[This diary includes portions of comments I’ve made in reply to other diaries.]
Crimes against humanity are defined in the Rome Statute of 1998:
According to Article 7 (1) of the Rome Statute, crimes against humanity do not need to be linked to an armed conflict and can also occur in peacetime, similar to the crime of genocide. That same Article provides a definition of the crime that contains the following main elements:
- A physical element, which includes the commission of “any of the following acts”:
- Murder;
- Extermination;
- Enslavement;
- Deportation or forcible transfer of population;
- Imprisonment;
- Torture;
- Grave forms of sexual violence;
- Persecution;
- Enforced disappearance of persons;
- The crime of apartheid;
- Other inhumane acts.
- A contextual element: “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population”; and
- A mental element: “with knowledge of the attack”
The contextual element determines that crimes against humanity involve either large-scale violence in relation to the number of victims or its extension over a broad geographic area (widespread), or a methodical type of violence (systematic). This excludes random, accidental or isolated acts of violence. In addition, Article 7(2)(a) of the Rome Statute determines that crimes against humanity must be committed in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit an attack. The plan or policy does not need to be explicitly stipulated or formally adopted and can, therefore, be inferred from the totality of the circumstances.
In contrast with genocide, crimes against humanity do not need to target a specific group. Instead, the victim of the attack can be any civilian population, regardless of its affiliation or identity. Another important distinction is that in the case of crimes against humanity, it is not necessary to prove that there is an overall specific intent. It suffices for there to be a simple intent to commit any of the acts listed, with the exception of the act of persecution, which requires additional discriminatory intent. The perpetrator must also act with knowledge of the attack against the civilian population and that his/her action is part of that attack.
(It should be noted that the US, of course, has refused to become a signatory to the Rome Statute, because why would we oppose crimes against humanity?)
I’ve read dozens of outstanding, heart-rending diaries and comments about the internment of refugees to our southern border, with children literally torn from their parents’ arms.
Time and again I’ve read DKos members asking, in bewilderment: How can anyone support this? When will it finally be ‘enough’ for the rank and file GOP to decide not participate in atrocities?
The answers are unsettling to anyone who believes that the average GOP voter is basically a decent, reasonable person, difficult to comprehend for someone who perhaps subscribes to the notion that ‘there’s more that unites us than divides us’— it will never be ‘enough’, because these crimes against humanity are precisely what they voted for:
In a survey released last week, 66% of registered voters who support Trump in the general election call immigration a “very big problem” in the country. Just 17% of Hillary Clinton backers say the same. Terrorism is the only other issue, among seven included, that is viewed by about as many Trump supporters as a major problem (65%)…
Perhaps no Trump proposal has resonated more strongly with his supporters than his plan to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. Fully 79% of Trump supporters favor building a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border; just 18% are opposed…
Nearly half (48%) of Trump supporters say the priority for policy to deal with illegal immigration should be stronger law enforcement and better border security. Just 10% say the priority should be creating a way for undocumented immigrants to become citizens if they meet certain requirements. But about four-in-ten (41%) say both of these approaches should be given equal priority.
When Trump voters who give equal priority to both are asked to choose just one, a majority overall comes down on the side of stronger law enforcement and better border security: 78% say this should be the priority, compared with just 19% who prioritize a path to citizenship for those in the U.S. illegally.
When Nazis made their appearance at campaign rallies in early 2016, on the streets of the country ever since, and were welcomed by the cabal in the Oval Office, the willing supporters of the GOP were liberated from all moral constraint whatsoever.
Each ‘next instance’ of depravity is not pushing the limit further— the limit was removed when Putin’s tool was granted the nomination. Only those who hold onto the naive view that there must be some limit to what the rank and file GOP will stomach think this is about pushing moral limits. This is about taking advantage of power to carry out their wishes, to make the country what they have always wanted it to be.
It is the enablers and willing supporters that make the fascist autocrat possible.
