"The Immediate Demands of Justice"

excerpted from the book

The Splendid Blond Beast

by Christopher Simpson

Common Courage Press, 1995

(Punishment of defeated powers for war crimes and crimes against humanity was the first item on the agenda ... in Paris in 1919.)

p16
... Civilians sacrificed the most. In Turkey, the ruling junta attempted to exterminate that country's largest minority group, the Armenians, through pogroms, mass murder, and deportation. They killed about one million people between 1915 and 1918. More than half of the dead were children, and almost all the casualties were civilians... Epidemics of tuberculosis and influenza during the war killed at least three times as many people as did the fighting itself, and most of the afflicted were children and the elderly. Cholera and typhus ripped through civilian populations, particularly in southeastern Europe, despite improvements in public health measures among soldiers.

The U.S. Federal Reserve Board found that by the spring of 1918 the belligerents had spent about $l40 billion on the execution of the war, with the expectation that another $20 billion would be spent before the year was out. This was strictly for soldiers' pay, military hardware, and other direct costs. These were almost unimaginable outlays for that era, representing the bulk of existing productive capacity of all Western society.

p17
... When fighting broke out in 1914. there had been plenty of nationalist enthusiasm among the citizens of the belligerents. But this support diminished as the number of casualties mounted and the futility of the fighting became apparent. Pacifist and Communist arguments that blamed the war on an imperial squabble among the rich won a widening audience as the months passed. By 1916, European governments on both sides of the conflict faced increasing difficulties mobilizing their populations to fight.

War administrations in each country turned to atrocity stories, promises of revenge, and inspiring tales about fallen heroes as a means of bolstering public enthusiasm for continued fighting. A tight, symbiotic relationship soon emerged between the national media and the intelligence services of each major power, as both groups had an interest in wide dissemination of moving stories that demonized the enemy and sanctified each country's own war effort. Dozens of men who later emerged as prominent journalists and public relations specialists, among them Walter Lippmann and Arthur Sweetser of the United States, pioneered modern tactics for organized media campaigns, early radio broadcasting, staged events, and other war propaganda.

(Each of the belligerents had signed the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the Geneva conventions of 1864 and 1906 (also known as the Red Cross conventions) which set basic standards for military conduct during wars.)

p18
... The United States ... specifically exempted anything it might choose to do in Central and South America and the Philippines from the terms of the Hague agreements.

p20
War crimes and crimes against humanity thus emerged at the Paris Conference as a pivotal issue, both in symbolic and practical terms. This was more than simply as important judicial matter; it became a focus of a wide-ranging debate over what sort of society Europe would build in the wake of the war [WW I].

p23
Edward House, presidential advisor about Secretary of State Robert Lansing
"He believes that almost any form of atrocity is permissible provided a nation's safety is involved."

When House asked Lansing who should best determine the level of atrocity appropriate to protect the nation, Lansing replied, "the military authorities of the nation committing the atrocities." Thus, the leaders of the armed forces accused of committing a crime should be the final judge of whether the act was justified in the interests of the nation.

p25
International law [Secretary of State Robert Lansing contended] regulated relations among nations; it had no jurisdiction over what a state chooses to do to its own people.

Splendid Blond Beast

Index of Website

Home Page