From: utzoo!watmath!watarts!geo
Newsgroups: net.misc
Title: Re: Klaus Barbey"s trial
Article-I.D.: watarts.1676
Posted: Mon Feb 14 23:09:18 1983
Received: Tue Feb 15 23:58:54 1983
Reply-To: geo@watarts (Geo Swan)
References: arizona.1326

Jim @ arizona asks why Idi Amin, August Pinochet and the people who were
responsible for the the massacre of Armenians were not tried, if the
french government plans to extradite Klaus Barbey, "the Butcher of Lyon".

I would like to direct people's attention to a short science fiction
story entitled 'My Trial as a War Criminal', by Leo Szilard.  Szilard
was an nuclear physicist.  He was the person who coined the term
'chain reaction' , in 1933, he worked on the A-Bomb, in Chicago
with Enrico Fermi, and he tried, unsuccessfully to lobby to prevent
the Bomb from being dropped on Japanese cities.

The story is not great literature, but it is \very/ interesting,
because Szilard, given the events in the story, very likely would
have been on trial.  The story is highly ironic.  Trials, like the
kind they had at Nuremburg, now seem incredibly self-serving.
Does anyone know if a single member of the "Allies" stood trial
for a "war crime"?

I do not mean to condone atrocities.  I think we are fooling ourselves
if we try to imagine that we are that unlike 'war-criminals'.
=============================================================
In a related vein, doesn't it strike you as two-faced to hear
the U.S. Government accusing the Soviets of using chemical weapons
in Afganistan, when they used chemical weapons in Vietnam?