murder of Jews, called for hatred of the Jewish population and ended a legal document with the words "Heil Hitler," the statement said. The document was freely accessible on the Internet, it added.

Stolz does not deny making the statements or writing "Heil Hitler" on the document. However, she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that while she anticipated she might be charged, it was part of her fight against what she considers an illegitimate government built upon the postwar allied occupation of Germany.

"We are under foreign occupation, and this foreign occupation has portrayed Adolf Hitler as a devil for 60 years, but that is not true," she said. "But the real truth can only be told when someone attempts to break this taboo.

Stolz is also accused of trying to "force an end to the proceedings" with constant interventions and "provocations" that disturbed the conduct of the trial.

The presiding judge halted Zundel's trial last March to ask for Stolz's removal after she denounced the court as a "tool of foreign domination" and described the Jews as an "enemy people" in earlier sessions.

In April, she was carried out of the court room, shouting "Resistance! The German people are rising up," after defying an order for her removal.

Prosecutors said they are seeking a ban on Stolz working as a lawyer.

"This foreign occupation seems threatened and insulted," Stolz said. "So telling the truth is prosecuted for slander and the people who speak the truth are silenced, whether they're attorneys, doctors, engineers or any other profession."

No hearing dates had been set, Stolz said.

 

 

 

From Monsters and Critics.com

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/europe/features/article_1278591.php/Latvia_caught_in_historical_minefield_over_SS_past

Europe Features
Latvia caught in 'historical minefield' over SS past
By Ben Nimmo
Mar 16, 2007, 19:44 GMT


 

Riga - Sixty-two years after the guns of World War II fell silent in Latvia, the country is still bitterly divided over the implications of its bloody and chaotic past.

On March 16, Latvians commemorate the Latvian Legion - a Waffen-SS unit formed by the Nazis in 1943. Some in the Baltic state view its soldiers as patriotic heroes, but others see them as criminals.

'The whole concept of the Legion is a historical minefield. It's far easier to say what it wasn't than what it was,' Matthew Kott, an expert on non-German SS units, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

'It wasn't a Latvian national army, but equally, it wasn't a unit formed primarily to further German racial war aims,' he added.

Latvia's history during WWII is both complex and tragic. The country was occupied by the Soviets in 1940, invaded and occupied by the Nazis in 1941 and re-occupied by the Soviets in 1944.

During the first Soviet occupation, over 15,000 Latvians were deported or executed. As a result, many Latvians viewed the Nazi invasion of 1941 as a liberation, and saw the Legion as a way of fighting back against a worse enemy.

'I volunteered to join the Legion. My family was destroyed by the communists - they shot my father and uncle because they wanted to fight for Latvia,' said former legionary Imants Gravitis.

The Legion was formed in 1943 and served as a combat unit on the Eastern Front. During its two-year existence, over 100,000 Latvians fought in its ranks in Russia, Latvia and Germany.

Many of them were conscripts, a fact acknowledged by the Nuremberg tribunal and the US government, which ruled that the Legion as a whole could not be viewed as an ideologically-based unit.

But within the Legion, a significant number of soldiers were draughted from earlier, volunteer formations. Many of these had been directly involved in massacres across the Eastern Front.

'Not all in the Legion were involved in atrocities, but the Legion came to include those who had been,' Kott said.

For that reason, many observers both in Latvia and abroad view any attempt to honour the Legion as a whitewashing of SS crimes.

'It's hardly likely that anyone today would dare to say that there are only conscripts among the bouquet-carrying old men,' journalist Viktor Matiushenok wrote in Russian-language paper Chas.

'The Latvian-SS Legion should not be glorified nor should its members be considered Latvian heroes. If anything, many of them were criminals who, prior to joining the Legion, committed the crimes of the Holocaust,' added Dr. Ephraim Zuroff, director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center.

But the debate over the Legion's historical role is no longer confined to the historical arena. In the past few years, Latvian far-right groups have regularly demonstrated on March 16 to promote their view of Latvia as a mono-ethnic state.

These ultra-nationalists are numbered in the dozens and have never won more than 1.5 per cent of votes in national elections.

But each year, Russian commentators in both Riga and Moscow say that the events of March 16 show that Latvia is quietly encouraging a 'rebirth of fascism.'

'Six decades after the defeat and condemnation of Nazism, there is every reason to speak of a rebirth of its ideology in an EU member state,' Matiushenok wrote.

The Latvian government has tried in vain to distance itself from events. Last March 16, it ordered that the Freedom Monument be closed to the public, banned all commemorative events and sent over 1,000 police into central Riga to keep order.

The ban was condemned in the constitutional court soon after. This year, the authorities have been reduced to pleading with the public not to become involved.

'I ask Latvian society to evaluate carefully the radical and extremist organizations' real motives, and (their) events, which could be used to divide society, provoke ethnic hatred and damage Latvia's image,' Foreign Minister Artis Pabriks said on Wednesday.

But given the strength of the emotions which the Legion still provokes, not all are willing to heed his call.

'The problem is that there are so many perspectives, and each has its grain of truth... Now (the Legion's history) is being used to heat up social and political tension,' Kott said.

 

© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

© Copyright 2006,2007 by monstersandcritics.com.
This notice cannot be removed without permission.

 

 

 

 

 

Mainstream Revisionism
Horrors Visited On Germany In 1945
The Independent - UK 3-9-7

Is Nazi Germany a fit subject for sympathy?

In the case of individuals caught up in the conflagration of World War II's final days, three recently made films suggest that the answer may be a careful yes.

Paul Verhoeven's Black Book has its Jewish-Dutch resistance heroine falling for the humane SS chief she's sent to spy on.

Steven Soderbergh's The Good German is set in Allied-occupied Berlin in 1945, exploring its morally and physically devastated population, and corrupt US motives as the Cold War looms.

