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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Concise Exposure of Kangaroo Court Justice at Nuremberg,
This review is from: Advance to Barbarism: The Development of Total Warfare from Sarajevo to Hiroshima (Paperback)
Frederick J. Veale's THE ADVANCE TO BARBARISM is a concise exposure of the injustice and hypocrisy of the Nuremberg Trials which began in 1946. Veale simply wrote a great book, and this book should be a warning to those who considere "war criminals" to be those who are far away and so defined by phony media "experts" who are ignorant of these staged trials and morality plays.
Veale begins this study with a brief but informative review of how the victors treated the vanquished during Ancient History. Basically, the ancients usually tortured and massacred the vanquished without the pretense of "trial." In other words they were more honest in their treatment of the losers. Veale explains the transition from vengence to limited aims and goals that gradually occured in early modern European History. This transition took place after the terrible Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Crowned rulers sent forces to war commanded by men who usually conformed to the phrase of "an officer and gentleman." There was usually a concerted effort to avoid harm to the enemy's civilian population. Rulers and commanders understood war as a limited effort to gain land, resources, and economic access. The Europeans did not resort to wars of extermination or crusades against the forces of evil when the Europeans were at war with other Europeans. However, this mutual understanding ended during World War II. The beginning of World War II began as a small war of the Germans and Soviets invading Poland in 1939. One should note that the view of an innocent Poland is false. For example, the Polish had already used military force to land from the Czechs, Lituanians, etc., in 1938 which obviously concerned the Soviets. One must remember that some of the Polish poltical leaders claimed that a Greater Poland's borders extended from Berlin to Moscow. As one historian commented, the Polish thought they were the carnary who could swollow two cats. As an aside, one might ask why the Germans were "war criminals" when they invaded Poland, but the Soviets were not. Veale presents a clear case that some of the charges brought against German political leaders arose ex post facto. Prior to the Nurmemberg "Trials," there was no international law defining internal laws and acts of a soverign state as violations of international law. Yet, some of the charges were based on such flawed legal reasoning. Other charges were "crimes against humanity and starting an aggressive war." This was bogus based on 6,000 years of history. The "jurists" representing the "victors" of World War II were citizens of governments who waged "aggressive" wars throughout history and continued to do so when European colonies were in a state of rebellion. One of the most hypocritical aspects of these trials was the presence of Soviet "jurists" sitting in judgement of the German defendants. The Soviet leaders under the sponsorhship of Lenin and Stalin committed mass concentration camp brutality and mass murder that made the accusations of the Germans almost look tame. Veale calls attention to the unprovoked Soviet invasion of Finland in 1940 plus Soviet forced absorbtion of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The hypocrisy of the jurists ignoring all this is startling. Even upon closer examination, the charges of waging an "aggressive war" against the Germans appear ludicrous regarding Goring's plans to invade Norway in 1940. Veale proves beyond doubt that the British planned such an invasion in 1940 and started their invasion plans before the Germans did. The only thing the Germans did that was considered criminal was the fact the German effort was successful. Veale cites Churchill's speeches and Hansard's PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY to prove his case. The accusation leveled against the Germans that they deliberately caused harm to civilians is refuted by the fact that the British started this breach of international law. Veale cites J.M. Spaight's book BOMBING VINDICATED to prove that the British started the deleiberate of German civilians on May 11, 1940 which Spaight called the "Splendid Decision." While the battle for France was being waged hundreds of miles from German civilians, the British, who should have focused their bombing to military targets such as bridge networks in France, bombed innocent civilians who had nothing to do with the Battle of France. In fact, Veale makes a good point that had the British concentrated their bombing on these bridge networks, destruction of these networks would have stopped Hitler's mechanized forces due to the lack of getting gasoline supplies. The German offensive would have stalled and would have been defeated. An interesting episode of the Nuremberg Trials was the cross examination of Goring by the late Supreme Court Justice Jackson. Goring admitted to the charges that he planned to assist in ending the Weimar Republic and revise the unjust conditions of the Versailles Treaty. He bluntly admitted to having planned to create the German airforce and use military force to correct what many Germans considered unjust territorial impositions at the Versailles Treaty. Goring stated that he had planned to use military force to achieve political objectives as statesmen had done throughout history. Some of the British "justices" admitted to a grudging admiration of Goring's performance at the Nuremberg Trials. What Veale suggests in a nuclear age is that the Nurember Trials only sufficed to make future wars worse. If the "losers" think that losing a war will resulet in their executiion, they may very well use the most destructive weapons to either salvage their tenure or to threaten possible "winners" with mutual destruction. While recent events are well beyond the scope of Veale's book, one should note that some of the Serbian leaders who stalled their "war crimes" trials by arguing that they ordered counter terror campaigns to serious political threats. The recent attempts to try to Saddam Hussain have proven difficult when one considers that during the 1980s, Hussain only did what his then American sponsors wanted him to. Now to try him as a war criminal is so hypocritial as to deserve little comment. Veale's book was first published in 1953 during the Cold War. Yet the implications in this book are thought provoking and applicable to contemporary events. Another feature of this book is that Veale's work is clear and readable. One should read this book as it is more than worth the price of the book.
21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Advance to Enlightenment,
By A Customer
This review is from: Advance to Barbarism: The Development of Total Warfare from Sarajevo to Hiroshima (Paperback)
Perhaps the most devasting of all the revisionist debunking of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the other post-WWII trials. Knowledgeable, lucid English attorney F.J.P. Veale does more than skewer the judicial outrages of the trials of the Germans and their allies: he shows that these trials, by demonizing the defeated and glossing over the crimes of the victors, abolished the traditional code that had ruled European warfare for centuries. In a revisionist refresher course on mdern history, Veale draws on precedents from Napoleonic wars onto demonstrate the hollowness and hypocrisy of the Allies' judgement of the Germans. The Gulf War, Bosnia, and Kosovo seem validation for this books' prediction, grounded in its author's analysis of the IMT that Nuremburg would make future warfare worse for non-combatants by dividing warring nations into good (us) and evil (them).
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