“You cannot kill an idea with a gun, you can
    only stop them if you have a better idea.
    And we have a better idea … You must teach
    people that law is always better than war.”      

    – Benjamin Ferencz

No man should have power to decide who dies and who should live. When I heard governor of Texas George Bush speak in an interview in 2000, I understood he represented evil, he was morally corrupt. History has proven me right. In the end, Governor Bush even lacked the honesty to do the work in deciding whether to pardon someone.

I see and heard in the actions and words of President Obama he has passed into the same moral abyss where George Bush lived. Obama believes someone invested in him the authority to decide between life and death. The drone attack to murder U.S. citizens was illegal and immoral. Nothing good has come to pass.

George Bush lauded the Iraq War is over on May 1, 2003, he was wrong. Barack Obama declared the war on terror of Al Qaeda over in 2012, he was wrong.

I have been troubled by too many decisions coming out of the Obama administration in actions and words. Obama was wrong on Libya, Syria and the Ukraine. NATO needs to be stopped, it was meant as a defense pact a deterrent against an expanding sphere of influence of Communism in Western Europe. The Vietnam War was fought for the same reason in the Far East. NATO has become a force of neocon policy, an aggressive expansionist policy, a tool for greed of capitalism. Much will be destroyed before the masses in Europe realize they have been fooled once again.

The Last Man at Nuremberg
Emma Green | The Atlantic | May 9, 2014 at 12:25 PM ET |

Benjamin Ferencz was 27 when the Einsatzgruppen trial began in 1947. There were 22 defendants, all men, all members of the German SS. “One of the counsel has characterized this trial as the biggest murder trial in history,” the military tribunal wrote. “In this case, the defendants are not … charged with sitting in an office hundreds and thousands of miles away from the slaughter…. These men were in the field actively superintending, controlling, directing, and taking an active part in the bloody harvest.” Put simply, the Einsatzgruppen were exterminators: Their squads traveled to towns throughout Eastern Europe, rounding up Jews and shooting them with mechanized efficiency. Some mass graves were filled with hundreds of bodies; others, thousands.

Otto Ohlendorf, Paul Blobel, and almost two dozen others led these divisions of Hitler’s army; after the war, they were indicted for crimes against humanity. Benjamin Ferencz was 27, and he was the chief prosecutor responsible for convicting 22 men on trial for murdering 1 million men, women, and children.

Nazi Einsatzgruppen and  Ukrainian auxiliaries murdered Jewish women and children at Bila Tserkva

Continued below the fold …

A German Nazi war criminal, an SS- Standartenführer Paul Blobel

Paul Blobel (August 13, 1894 – June 7, 1951) was a German Nazi war criminal, an SS-Standartenführer (Colonel) and a member of the SD. Born in the city of Potsdam, he participated in the First World War, where by all accounts he served well and was decorated with the Iron Cross first class. After the war, Blobel studied architecture and practiced this profession from 1924 until 1931, when upon losing his job, he joined the Nazi Party, the SA and the SS (he had joined all of these by 1 December 1931).

In 1933 he joined the police force in Düsseldorf. In June 1934 he was recruited into the SD. In June 1941 he became the commanding officer of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C that was active in Ukraine. Following Wehrmacht troops into Ukraine, the Einsatzgruppen would be responsible for liquidating political and racial undesirables. In August 1941 Blobel decided to create a ghetto in Zhytomyr to enclose 3,000 Jews who would be murdered a month later. On 10 or 11 August 1941, Friedrich Jeckeln ordered him, on behalf of Adolf Hitler, to exterminate the whole Jewish population. On 22 August 1941 the Sonderkommando and its Ukrainian auxiliaries murdered Jewish women and children at Bila Tserkva with the consent of field marshal Walther von Reichenau, commander of the 6th Army. SS-Obersturmführer August Häfner testified at his own trial.

Blobel, in conjunction with von Reichenau and Friedrich Jeckeln’s units, organized the Babi Yar massacre in late September 1941 in Kiev, where 33,771 Jews were murdered. In November 1941 Blobel received and activated the first gas vans at Poltava. In June 1942 he was put in charge of Aktion 1005, with the task of destroying the evidence of all Nazi atrocities in Eastern Europe.

Per Anders Rudling: Warfare or War Criminality?

Yushchenko’s legitimizing historians presented a narrative of suffering, resistance, and redemption, in which a heroic representation of the Bandera wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Bandera) (OUN[b]) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were key components.

V’iatrovych externalizes Soviet rule as a genocidal occupation against which the Ukrainian people conducted a heroic resistance. He argues that a state-sponsored cult of personality is needed, since, he maintains,without these “national heroes” there would not be a Ukraine.

    The Ukrainian struggle for independence is one of the cornerstones of our national self-identication. Because without UPA, without Bandera, without Shukhevych there would not be a contemporary Ukrainian state, there would not be a contemporary Ukrainian nation… The very example of the insurgents’ uncompromising struggle also inspired future generations of fighters for human rights and national unity – from the participants of the dissident movement to the activists of the Orange Revolution.

V’iatrovych presents history as a teleological, whiggish narrative; themarch of the Ukrainian nation toward statehood. With its heavy emphasis on patrimonial national heroes and martyrs this curiously anachronistic narrative is a spitting image of Soviet history writing. V’iatrovych describes OUN founder Evhen Konovalets‘ as a “hero of Ukraine,” “of which the entire Ukrainian nation needs to be proud… Konovalets’ and Stepan Bandera are figures of all-Ukrainian stature and the place of such heroes should be a National Pantheon, which ought to be constructed in Kyiv.”

NOTE: Volodymyr Viatrovych’s book “Ставлення ОУН до євреїв: формування позиції на тлі катастрофи” (“The OUN’s position towards the Jews: Formulation of a position against the backdrop of a catastrophe”) has been criticized by John-Paul Himka, Taras Kurylo, Per Anders Rudling and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. The critics claim that this book is an attempt to deny the crimes of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) on Jews and to dismiss the allegations of its anti-Semitism.

Nuremberg Prosecutor Makes The Case For Trying Assad

When he was just 27 years old, helped prosecute Nazi leaders in the Nuremburg war crimes trial after World War II. In the years since, the Harvard-educated lawyer has continued to focus on issues of international criminal justice.

As he considers the possibility the U.S. might launch strikes on Syria, Benjamin Ferencz raises the idea of using the International Criminal Court to try Syrian President Bashar Assad for the alleged use of chemical weapons.

But, he tells NPR’s Rachel Martin, “the United States has been opposed, unfortunately … to using that court because we value our sovereignty and we want to decide for ourselves when we go to war and when we don’t. A very, very dangerous practice, as we’re now discovering.”

Using the ICC to bring someone to justice can take years, something Ferencz admits he’s not comfortable with. “I wish we could go into court and have a trial over in three days as I did in Nuremberg,” he says.

“But the fact we are not comfortable is not the test. The test is whether it’s just or not. Is it just for an individual in any country to conclude that some individual in another country is guilty of supreme crimes and therefore he should be punished, without a trial of any kind? Is that just?”

See also my earlier diaries.

○ Nazi Collaboration by Banderists in East Galicia
○ Ukraine’s Coup d’ État – George Marshall, OSS, Bissell and Gladio
○ Estonia Celebrates Annual Waffen SS Division Heroes

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