Reg Traviss's Joy Division, most remarkably, ignores the Holocaust, instead following a German boy soldier in 1944 through to his life as a Soviet spy in 1960s London, showing the experience of German civilians as they're bombed by the British and raped by the Russians, and the savagery an uncomprehending 14-year-old Nazi is subjected to.

This shift in perspective has arrived with the 21st century, with the war's reality six decades gone. Anthony Beevor's best-selling 2002 history book Berlin: The Downfall 1945 was one catalyst. It used newly uncovered Soviet documents to detail the Red Army's systematic rape of almost every woman in its path, as it bludgeoned its way through East Prussia towards Hitler's capital. The sheer horror of German civilian suffering, and the despairing heroism of its shattered armies, was impossible to avoid, even as Beevor fought to keep the Nazis' culpability for everything visited on them in view.

British bookshelves have since groaned with similar bestsellers, including Max Hastings's Berlin narrative, Armageddon, and Frederick Taylor's Dresden: February 13, 1945.

Cinema's newly humane view of Nazi Germany's last days began in parallel with this literature. The Austrian documentary Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary (2002) was the beginning, holding its camera on Traudl Junge as she recalled happy teenage days working for kind and funny Adolf Hitler, a man too squeamish to mention the Holocaust or see his country's bombed ruins through his train's blacked-out windows, until the deadly horror of the last days in the bunker, and Junge's subsequent, palpable life-long guilt at not seeing and resisting the nightmare unfolding in front of her.

Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall (2004), in some ways an adaptation of both Blind Spot and Berlin, then dwarfed both in impact. This German film took us into the heart of the Berlin inferno, setting us alongside ragtag German platoons as the Red Army battered them back foot by foot toward's Hitler's lair, and the city became a hellish husk.

It also followed Junge in leading us inside the bunker and making the chief Nazis' evil clammily close, by at last making them human. Magda Goebbels's poisoning of her own children, and Hitler's hurling of Berlin's population into a knowingly futile last stand, gave a fresh angle on Nazi atrocities. In the final scenes of numbed Germans shuffling through the Third Reich's ruins, this international hit also forced audiences in Germany and elsewhere into something like sympathy for the generation that fought for Hitler, even as it renewed our sense of its disgrace.

Hollywood did not follow this lead. Aside from the caricature-Nazis of films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), its own revived interest in World War II has come from Steven Spielberg (also the director of Raiders), with Schindler's List (1993), then Saving Private Ryan (1998) and its television offspring, Band of Brothers. Though the first film's only slightly sentimental version of the Holocaust was valuable for a new generation, subsequent tales of GIs marching through a Europe shorn of political context stimulated only patriotic books and movies, which basked in America's part in what Studs Terkel's 1985 book called The Good War.

Despite the visceral violence of its D-Day scenes, Ryan's values and assumptions were the same as in Hollywood films made during the war. The fact that most anti-Nazi fighting was done by Stalin's Russia, a more efficiently cruel and brutal regime, can't find a place in this commonly held world view, which Hollywood did so much to construct. Of course, there have been previous British and American attempts to see humanity in their beaten enemies, notably Sam Fuller's anti-Nazi B-movie Verboten! (1958) and Carol Reed's The Man Between (1953), both set in Germany immediately after the war, when the suffering of millions of the country's refugees and its place in Cold War power plays with Russia were well understood. Reed's footage of the icy, burnt-out Berlin that Downfall recreates, and its orphan children, is especially unforgettable.

It is this morally grey world that Steven Soderbergh's The Good German returns to, becoming the first mainstream US film to attempt a new, radical perspective.

Based on Joseph Kanon's bestselling novel and starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire, it is very much in Third Man territory, with black marketeers, a missing German being hunted by both sides of the just-starting Cold War, and the Holocaust hanging over it all. Opening here in March, its title alone promises the ambiguity and nuance now entering perspectives on the war.

Black Book, Verhoeven's grand return to the Netherlands after time in Hollywood making films such as Basic Instinct, is in some ways a more traditional World War II movie, a rip-roaring adventure tale of the Dutch resistance in the final months of Nazi occupation. But Verhoeven, who was a child at the time and has worked on the script for 20 years, is not content just to show Dutch heroism: he vividly remembers seeing corpses of Nazi victims left lying in the street.

Black Book shows Nazi atrocities, especially against Dutch Jews, in unswerving detail. But its Jewish heroine and an SS chief with human foibles also fall in love, and the Dutch treatment of both at war's end is vicious. Influenced by a Dutch revisionist history book, Chris van der Heyden's Grijs Verleden (2001), it is Verhoeven's corrective to his own popular tale of Dutch resistance heroics, Soldier of Orange (1977). "I wanted to show what reality was like then," he has said. "Not black and white, but in shades of grey. That is what makes our film so provocative. Nobody has yet shown how we treated our prisoners in 1945."

But it is Traviss's low-budget British film, Joy Division that is perhaps the most daring of all. Heavily influenced by Beevor's Berlin, it interweaves narrative strands from the 1940s, '50s and '60s, to show the eventual moral awakening of a Hitler Youth boy turned Soviet spy. Early scenes, of its hero as a 14-year-old brownshirt in puppy love with his blonde neighbour, give way to his immersion in desperate streetfighting as the Red Army enters East Prussia, where its planes strafe refugees and his girlfriend is gang-raped. Captured by Russians, the Cold War continues his moral numbing. But it is the scenes of German suffering, with no alleviating context of Nazi aggression or atrocity, that are challenging and powerful. "It was a big script originally, with Polish Jews and a concentration camp survivor in early drafts," Traviss tells me. "In the final version, you don't see the Wehrmacht rushing east, you don't see the Holocaust, which I regret. But that knowledge is assumed. We're focusing on something that hasn't been seen before: from our perspective, the darker side of the war, where troops of our allies were not heroic. Of course there is truth in the idea the Russians committed atrocities in revenge. But there's also a dark side to human nature.

