"Every man loves justice at another man’s expense."
One of the emptiest words in our culture is "justice." Its vacuous quality is what makes it so popular: it requires little in the way of focused, intelligent explication to employ it. To those on the political "left," justice" gets translated into a demand for money to be taken from some and bestowed upon others. Those on the political "right" use it as a plea for the building of more prisons and the hiring of more police officers to ferret out more persons to fill them. When people tell me "I demand justice," my response is to warn them to temper their insistence, as they might just get it!
When pressed for a definition, I reply that justice is the redistribution of violence. In its simplest form, X commits a wrong upon Y, for which Y demands retaliation against X. In its more complex form in our collectivized world, fifteen Saudis, two men from the United Arab Emirates, one Egyptian, and one Lebanese join in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center buildings. As these men were killed in the process, the demands for "justice" led most Americans to accept the bombing and killing of innocent men, women, and children in such unrelated places as Afghanistan and Iraq! Justice and rationality have little to do with one another.
The death of Robert McNamara brought home the meaningless nature of this concept. This war criminal – like so many others of the home-grown type – was, perhaps more than any other, responsible for the deaths of more than a million innocent victims during the Vietnam War. He knew the war to be bogus and unwinnable, yet continued to insist upon more lives being invested in this evil scheme. His co-conspirator, Lyndon Johnson, helped to cover up their evil deeds by awarding McNamara with a Medal of Freedom. If Americans had been as self-righteous in punishing the crimes of their own leaders as they insist inflicting upon foreign monsters, both these men would have ended their careers on the gallows.
The same fate would have awaited the likes of Churchill, Truman, Stalin, and other perpetrators of "allied" crimes. The head of the British RAF Bomber Command in the latter half of World War II was Arthur "Bomber" Harris (also known as "Butcher" Harris even within the RAF). Harris – later awarded a knighthood – was responsible for the saturation bombing of German cities that had not the slightest military significance; his purpose, rather, being to inflict massive death as an end in itself. The firebombing of the beautiful city of Dresden – so well captured in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five – was rationalized on the grounds that there were no other German cities left to bomb. Harris, along with Churchill, would surely have swung from the gallows if "justice" had meant anything other than sanctimonious revenge visited upon the losing side, or what others have called "victor’s justice."
Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the purpose of warning the Soviet Union of the state of American destructiveness, merited his trip to the scaffold. Octogenarians – with their "U.S.S. Missouri" baseball caps – continue to babble the line that this act of butchery inflicted upon a civilian population was necessary to end the war and save American lives. That Japan was trying to surrender before these cities were attacked, and that American POWs were among the thousands of victims of this attack, refutes the lie.
A date with the hangman should also have awaited the likes of Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and . . . well, you begin to see the pattern: deaths visited upon the men, women, and children of other countries are to be excused, even honored, when carried out by American political leaders. READ THE REST AT LEW ROCKWELL
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