Nazi-Like War Crimes

Anthony McIntyre ✒ Much of the discourse around Russia’s war crime of aggression against Ukraine pointedly aims at drawing a comparison with the Nazis.

Yet the Nazi comparison in conflict situations, when used all too facilely, becomes little more than how Brendan O’Neill once characterized the pejorative of fascist – just another way of calling somebody else a bastard. The matured observation that when everyone is somebody, then no one is anybody mirrors this – when everybody is a Nazi then nobody is a Nazi: the word simply loses its meaning, even more so its moral power to dissuade or condemn. Labelling Nazi those whose likeness to Nazis in terms of policy and ideology content happens to be remote or vague, is more about PR positioning that it is an authentic description of the essence of a regime.

Still, it seems axiomatic that every war crime is Nazi-like. Although war crimes long predated the rise of the Nazis, it is they who more than anybody else have come to be emblematic of war criminality. While the Nazis past and present have nothing like a monopoly on war crimes – they can be, and are, perpetrated by all ideological schools – it is impossible to conceive of any war crime that cannot be described as Nazi-like, even if we decline to accuse those of carrying them out as being actual Nazis. It does not mean that the perpetrators are better or worse than Nazis, just that when carrying out war crimes they behave much like the Nazis did.

The Israelis, or course, have more reason that any other state to both eschew and skewer this reasoning. Benefitting hugely from the Holocaust Industry, they have long sought to protect the status of their war crimes by seeking to have officially labelled anti-Semitic any comparisons of their actions to those of the Nazis. They have endeavoured to make a N word out of Nazi when applied to themselves. Makes it easier to get on with war crimes without risking the opprobrium that comes with perpetrating them. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance acts as a shill for the Israelis in this respect, indulging in special pleading while in effect - to borrow words from the Independent Jewish Voices Canada - lending weight to efforts "to cancel events or silence Palestine solidarity movements."

Well documented facts on the ground show that the Israelis have been guilty of Nazi-like atrocities against the Palestinians, much as the British were guilty of them against the Iraqis, the Americans were guilty of them against the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, Saddam was guilty of them against the Kurds and his own people while, at the very moment, the Russians are guilty of them against the Ukrainians.

Failing to acknowledge the war criminality of "our own" leads to Just War theorists tying themselves in knots of their own making. Despite being a long time admirer of Michael Walzer's 1977 work Just And Unjust Wars, it is embarrassing to observe the moral inversion of this great mind as he performs summersaults to square the circle when it comes to Israeli war crimes. Only by becoming a war crime denier on a par with Holocaust denial, can this position be transmitted, even if poorly received.

a war that so blatantly violates the principle of proportionality cannot be a just war. It is sad that one of the world's leading expositors of just war theory can't get this right.

In the case of Walzer, he simply ends up as a poster boy for the Orwell statement that “everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.”

Such fumbling for excuses, the alibi of context, and mitigation means that it is not just Russian bombs that cause the ground to move beneath the feet of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when he accuses the Russians of war crimes yet:

he had no sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian refugees, nor did he consider them to be victims of any crime. In his interviews after the last barbaric Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in May 2021, he stated that the only tragedy in Gaza was the one suffered by the Israelis. If this is so then it is only the Russians who suffer in Ukraine.

Of course, in the current Russian war against Ukraine there are those who will settle for comparisons with Nazis but howl with indignation when Russian war crimes are described as Israeli-like. As Ilan Papee asserts:

Israel’s assaults on Gaza should, indeed, be mentioned and considered when evaluating the present crisis in the Ukraine. It is not a coincidence that photos are being confused–there are not many high-rises that were toppled in the Ukraine, but there is an abundance of ruined high-rises in the Gaza Strip.

Moscow is carrying out Nazi-like war crimes against Ukrainians. That the Russians were the bullseye at the centre of the board being subjected to the most heinous crime against humanity perpetrated in the course of World War Two - the war of extermination in the East - is no reason to avoid calling what they are doing in Ukraine by its name.

Massacring civilians, targeting children, bombing schools, firing rockets into hospitals, forcing people to flee their homes by the million - none of it is defensible. The Kremlin might wish to get off the hook by sticking to the fiction that there is no war, just a special military operation, but despite the sleight of hand employed here, the Geneva Conventions on armed conflicts apply "even if the state of war is not recognized" by Russian officials.

In a more just world Vladimir Putin would transfer from the Kremlin to the Hague, where he should have no need to fear solitary: the company should be plentiful - Blair, Bush, Netanyahu, Kissinger. And that is only on the ground floor.

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