"And if you're mobilising an army over someone's border, and there's no defence, just women and kids, then that army's dark side may come too. I don't think all those civilians could be held accountable for the Third Reich's crimes. The teenage characters especially had just been born when Hitler came to power. They're innocent."

Traviss has a simple answer to why this new perspective is gaining ground. "Anthony Beevor talked about how enough time had passed to write books like his, and predicted that films would be next. And apart from the humanist aspect of wanting to understand such suffering, the war has been a huge part of popular culture as well, with films like The Dirty Dozen."

As a genre, after Spielberg's late-'90s realist approach, what could be next? "Well, the end of the war hadn't really been done. The search for stories is endless. And now filmmakers have found 1945, and found it's much richer than that Dirty Dozen stuff."

All these films are on delicate ground, trodden carefully for 60 years because no one wants to let Nazi horrors become just another bit of history, to be debated or forgotten. But in showing a fuller picture, of humanity and atrocity on both sides, they may teach truer lessons than the simple story of the Good War that Hollywood has told until now.

The Good German opened nationally on March 8. The Black Book will be released later this year.

 

 

 

OPEN LETTER about Revisionism
in the Light of Anti-Imperialism

27th February, 2007
OPEN LETTER TO
Mr. Terry Sweetman
Columnist of the Sunday Mail
Brisbane/Australia
 
Dear Sir,
 
                Re.: Your article “Dancing with Holocaust-deniers” by Terry Sweetman, in The Sunday
                        Mail, 18th February, 2007, Pg. 55
                        http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,,21242685-27197,00.html
 
In your above-named  article you claim that Richard Krege is a Neo-Nazi-Activist.  Where is your evidence to this? Instead of this, you come just with dodgy shonky journalism. You have apparently not yet discovered,  that most of the Revisionists come from a left-leaning back-ground.  So was the Father of modern Revisionism, nobody else then the Buchenwald-Dora concentration-camp-survivor and former French Resistance-fighter Prof. Paul Rassinier. See following article about him: http://www.ihr.org/books/hoggan/A5.html
 
 
 
Read about the former French Communist Garaudy on:
 
Read about the Australian Friend of Humanity Mr. Peter Myers:
 
Also Communists like the North American Committee Against Zionism & Imperialism (NACAZAI) are going to research the validity of Revisionism on a fair basis.
 
Prof. Dr. Faurisson was a left-liberal high-degree French University - Professor who was commissioned by the French government to proof on the basic of the available holocaust-literature and witness-statements, that the Holocaust is a deed. Yet Prof. Dr. Faurisson found that their documentations were un-logical, had faults and contradictions etc..  Because of his findings the government and the Jews turned against him and he was branded an anti-Semite as seen hereto:
 
 
Recently in Australia, the Philo - Jewish  high-flying top-journalist Philip Adams was attacked by the Jews in Australia for his support of the Jewish Nuclear-Scientist Vanunu and against the Israeli – Apartheid –State’s Weapons of Mass-Destructions.  So if you still have not learned your lesson, that you are not allowed to criticize the Jews without being branded a Racist, Neo-Nazi and Anti-Semite, then you might be also either very ignorant or  you are a fanatical partial Philo-Jew and Zionist!
You might get really interested to know who the real racial Hate-Mongers of Australia are! You will find them on the following Web-Site:
 
 
Engineer Krege's hobby is historical Revisionism and the related Science of Forensics. His ground-penetrating radar investigations and - findings of the alleged execution-grave-yards of Treblinka do not support the idea that a Holocaust happened there. Here you can check on his findings:
Treblinka investigation-video:
 
Also: Search for “Treblinka investigation-video” on:
 
Comments to this investigation on:
 
 
 
Ground -Penetrating Radar is used by Forensic Police-Squads world-wide to find murdered  hidden  buried dead bodies and is in contrast to the false memory-syndrome of former camp-inmates an exact science. But why don't you organize  a team of forensic experts with radar-ground-penetrating apparatus and do your own examination at the alleged execution-grave-yards of Treblinka.
 
Moreover, why do you link Pauline Hanson with Mr. Krege’s investigations-results? On the Inverell Forum, in which Mrs. Hanson and Mr. Krege will participate, all political incorrect and other views are allowed. Even Nutritionists like Mr. Rob McIntyre and former ALP-member and –Unionist Mr. Phil Tzavellas had their go there! Last year famous left-wing film-maker Mr. David Bradbury B.A. presented his latest Anti-War-Film which exposed the use of depleted Uranium by US-Allied-Forces in Iraq at the Inverell Forum.  There was also a bloke who collected donations for the victims of the depleted Uranium-weapons in Iraq, mainly children. You want to know really all about the Inverell Forum, then go onto their web-site hereto:
 
 
What is documented in painful details in Nazi-Records is, that less than 150.000 deaths, caused through epidemics, of Auschwitz-Inmates were recorded in the Auschwitz-Death-Books, which are in possession of the International Red Cross. The International Red Cross inspected all of the German Concentration-Camps on a regular basis and never mentioned anything about gassings or extermination in their visiting-reports. Will you argue and say that the International Red Cross was collaborating with the Nazis, was a Nazi-accomplice or is a Holocaust-Denier? See the evidence hereto:
 
 
Most of your Holocaust-Survivors stated, that Zyklon-B--gas-pellets were dropped to the ground of the gas-chambers of Auschwitz through pipe-lines within the concrete-pillars of the gas-chambers.
This alleged pipe-lines do not exist! Why not? Because Dr. F. Toeben M.Ed. Ph.D, who also was a trained- and qualified Rhodesian Police-man inspected the above-named concrete-pillars of the alleged-gas-chamber and presented the photo-evidence (showing no pipelines within  the concrete-pillars) on the Internet. That fact discredits your Holo-Hoax witnesses! Here convince yourself and see 3.5 Mortuary I, Krema II – problem with cremation time on:
 
