Chomsky on the Ploughshares 5 Action

national | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis

Thursday October 27, 2005 19:49

by Michael Friesen

michael_friesen at hotmail dot com

A private e-mail

A message from Noam Chomsky in support of the Ploughshares 5.

It is a privilege to be able to join you, at least in words from a distance, as you come to trial for the crime of living up to the Nuremberg principles that were constructed by the US and Britain to convict Nazi war criminals for such crimes as participating in the "preemptive war" against Norway (Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop). The most extreme of these crimes, in the eyes of the prosecutors, was "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole": the crime of aggression.

That crime was clearly defined by US Chief of Counsel Robert Jackson as the act of some state of "Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State." As Justice Jackson memorably continued, "If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.... We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well."

And the fundamental legacy of Nuremberg for all people is that they must act to prevent the supreme crime and all of the accumulated evil that follows, which it is unnecessary to enumerate in the present case.

The St. Patrick Four were tried in the US for a crime similar to yours, and the jury, to its credit, accepted their Nuremberg defense and acquitted them of felony conspiracy charges. I trust that you too will be honored for your courageous and principled stand.

Noam Chomsky