We need to send a copy of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem to every classroom and newsroom in the country:
What had been mentioned at Nuremberg only occasionally and, as it were, marginally - that "the evidence shows that . . . the mass murders and cruelties were not committed solely for the purpose of stamping out opposition" but were "part of a plan to get rid of whole native populations" - was in the center of the Jerusalem proceedings, for the obvious reason that Eichmann stood accused of a crime against the Jewish people, a crime that could not be explained by any utilitarian purpose; Jews had been murdered all over Europe, not only in the East, and their annihilation was not due to any desire to gain territory that "could be used for colonization by Germans." It was the great advantage of a trial centered on the crime against the Jewish people that not only did the difference between war crimes, such as shooting of partisans and killing of hostages, and "inhuman acts," such as "expulsion and annihilation" of native populations to permit colonization by an invader, emerge with sufficient clarity to become part of a future international penal code, but also that the difference between "inhuman acts" (which were undertaken for some known, though criminal, purpose, such as expansion through colonization)and the "crime against humanity," whose intent and purpose were unprecedented, was clarified. At no point, however, either in the proceedings or in the judgment, did the Jerusalem trial ever mention even the possibility that extermination of whole ethnic groups - the Jews, or the Poles, or the Gypsies - might be more than a crime against the Jewish or the Polish or the Gypsy people,that the international order, and mankind in its entirety, might have been grievously hurt and endangered. Closely connected with this failure was the conspicuous helplessness the judges experienced when they were confronted with the task they could least escape, the task of understanding the criminal whom they had come to judge. Clearly, it was not enough that they did not follow the prosecution in its obviously mistaken description of the accused as a "perverted sadist," nor would it have been enough if they had gone one step further and shown the inconsistency of the case for the prosecution, in which Mr. Hausner wanted to try the most abnormal monster the world had ever seen and, at the same time, try in him "many like him," even the "whole Nazi movement and anti-Semitism at large." They knew, of course, that it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster, even though if he had been Israel's case against him would have collapsed or, at the very least, lost all interest. Surely, one can hardly call upon the whole world and gather correspondents from the four corners of the earth in order to display Bluebeard in the dock. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are,terribly an terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together for it implied - as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal, who is in actual act hostis generis humani, commits his crime - under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. In this respect, the evidence in the Eichmann case was even more convincing than the evidence presented in the trial of the major war criminals, whose pleas of a clear conscience could be dismissed more easily because they combined with the argument of obedience to"superior orders" various boasts about occasional disobedience. But although the bad faith of the defendants was manifest, the only ground on which guilty conscience could actually be proved was the fact that the Nazis, and especially the criminal organizations to which Eichmann belonged, had been so very busy destroying the evidence of their crimes during the last months of the war. And this ground was rather shaky. It proved no more than recognition that the law of mass murder, because of its novelty, was not yet accepted by other nations; or, in the language of the Nazis, that they had lost their fight to "liberate" mankind from the "rule of subhumans,"especially from the domination of the Elders of Zion; or, in ordinary language, it proved no more than the admission of defeat. Would any one of them have suffered from a guilty conscience if they had won?...
We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potentialities of those around you. You told your story in terms of a hard-luck story, and, knowing the circumstances, we are, up to a point,willing to grant you that under more favorable circumstances it is highly unlikely that you would ever have come before us or before any other criminal court. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and Support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations -as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world… (emphasis added)
People need to get this— politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and Support are the same— right quick.
This is the frame of reference for understanding all those who have voted for any GOP candidate, at any level, and continue in their support of the organization that brought fascism openly to the White House.
They are complicit in the atrocities, they are in fact necessary for the atrocities to be carried out, and cannot claim otherwise.
Given who rank and file GOP voters have been voting for, and the policies they have pursued, for the past seventy years, we can reasonably surmise that the installation of a fascist autocracy is precisely what they have in fact wanted.
No moral constraint, no moral considerations, no camouflage, no bothering with the pretense of a rationale.
They are— to a person— utterly amoral.
60 million of them voted for Putin’s tool in 2016, and they are not outliers. They are the rank and file of the GOP party, and properly viewed as co-authors of crimes against humanity.
Such a rank and file are the foundation of every fascist autocracy; without them, fascism could never seize any sort of political power.
If the voters behind this American gestapo operation aren’t held to account, it will simply go on unabated.