Again, why don't you go and check these pillars in Auschwitz on your own.  One of your high-degree key-witness of the Nuremberg Trials, Prof. Vrba virtually admitted during the Zuendel-Trials in Toronto (Canada) 1988, that he told a lie about Auschwitz at the Nuremberg Trials. There were also witnesses who stated that no gassings took place at Auschwitz. But these witnesses were always conveniently kept away from testifying to the public, weren't they. So how trustworthy are your Holo-Hoax-Witnesses.  See information to this on:
 
Your Government put Australians of German, Italian and other Axis-Power-descendants into concentration-camps here in Australia and New Zealand. Some were even German- and Italian Jews. A lot of them died in those Concentration-Camps. As your argument is always, that even one dead was to much, will you finally admit that a Holocaust was perpetrated on Australian- and New Zealand's soil or will you deny it?
 
It is your obsession that Holocaust-Deniers are Nazis. But what your ilk in your smear-campaigns have not realized is, that even WW II Australian-Ex-Service-men like Mr. Alex McClelland, who was also a concentration-camp-survivor, came to the conclusion, that there was nothing else than a Holo-Hoax. See his web-site:
 
Now my dear Mr. Sweetman, I like to reveal to you that I was like you an Anti-Vietnam-War protester in the end of the sixties and early seventies and I became a consciousness war objector. My search for the origins of wars let me come to the conclusion, that the same ilk which is responsible for today's wars in the Middle-East was also responsible for the Vietnam-War, the Korean Wars, WW 2 and WW 1.
I agree for example fully with Jewish Writer Dr. Henry Makow, that Hitler did not want WW 2.. See Dr. Makow’s writings to this hereto:
 
Furthermore Jewish Writer Anton Chaitkin has written as a co-writer about the US-Financiers of Adolf Hitler in the biography of G. Bush senior, which you can find on following web-site:
Mr. Anton Chaitkin is the son of Jewish Adviser Jacob Chaitkin who had led a boycott against the Nazis during the 1930’s and had successfully sued the Wall Street partners of the Nazi-Government on behalf of American bondholders.  This is mentioned in the obituary of his daughter Mrs. Marianne Wertz on following web-site:
 
Like Dr. Makow and Mr. Chaitkin, I do believe that these deranged International Financial Warmongers have to be taken under protection immediately by the people, because the latest catastrophic wars in the Middle East show, that because of no available medicine, they are not able to be rehabilitated, and just wait for their next war-adventure. These deranged International Financial Warmongers are the problem and not people like Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler. It was nobody else than the Adviser to US-Presidents Mr. Bernard Baruch (Jew) who said:
“All Wars are Economic in Origin”
Study more to this on:
 
 
 
Thirty years ago I was in the same spirit as was Attorney Horst Mahler, the former leader of the German None-Parliamentarian Opposition and co-founder of the Red-Army-Faction. As a High-Degree Lawyer whose political companions were also the former Chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schroeder and German Minister of Interior, Mr. Schily, he woke up to the Holo-Hoax and made following statement about the Nuremberg Trials:
 
 
 
What you forget is, that the Nazis are Socialist and they were also against the Vietnam-War. They have even today connections to Vietnam, Palestine and Iraq. Their view and Hitler's view about race was propagandized as racial hatred, another Allied-Illuminati-Zionist lie. What you do not know is that Hitler had no choice with the Jews, when they declared war against him:
 
But the truth is that the Nazis like the Green Left for example support the Palestinian and Iraqi people in their struggle against US-British-Zionist Imperialism. And when you go onto their Web-Site you will see that they even have admiration for President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro of Cuba:
 
 
 
And that works for me as a former young Communist who became a Free Thinker. I rather move with them, than with these stinking Anti-Australian Arse-lickers of Zionist Mr. Bush and Zionist Mr. Blair, your so-called honest Zionist John alias Harry Potter sen.,  and that semi honest Zionist Kevin alias Harry Potter jun.!
 
With best regards,
 
Yours sincerely
 
Paul Walters

 

Virtuous Leaders or War Criminals?

by Chris Leithner
 

 

Charles Munger is so deeply sceptical about the human condition, wrote Roger Lowenstein in Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996), that Warren Buffett has called him "the abominable no-man." A tenet of Munger’s approach to investing – and to life in general – is constantly to ask what can and likely will go awry. "Invert, always invert," said the mathematician Carl Jacobi, and for decades Munger has faithfully applied this maxim. Invited to address high school graduands, he did not laud the habits and qualities that would promote health, wealth and wisdom; instead, he denigrated those that would ensure emotional penury and material misery. In effect, he counselled his young audience "If you don’t do the things I’m going to talk about, then chances are you’ll be just fine." More whimsically, he once wondered aloud where he would die "so that I never go there."

Clearly, to "invert, always invert" is to mitigate the downside and let the upside take care of itself. It is also to see things from another person’s point of view; and a particularly illuminating way is to consider a contentious situation from the perspective of an opponent or adversary. If we can avoid harming others, or offer amends to those whom we inadvertently harm, then we lessen their incentive to hurt us; and if we can make habits of civility and neighbourliness, we will likely reduce some of the misfortune that life routinely tosses into our paths. Umbrage and hatred seem to flourish longest and deepest among people who have lost – or never possessed – the capacity to empathise with those whom they have harmed, and also among the people who have retained the capacity to remember the harm they have suffered. How to avoid injuring others? We become more inclined to treat other people as we would want them to treat us, and thereby to increase the chances that we enjoy their goodwill, when we try to see their situation, predicament or grievance through their spectacles. A good way to avoid unintended consequences, and to mitigate what might go awry and return to haunt us, is to walk in others’ shoes.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, seemed to be thinking along these lines when he said "If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country … We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler and Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?" (See also John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy).

