"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The march of the hypocrites " - читать интересную книгу автора

on either side would at least agree that the Crimean question is very
complex, whereas Ukraine's claim to Sevastopol has no legal base. Yet
the US State Department, choosing not to trouble itself with the
history of the matter, has continued to assert authoritatively, for
six years running, that both the Crimea and Sevastopol are
unequivocally the property of Ukraine, end of discussion. Would it
presume to speak so categorically on, say, the future of Northern
Ireland?
Still another accomplishment of political hypocrisy is apparent in
the way in which we conduct "war crimes tribunals". Wars, for
thousands of years, have always been aggravated on both sides by
crimes and injustices. In hopes that a just reason might prevail, in
order to make sense of war and to punish evil passions and evil deeds,
Russia proposed The Hague Convention of 1899.
Yet no sooner did the first war crimes trial take place - the
Nazis at Nuremberg - than we saw, elevated high upon the judges'
bench, the unblemished administrators of a justice system that during
those same years handed over to torture, execution and untimely death
tens of millions of innocent lives in its own country.
And if we continue to differentiate between the always inevitable
deaths of soldiers at war and the mass killings of undoubtedly
peaceful citizens, then by what name shall we call those who, in a
matter of minutes, burnt to death 140,000 civilians at Hiroshimaalone
-- justifying the act with the astounding words, "to save the lives
of our soldiers"? That President and his entourage were never
subjected to trial, and they are remembered as worthy victors. And
how shall we name those who, with victory fully in hand, dispatched a
two-day wave of fighter bombers to reduce to ashes beautiful Dresden,
a civilian city teeming with refugees? The death toll was not far
below Hiroshima, and two orders of magnitude greater than at Coventry.
The Coventry bombing, however, was condemned in trial, while the Air
Marshal who directed the bombing of Dresden was not only spared the
brand of "war criminal", but towers over the British capital in a
monument, as a national hero.
In an age marked by such a flourishing of jurisprudence, we ought
to see clearly that a well-considered international law is a law which
justly punishes criminals irrespective - irrespective - of their
side's victory or defeat. No such law has yet been created, found a
firm footing, or been universally recognised. It follows, then, that
The Hague tribunal still lacks sufficient legal authority with respect
to its accused and might on occasion lack impartiality. If so, its
verdicts would constitute reprisal, not justice. For all the numerous
corpses of civilians uncovered in Bosnia, from all the warring
parties, no suspects seem to have been found from the safeguarded
Muslim side. Finally we might mention this remarkable tactic: The
Hague tribunal now hands down indictments in secret, not announcing
them publicly. Somewhere, the accused is summoned on a civil matter,
and immediately captured - a method beyond even the Inquisition, more
worthy of barbarians, circa 3,000 BC.
Perusing the world map, we find many examples of today's