by Sean Jobst
May 18, 2011
There is an impending effort to bring Libyan leader Muammar al-Qadhafi to “justice” at the International Tribunal for his “crimes against humanity.” Yet far from being actual outrages, what these buzz-words reveal is the blatant hypocrisy and double standards of those who would selectively cry crocodile tears whenever it suits them.
Those standing in judgement had no problem with his human rights abuses in the past, when they were dealing with him and giving him weapons up to the time of their intervention. And even aside from his crimes, these are the same leaders who are currently occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, killing civilians with drones in Pakistan, turning a blind eye to human rights abuses by their favored regimes in Yemen and Bahrain, and as always supporting Israel in all its crimes.
Such “war crimes” tribunals are nothing but the weapon of the powerful over the weak. It is a manner through which the rich and powerful can impose their will upon the weak, while justifying their own actions with a thin veneer of humanitarianism. Victors make the laws and violate them, while using them as rhetorical weapons against the weak and to impose their will upon the vanquished.
History truly repeats itself in the same way that the victors of Nuremberg and Tokyo convened the spectacle of putting the defeated leaders on trial, even while the ones sitting from a moral pedestal of judging included those who committed atrocities in Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki – and elsewhere in indiscriminate bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan. The ones doing the judging are often the most guilty of those crimes themselves, or at the very least the scope of their crimes either equals or even exceeds those of the vanquished.
“If the population of a State has been given exclusively propaganda to the effect that the war was not political, but for moral, humanitarian, legal, scientific and other reasons, this population will regard the end of the war as the beginning of unlimited opportunities of oppressing the population of the former enemy State. Moral propaganda thus stands forth in its nakedness — in the 20th century it is a means of fighting a war after the war, a war not this time against a State with weapons in its hands, but against the survivors of the defeat.” (Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium, 1948, pp. 187-188)
Total War evolved with the Total State. They have made war into a new science, turning it into a technique defined by a new technology and a new ethics. This ethics is now the hypocrisy of “humanitarian” concerns. The reality is that any government goes to war to protect its political or economic interests. They care nothing about “human rights”, especially when their own record is far from clean in this regard.
Qadhafi was supported by the American, British and French governments up to the time of the intervention and their companies were giving him weapons that he’s now using in the current civil war. Its the same selective outrage repeated over and over again. When the other public reasons for his invasion of Iraq fell apart, George W. Bush then cried his crocodile tears about Saddam Hussein “killing his own people.” Was he talking about the slaughter of Kurds in Halabja in 1988, which was committed with chemical weapons made by American and British corporations? His dad was the Vice President at the time and nothing was done against Saddam Hussein except to tell him “good job”!
There is an ongoing genocide in the Congo; Israel continues to commit crimes against the Palestinians; countries around the world are occupying other peoples and suppressing movements for freedom; and then there is the U.S. government’s own sordid record with the Indigenous nations that inhabited this continent. Where there is money and power to be made, you can best believe human values are being trumped by the blood-crazed search for profits.