Alas, Ben-Gurion did not seem to be "inverting" when he declared "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Even more regrettably, this apparent lack of compassion for people other than his own also spread further afield. In 1948, the year the State of Israel was founded, he declared "We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai" (see Michel Bar-Zohar, The Armed Prophet: A Biography of Ben-Gurion, Barker, 1967).

Viewing things from an unaccustomed, unconventional or unpopular angle often helps to understand them more thoroughly, appreciate their worth and acknowledge their flaws. It thereby promotes humility and inoculates against narrow-mindedness and intransigence. "Inversion" does not necessarily corrode one’s principles; still less does it inevitably overturn them. Yet once in a great while, it triggers a fundamental alteration of outlook. But because it is so emotionally difficult – indeed, because something akin to the Stockholm Syndrome usually prevails – people go to extraordinary lengths to avoid reappraisals of their rulers. Perhaps that is why so few Australians, for example, think seriously about how their rulers’ policies affect people in other countries. After all, foreign lands are usually distant and unfamiliar; there are only so many hours in the day to inform oneself about them; and other matters, from mortgage rates to petrol prices, seem to be more pressing. Accordingly, are not such specialised matters best left to the anointed experts in Canberra, the universities, think tanks and editorial pages? And surely the motives of Australian politicians and their Anglo-American masters are unimpeachable?

But shortages of time do not provide very satisfactory explanations of this general abandonment of the classical liberal virtue of vigilance. It is clear to anybody who opens his eyes that the policies of the Western political class routinely create messes and disasters at home: so why on earth should they foment anything other than chaos and misery abroad? Alas, few of the ruled ask this question. Instead, many avert their eyes and blindly accept what their rulers tell them about foreigners and far-off parts of the world. Why? Perhaps because if they saw things from the point of view of people at the receiving end of Western governments’ foreign policies, an awful truth would stare them in the face: during and since the Second World War, some celebrated Western "leaders," particularly American and British, have, by the standards employed at Nuremberg, qualified as war criminals.

 

As an example, consider Harry S Truman. Ralph Raico, in "Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution," concludes "the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was." To say the least, America’s most senior military men, including Dwight Eisenhower, Ernest King, Douglas MacArthur, Chester Nimitz and Carl Spaatz, expressed deep reservations about the bombings – and to say the most, they condemned them as pitiless, spiteful and unnecessary. The assessment of Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, was typical: "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan … My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

In his memoirs, entitled I Was There (McGraw-Hill, 1950), Leahy compared the use of the atomic bomb to the treatment of civilians by Genghis Khan, and termed it "not worthy of Christian man." Truman himself eventually regretted his decision. In a private letter written just before he left the White House, he referred to the dropping of the bomb as "murder," and concluded that it "is far worse than gas and biological warfare because it affects the civilian population and murders them wholesale" (see Barton J. Bernstein, "Origins of the U.S. Biological Warfare Program," in Preventing a Biological Arms Race, MIT Press, 1990; John Denson, "The Hiroshima Myth"; Gary Kohls, "Whitewashing Hiroshima: The Uncritical Glorification of American Militarism"; and Ralph Raico, "Rethinking Churchill," particularly Part V).

What Is a War Crime, Anyway?

A war crime is a general label used to describe one of three specific crimes enumerated and described in Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT). Immediately after the end of the Second World War, the governments of the "Big Four" (i.e., the U.S.A., Soviet Union, Britain and France) established the IMT in order to prosecute the leaders of National Socialist Germany and its allies. The Tribunal’s Charter, published on 8 August 1945 (ironically, shortly after the nuclear explosion at Hiroshima and just hours before the second detonation at Nagasaki), declared in Article 6: "The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility":

  1. "Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing." In plain English, to invade a nation that has never threatened you and does not presently threaten you is a crime against peace.
  2. "War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.
  3. "Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated."

Article 6 warns: "Leaders, organisers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan." Section 7 states "The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment." And Section 8 cautions: "The fact that the defendant acted pursuant [to an order of a superior] shall not free him from responsibility …"

At a series of trials at Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945–49, these criteria were used to try more than 100 defendants. At the most important trial, of the top surviving leaders of Hitler’s government and military, twenty-two men were indicted on one or more of the charges listed in Article 6. Nineteen were convicted and three acquitted. Of those found guilty, twelve were sentenced to death by hanging, three to life in prison and four to terms of imprisonment ranging from ten to twenty years. No appeals were permitted, and the last surviving convict, Rudolf Hess, died at Spandau Prison in Berlin in 1989.

In late 1946, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted Resolution 95 (1), affirming The Principles of International Law Recognised in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal. In this and other respects, the premises, process, results and precedents of the Nuremberg Tribunal form cornerstones of civilised international behaviour.

The Trouble with Victors’ Justice

The Nuremberg Tribunal explicitly prohibited tu quoque ("you did it too!") defences – hardly a surprise, given that it rendered victors’ justice. The prosecuting powers sought to obscure the inconvenient fact that during the war their civilian and military leaders, as well as a few of their officers and enlisted men, had issued and obeyed orders that fell well short of the standards imposed upon Hitler’s henchmen. This prohibition set a bad precedent. Surely justice, if it is worthy of the name, cannot be restricted to particular times, places and people? That is, if the invasion of Poland was a crime against peace when Adolf Hitler and high-ranking German officers and diplomats planned and executed it in 1939, then (to cite but one example) surely the invasion of Iraq, when planned and committed in 2001–2003 by George W. Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard and their military and diplomatic subordinates, is no less a crime against peace?

