The judges at their bench (left) in Room 600 at the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, during proceedings against leading Nazi figures for war crimes at the International Military Tribunal (IMT), Germany, 1945. Image Wikipedia.

“To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

These words, spoken by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson at the opening of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal of Nazi war criminals, might give pause to White House and Pentagon strategists who appear anxious to launch a U.S. war on Venezuela, if only they had a fear of violating international law.

With a U.S. President who self-enriches and hurls insults like a gangland mob boss, it’s become routine to watch the White House orchestrate criminal acts in broad daylight: kidnapping college students using masked agents and unmarked vans; ordering mass arrests and detention of Spanish speakers without charges; flying kidnapped persons in chains to foreign countries and foreign prisons without due process or appeal rights; blowing up dozens of unknown persons in Caribbean fast boats and broadcasting the murders like a bloody video arcade.

The Trump Administration’s vicious crime spree in the Caribbean, and its videotaped made-for-TV propaganda, appears to be the conditioning of public opinion regarding state-sponsored killing of nameless suspects. At the same time, the yahoo murders may be a new version of the Pentagon’s endless “war on terrorism.” The civilian fast boat victims being killed are of course labeled “terrorists”” the broad-brush painting of all targeted persons or groups which is precisely where George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four begins at page one. “Terrorist” is the universally applicable smear and epithet that justifies any and all manner of political and military murder.

Last weekend the gangster prez hinted at possible U.S. military strikes inside Venezuelan territory, and last week the White House declared Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro to be the “head of a foreign terrorist organization.”

This patent absurdity is an echo of the State Department’s February decision to return Cuba to the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, and is reminiscent of drug trafficking charges leveled against President Manuel Noriega of Panama as a pretext for the 1990 U.S. military invasion of his country. Demonizing the state and heads of state to be attacked is historically a necessary precursor to all such U.S. invasions, be it Vietnam, Panama, Somalia, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Syria.

Outlawing not only aggression but preparing aggression

Significantly, Justice Jackson and the Nuremberg Tribunal went far beyond condemning wars of aggression as the “supreme international crime.” The Nuremberg Charter, Tribunal and Judgment explicitly set out to criminalize the inchoate crimes of planning and preparing illegal wars.

In his opening statement at trial, Justice Jackson said: “A fundamental provision of the Charter is that to plan, prepare, initiate, or wage a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances, or to conspire or participate in a common plan to do so, is a crime.” (This then-new binding preventative language may have moved the U.S. War Department in 1947 to change its name to the Department of Defense.)

Nuremberg’s U.S.-sponsored and binding international prohibition of military “plans and preparations” for wars of aggression is being blown to bits like the boats in the Caribbean, shredded by the Navy’s string of high-tech multiple murders.

President Trump said on Sept. 5, “I sort of made up my mind” about initiating U.S. war on Venezuela. While Venezuela has not attacked or threatened the United States, the Pentagon has 15,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors, an aircraft carrier battle group with its 75 fighter jets, seven Navy warships including missile-firing destroyers, and a Special Forces Operations “mother ship” positioned in the Caribbean. And the naval armada has even been dubbed “Operation Southern Spear” rather than “Southern Shield” by a Secretary of Defense who’d prefer being titled the far uglier and more menacing Secretary of War.

The White House claims to justify its massive tinder box of war machinery with obvious lies about fighting U.S. fentanyl deaths which are being caused by “narco-terrorists” and “unlawful combatants” from Venezuela. That country’s 300 billion barrels in oil reserves are never spoken of publicly by President Drill Baby, but U.S. corporate control of this gargantuan prize is the only reason the White House promotes the fiction that U.S. drug problems come from anywhere other than Mexico, Columbia, and Afghanistan.

Mohandas Gandhi reminded us of the very least that we should expect of ourselves when inside a tyrannical political environment powered by a firehose of lies. “The first principle of valid political action in such a society then becomes non-cooperation with its disorder, its injustices, and more particularly with its deep commitment to untruth.”

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