NEWS
RADICAL EVIL
10-07-2025WAR AND HYPOCRISY
Shortly after the German air attack on Coventry in the beginning of the Second World War, the Commander of the Royal Airforce asked Prime Minister Winston Churchill what targets to aim at in retaliation. Churchill’s answer was: right to the center of a German city. What the allies did to the German cities thereafter was exactly what the Germans had done to the cities of Britain, the Netherlands, Poland and other cities. Many German cities thereafter were destroyed by the allied air raids as were Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
The new international legal order with the United Organization as its guarantee was meant to help prevent such destructive warfare . or war altogether. New rules of international law and of humanitarian international law were written for that purpose. Unity among the five major postwar powers – permanent members of the Security Council – was the political ( and shaky) foundation for respecting the new legal order. That political foundation crumbled completely when Putin’s Russia started its war of aggression against Ukraine. Sadly thereafter, every reference to the UN made post-war legal order has lost much sense.
Condemning only Israel for violating the rules of international law made after the Second World War, is at best hypocrisy, at worst reviving anti-Semitism.
We Europeans ought to realize that the Third World War fought currently in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Israel, Iran, Ukraine and as Cyberwar is far worse than violations of International Law, developed after the Second World War. What the warring parties – except the Ukraine – have in common is the disfranchisement of the adversary. The adversary is denied any legal status, any human dignity, and thus dehumanized to an object to be destroyed with all available means. It has turned Gaza into an exterminationcamp.
Back
- Cultural Diplomacy: Waging war by other means?
- The Illusions of Détente,
- Western Cooperation
- Sporen van de Twintigste Eeuw
- European Unification into the twenty first Century...
- De geest van Christus leeft in Europa
- Neither Justice nor Order
Neither Justice nor Order
Footprints of the 20th Century - Third EditionDescription
This fifth and final volume offers a critical assessment of the state of the law of nations. In the twenty first century the world needs true global law anchored in the dignity of the human person rather than weak international law built on the interests of major sovereign states.