Apparently not – or, at any rate, few Americans, Australians and Britons believe that their leaders could contemplate, let alone commit, such crimes. But if one peruses the public record and considers how Anglo-American governments have planned and conducted military actions, then time after time one encounters prima facie evidence that certain of their politicians, bureaucrats, senior military officers and a few soldiers and airmen have committed crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity as defined by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945.

In light of the voluminous evidence that now crowds the public domain, a case can be made that in 2001–2003 American, British and Australian leaders and their military and civilian advisers engaged in or acquiesced to the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression." It was obvious at the time (see in particular Justin Raimondo, "The Lying Game," 7 February 2003), and today is as plain as the nose on one’s face, that neither Saddam Hussein nor the Iraqi military posed any threat to America, Australia or Britain. The many revelations by former insiders, coupled with the Downing Street Memo, Lewis Libby indictment and numerous other sources, leave little doubt that these insiders intentionally deceived their own citizens and the world in order to invade a country that did not threaten them.

Accordingly, and by the precedent set at Nuremberg, the misleading and ever-changing rationales uttered before, during and after the invasion exonerate nobody. Nor does the evasive special pleading uttered after the fact ("we acted on the best information available," Mr Howard has bleated repeatedly since the WMDs failed to materialise). To invade a country that has neither the means nor the intention to attack you – whether or not the invaders know it when they plan and execute their invasion – is a crime against peace. As Murray Rothbard put it in The Ethics of Liberty, "It is important to insist, however, that the threat of aggression be palpable, immediate, and direct; in short, that it be embodied in the initiation of an overt act. Any remote or indirect criterion – any ‘risk’ or ‘threat’ – is simply an excuse for invasive action by the supposed ‘defender’ against the alleged ‘threat.’" Whether waged by Nazis or neocons, a "pre-emptive" war is necessarily a crime against peace. The ironic and rather pathetic fact that between 1991 and 2003 Saddam Hussein was the only person who spoke truth to power about WMDs in Iraq speaks volumes about the determination of Western politicians and their lackeys to twist information in order to indulge their inflexible prejudices.

Moreover, and again in the light of the massive and growing body of evidence available to anybody prepared to consider it, it appears that American and British politicians and bureaucrats (and some military personnel obeying their orders) have committed "violations of the laws or customs of war," including "murder . . . of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war . . . plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity." Acts that seem to fit this description have occurred at Falluja, Haditha, Mahmoudiya, Samarra, Tikrit, the Abu Ghraib Prison and other locations.

These incidents, it is reasonable to assume, are not isolated. Inevitably and by its very nature, war, occupation, insurgency and counter-insurgency breed atrocities (see, for example, "Beyond My Lai: New Revelations of Vietnam Atrocities" by Jon Wiener). Accordingly, when neoconservatives babble their despicable blather (i.e., "we must not cut and run," "we must stay the course," etc.), their use of the pronoun "we" is disingenuous. What they really demand is that somebody else must continue the destruction of faraway places and the murder of anonymous people. Equally deceitful is their invocation of a bogus and moronic "war on terror" and vast exaggeration of "the terrorist threat" (which, as Leithner Letter 33 shows, is in probabilistic terms actually quite trivial). Hence an inconvenient question for the foreign policy interventionists: if pleas of military necessity did not excuse leading Nazis, then how can the alleged imperatives of a war on terror excuse the Three Amigos and their subordinates?

The parallels are troubling. In the dock at Nuremberg, did Hermann Göring not plead that concentration camps were necessary in order to preserve order and stability? Did he not say, "It was a question of removing danger"? Göring also shed disturbing light upon the political tricks that demented shepherds use to frighten their docile flocks into the false belief they need more regulations, services and protection. During his trial, he mused to an interviewer "Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship" (see Gustave Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, DaCapo Press, 1995).

A Grave Responsibility Mocked and a Desperate Effort Repudiated

Today, more than three years after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein, many Westerners have mostly forgotten (if, indeed, they ever knew them) the transgressions of this war, its 1990–1991 predecessor and the many others that preceded them. They don’t "invert" – that is, see things from others’ points of view – because, by and large, they have convinced themselves that their rulers are right and just and others’ are wrong and crazed. Hence it never occurs to them that their politicians, in their name, commit war crimes; and they respond with indifference, denial or even hostility to the proposition that today’s crop of Western politicians, like their predecessors at Versailles, are creating conditions under which extremists thrive.

Since 2003, much mainstream coverage and commentary about the second war against Iraq has focussed first upon the failure to send enough troops to pacify the country; and then upon the decision to disband Saddam’s army without training a new one; and more recently upon the failure to crush the insurgency and foresee the appalling communal violence; and now upon the highhandedness, incompetence, cruelty and utter pointlessness of the occupation. But little analysis has pondered the legal questions arising from this and previous aggressions. The UN’s Secretary-General has put his view in an unusually blunt fashion. In September 2004, Kofi Annan told the BBC: "the US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that contravened the UN Charter."

If so, then the question arises: should Anglo-American politicians and their top civilian and military aides be prosecuted for their repeated violations over the years of the very laws devised in order to punish Nazis after the Second World War? Do the precedents established at Nuremberg apply to American and British officials? Or are they somehow exempt from the principles that their predecessors invoked? If not, why shouldn’t Bush, Blair, Howard and their inner circle be tried for the many deaths and untold misery their policies have caused?

