… lest we forget, for every Hiroshima and Nagasaki there is a firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden. It is not a question of the valiant, virtuous and spotless Allies against the unmitigated evil of the Axis as the comic book version of history written by the winners would tell us.
by James Corbett
The International Forecaster
For as long as there has been war there have been war crimes. Of course they weren’t always called “war crimes” and no international tribunals were convened to try the offenders, but make no mistake: there have always been war crimes.
[…] After the Batavian revolt, Roman officers raped the young boys of the vanquished.
During the sacking of Béziers in 1209, French crusaders massacred 20,000 men, women and children in cold blood after Abbot Arnaud Amalric encouraged them to “kill them all and let God sort them out.”
During the American Indian Wars, captives of the eastern woodlands tribes were executed by ritual torture, with victims being kept alive for days as they were cut, burnt, mutilated, made to eat their own flesh and otherwise defiled by the captors’ whole village.
Sadly, it would be impossible to locate a time and place anywhere in world history where war was not accompanied by rape, pillage and massacres. But there’s a strange phenomenon that applies to war crimes: most people think their own countrymen are immune. Yes, there may be a massacre here or a slaughter there, but there’s always a good reason for it.