Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate the premises on which World War II has been judged.  After all, apparently the problems with genocide and ethnic cleansing which purportedly differentiated the two warring camps may have had more to do with the methods with which those two purported crimes against humanity were implemented, or perhaps the numbers involved, rather than with they’re having been undertaken.  Gas bad!  Bombs good.  That was sort of clear when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed but seems absolutely clear now with the Israeli destruction of the Gaza Strip and elimination of its troublesome population. 

Interestingly though, United States courts at both the state and federal level have ruled that execution through use of gas chambers does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment; see, e.g., Hunt v. Nuth, 57 F.3d 1327 (4th Cir. 1995), Gray v. Lucas, 710 F.2d 1048 (5th Cir. 1983) and the Supreme Court decision in Gomez v. Fierro, 519 U.S. 918 (1996).  To violate the 8^th Amendment to the United States Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment it would need to involve some sort of torture, such as dismemberment (as results, for example from non-nuclear forms of bombing). 

Hmmm, so just what is the difference?

Given the foregoing, perhaps the Nazis, while extremely unpleasant towards diverse ethnic and social groups executed in gas chambers (e.g., Jews, Gypsies, sexually deviant groups as measured by standards at the time, etc.), where less culpable of crimes against humanity, at least in the manner of execution if not in numbers, than today’s Israel.  Since today’s Israeli campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing against non-Jews in the area of Greater Israel (the Nazi concept of lebensraum comes to mind) have been deemed appropriate responses to feelings of national insecurity and reprisals for rebellion such as those which occurred during the second war to end all wars in the Warsaw ghetto and elsewhere; perhaps Germans of all stripes are owed an apology, perhaps the decisions of the Nuremburg tribunals need to be vacated, and perhaps appropriate compensation should be paid to the descendants of those executed and otherwise punished erroneously in such trials as well as in the similar trials held in Tokyo.

As current Israeli leaders have specified, no rules involving human rights or proscriptions against lesa humanidad are applicable to military reprisals against groups deemed undesirable or inconvenient in light of national objectives.

Case closed, finally!!!  It’s only logical.  Everyone is innocent except, of course, for the victims.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.