If, on the same basis the Big Four employed to try Nazis at Nuremberg, the leading members of the American, Australian and British governments and armed forces were tried for actions taken in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in recent years, they might well be convicted (see Anwaar Hussein, "Dust Off the Nuremberg Files"; Michael Mandel, "Nuremberg Lesson for Iraq War: It’s Murder"; and Michael Gaddy, "The Ghosts of Nuremberg"). In his Opening Address at Nuremberg, Justice Robert Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court began with these words: "The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility." Alas, during the intervening years, Western politicians have mocked and debased this responsibility to such an extent that Nuremberg principles are today little more than rhetorical devices uttered on ceremonial occasions. So the Three Amigos need not worry. Apparently, these principles apply only to captured thugs from Balkan or Third World countries.

Yet reading the Nuremberg transcript, it is clear that all who were accused of crimes, from the humblest foot soldier to the highest and mightiest civilian and military leader, were considered responsible for their actions. In particular, the leaders and henchmen who initiated aggression were assigned primary criminal responsibility. None of the subsequent crimes would have been committed if the primary aggression – that is, the crime against peace – had not occurred. On 12 August 1945, Justice Jackson stated the objective of the American prosecution: "If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoner’s dock rather than the way to honours, we will have accomplished something toward making the peace more secure. … We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it."

Justice Jackson’s subsequent statements concerning the Nazi leadership in the dock go to the heart of the matter: "These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with the agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war. … We have here the surviving top politicians, militarists, financiers, diplomats, administrators and propagandists of the Nazi movement. Who was responsible for these crimes if they were not?"

On 1 October 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal delivered its judgement. Three Amigos, are you listening? "To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole … Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities; and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced." Had Bush, Blair and Howard not unleashed their aggression, then tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, thousands of American and hundreds of British and other military personnel would be alive today. Hence Justice Jackson’s last sentence of his closing statement applies to contemporary Anglo-American leaders as much as it did to the Germans on trial at the time: "If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime."

Justice Jackson’s words thus prompt one to wonder: how would he assess the legal basis of the Three Amigos’ decision to wage their unprovoked war? Neoconservatives would do well to remember his injunction: "Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling these grievances or for altering these conditions." And those who cannot visualise American, Australian and British defendants in a war crimes trial should also ponder Justice Jackson’s words: "Let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn, aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment … This trial represents mankind’s desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world’s peace and to commit aggression against the rights of their neighbours."

Sixty years later, it is clear that this desperate effort has failed. Ignore their babble: the Three Amigos are above any law and accountable to nobody. How on earth can this be? How can it be otherwise? The "leaders" of welfare-warfare states are nothing more than, and have never been anything more than, the chiefs of criminal gangs (see Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, New York University Press, 1998). They are not protectors: they are predators. Further, major political parties (Liberal-National coalition versus Labor in Australia, Labour v. Conservative in Britain, etc.) are not separate entities offering distinct policies; instead, they are simply appendages of a single welfare-warfare party. They are, to use Butler Schaffer’s apt analogy, wings of the same bird of prey. Those who have yet to encounter – much less absorb – this self-evident truth cling ferociously to the fairy tale of the benevolent state. Accordingly, confronted with the evidence that some of their "statesmen" are better described as war criminals, they reply either with denial or vitriol.

Contempt of Criminality and Obedience to God

In the world of business, finance and investments, Charles Munger constantly asks what can and likely will go awry. Applied to rulers and their policies of welfare and warfare, the rule is: whether at home or abroad, interventionism creates unintended consequences; and these consequences inevitably worsen the very problems that the interventions allegedly sought to resolve. What, then, to do? A first step is to disengage. In the absence of compelling reasons to the contrary, regard anything uttered by any politician – and certainly any Anglo-American politician – as an evasion, distortion, delusion or outright fabrication. Don’t believe them when they assert, in effect, that they can wave a magic wand and give you something (be it "security" or "quality healthcare" or "affordable childcare" or low interest rates or cheap petrol) for nothing. And ignore their vilifications of people in far-away places: if you have no reason to meddle there, then what grounds have your rulers?

Why can’t you believe the wicked priests of the welfare-warfare caste? Jim Henley, in his blog Unqualified Offerings (3 February 2003), answers this question tartly:

Because they lie. Routinely and often and deliberately. They said there were 100,000 people in mass graves in Kosovo. That was a lie. They said Iraqi soldiers were tossing babies out of incubators. That was a lie. They said Iraqi troops in 1991 were massing on the Saudi border. That was a lie. They said Saddam’s attack on Kuwait was a total surprise. That was a lie. They said US troops had no combat role in Central America in the 1980s. That was a lie.

Right through the Gulf War, I believed that sh**. By the time of Kosovo, I knew better. I’m 42 years old, I knew the Middle East existed before September 11, 2001, and if today’s bunch sounds like a lot of previous bunches that turned out to be full of crap, my conclusion is that this bunch is full of crap too.

Today, neoconservative politicians scream that Hezbollah, Syria and Iran are "threats to Western security." These assertions, too, are bald-faced lies (see, for example, Justin Raimondo, The Lying Game Revisited). Another is that "they hate us for what we are." The truth is that the victims of interventionism hate Western politicians’ relentless aggression, and the death and destruction that it invariably generates. It is flatly wrong, in other words, to insist that suicide attacks at Bali, London, Madrid, New York and Washington, etc., have been conducted by "Islamofascists" engaged in a religious onslaught against the secular West (see in particular Our Fascism, and Theirs by Justin Raimondo). Instead, "suicide-terrorist attacks are not so much driven by religion as by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide terrorist campaign – over 95% of all incidents – has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw" (see Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Random House, 2005). Suicide attacks, in short, are not a consequence of religious extremism: they are a response to political extremism – namely Western aggression and interventionism. Suicide attacks occur over here because our politicians meddle so brutally over there.

The good news, in Pape’s words, is that "The history of the last 20 years shows that once the [occupation forces] withdraw from the homeland of the terrorists, [the suicide attacks] often stop – and stop on a dime." If so, then the bad news is that the more our politicians intervene over there, the more the suicide bombers will retaliate over here. The Three Amigos’ alleged cure for terrorism is actually a cause of terrorism. Memo to politicians: Do you truly want to prevent suicide bombings? Then stop your aggression and invasions, withdraw the troops and renounce interventionism (see also Patrick Buchanan, "Why Are They Killing Us?").

The truth is that today’s neoconservative lies are simply the latest in a long series of statist lies. Anglo-American politicians have repeatedly manipulated their subjects into war. These wars created unintended consequences; and the next batch of politicians treated these consequences with more interventions, more deceptions – and more war. Woodrow Wilson, for example, lied America into the Great War (see Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I, Basic Books, 2003); and Wilson’s war, which he glorified as "The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy," became, in terms of its effects, "The War That Made the World Safe for Fascism." Similarly, Franklin Roosevelt bamboozled America into the Second World War (see Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II, Basic Books, 2001). FDR’s war, allegedly fought to defend and promote The Four Freedoms, became "The War That Made the World Safe for Communism." And so too the Bushies: they have lied repeatedly and shamelessly about Afghanistan and Iraq, and it appears that their aggressions will become known as "The Wars That Made the World Safe for Christian, Jewish and Islamic Extremism."

London’s Lord Mayor, "Red" Ken Livingston, one of the few politicians who seems to know that there are no traffic problems, only insufficiently clearly specified property rights, offered these wise words when asked what motivated the attacks in New York, Washington, London and elsewhere:

I think you’ve just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands … We’ve propped up unsavoury governments, we’ve overthrown ones we didn’t consider sympathetic. And I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s … the Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan. They didn’t give any thought to the fact that once he’d done that he might turn on his creators … If at the end of the First World War we had done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free and have their own governments, and kept out of Arab affairs, and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect [attacks by Muslim extremists in retaliation against the attacks of Western extremists] wouldn’t have arisen.

What to do? Secondly, respect history. That is, understand the course of events that has led to this sorry juncture, and extrapolate where the actions that have created it, if they continue, will lead. For the past century, America’s foreign relations can best be characterised as a series of subterfuges for empire-building (see in particular Ivan Eland, The Empire Has No Clothes, The Independent Institute, 2004); and for the past half-century, the foreign relations of countries like Australia, Britain and Canada have comprised little more than the running of fools’ errands for Uncle Sam. The trouble with meddling in foreign lands, in addition to the misery, death and destruction it wreaks upon its victims, is that it extinguishes liberty at home. And the trouble with overt imperialism is epitomised in a question that preoccupied Thucydides and Livy, absorbed America’s Founders and will likely overwhelm today’s political caste in Washington: when does empire corrupt and bankrupt a once-great republic beyond the point of no return? (See also Laurence Kotlikoff’s must-read Is the United States Bankrupt?).

The point for foreigners is that Anglo-American politicians have no right to dictate to the world and remake it in their image. The point for Americans is that by dictating to the world they cease to be the Americans in the sense that Thomas Jefferson understood that term – and Benjamin Franklin rightly feared would disappear within a century. For Americans and non-Americans alike, the extinction of Jeffersonian America is a sad loss.

Interventionist foreign policies, in short, breed war; and war spawns more interventionism. War, as Randolph Bourne famously put it, "is the health of the state." To advocate war is to promote big government; and to promote big government is to endorse failed programs. So make no mistake: war is just another failed government program. Given this insight, what will the "war on terror" achieve? Much killing, vast destruction of property and liberty, and growing hatred: it will, in other words, benefit the anointed and harm the benighted. Grieving the death of his only son during the war to end all wars, in 1919 Rudyard Kipling wrote "if any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied." The same point applies to the Americans, Australians, Britons, Canadians, Dutch and others mired pointlessly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Peace will not come until Western and particularly Anglo-American politicians abandon what they arrogantly believe is their birthright – the treatment of the Arab and Muslim world like a pawn on a chessboard, drawing its boundaries, making and breaking incompatible promises, occasionally invading it and constantly meddling in its affairs, and establishing and supporting puppets that oppress local populations. At various points during the twentieth century, particularly at Versailles and during the 1920s, Western politicians did little that mitigated – and much that encouraged – the rise of extremism. Today, they are doing exactly the same thing. A just peace can come only if politicians stop creating a state of affairs in which extremists thrive. Given their past and present form, a long time will pass before they come to their senses. In the mean time, countries like Australia, Britain and Canada should indeed adhere strictly to a staunchly pro-American policy. But it must be "pro-American" in the proper historical sense of that term – one, alas, that is alien to the best and brightest in Canberra, Ottawa and Westminster. As Amir Butler expresses it in an outstanding article, Australia Must Follow Washington – George Washington, that is.

What to do? Thirdly and above all, Christians must abandon their moral relativism (whereby it’s OK when Christians kill Muslims over there, but it’s not OK if Muslims kill Christians over here) and worship of and craven submission to the state. They must recognise the strict limits of their duty towards the state (see in particular David Lipscomb’s "Civil Government: Its Origin, Mission, and Destiny, and the Christian’s Relation to It," Michael Rozeff’s "Christians and Libertarians," Teresa Whitehurst’s "Why Are Some American Christians So Bloodthirsty?" and Leithner Letter 59). Lipscomb presents a biblical view of a voluntary society. He refutes the fantasy that governments are created for "the public good," and demonstrates that peace, progress and civilisation do not and cannot depend upon the state. If Christians participate in politics, they necessarily mock the Ten Commandments. Instead, they should persuade people to renounce the use of force – in all its forms, including taxation – embrace God and emulate the Carpenter of Nazareth.

Christians should pray that their earthly rulers rule justly. But they must not glorify them, and still less should they bomb and kill for them. What happens when Christians turn their backs to God and hail Caesar? Consider the words from 1 Samuel (8:11–18):

This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plough his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to mak