VIET NAM. A few days ago I came across a documentary on Viet Nam, one segment of which featured the degree to which statistics were manipulated. One of the statements made was that "The rule was that if it was dead, it was a Viet Cong." That is, the primary objective was to kill enemy Viet Cong, but Viet Cong were elusive and hard to kill whereas Vietnamese villagers were plentiful and easy to kill, and so the military inflated its success by killing civilians and counting all those killed as enemy Viet Cong.
An example was given � following the rule that anyone fleeing from the
Americans was an enemy and could be shot, Americans who had landed in their
helicopters shot at and killed a Vietnamese fleeing on the other side of a
rice paddy. Upon approaching the body, they discovered that it was a
woman, some 55 to 60 years old, unarmed. The American veteran testified
that this information was faithfully recorded in his report, but that by
the time the report reached higher levels, references to the sex and age of
the victim had been deleted, and the false detail added that the victim had
been carrying a Chinese hand grenade. One of my thoughts was that if I am
ready to believe that the military will lie in this way at a higher level,
then I am readier to believe that the lie will start right at the bottom,
and that in fact it would have been this soldier in the field who would
have falsified the information � but discussion of the level at which the
distortion would most plausibly have been introduced is a side issue.
WORLD WAR II. If each war is unique, then the American experience in Viet Nam teaches us nothing about World War II. If, however, themes repeat themselves from war to war, then we might expect that the German in the field during World War II operated under the same pressure to inflate statistics concerning the number killed of the primary target � where in a non-combat setting, the primary targets were Jews. If a German discovered that Jews in Ukraine had been evacuated or were hard to find, then he would be in a situation similar to that of the American unable to find anyone who was clearly Viet Cong, and so for the German soldier as well as for the American, to bring his statistics up to the levels expected back at headquarters he would be motivated to count every body as a Jewish body, to count bodies that in fact he had not seen, and so on. Thus, uncritically accepting Einsatzgruppen reports of the number of Jews killed in World War II is as naive and irresponsible as would be uncritically accepting American body counts in Viet Nam.
BABYN YAR. The figure of 33,771 Jews killed in a few days at Babyn Yar is one such German statistic that it would be irresponsible to accept uncritically. This figure clashes with the copious evidence that most Jews had been evacuated from Kyiv prior to the arrival of the Germans, as has been documented in four of my postings to POLITICS:
Furthermore, the Aug 19/97 posting above contains a more detailed
discussion of the reliability of German statistics in a section titled
"Accuracy of German Statistics."
And the German figure of 33,771 Jews killed in a few days at Babyn Yar
clashes also with an eyewitness account, as shown in my posting to POLITICS:
Aug 28/97 Babyn Yar � a Ukrainian grave (an eyewitness account) (try 97080151)
WAR CRIMINALS. The chief reason for the present posting, though, has to do with the current prosecution of war crimes. We have seen how in recent days, the question of Neal Sher being imported to Canada to assist in war crimes investigations has been mentioned in the press. One view of Neal Sher is that in a just world, he would not today be a viable candidate for such a role. A more extreme view might be that Neal Sher should be sitting in prison for having attempted to send a man whom he knew to be innocent to his death. However, it is not the purpose of the present posting to remind Neal Sher that his crimes have not been forgotten, or that putting geographical distance between the locus of his crimes (Washington) and his new place of employment (Ottawa) does not necessarily place him among co-workers who can be trusted to be ignorant of those crimes.
Rather, the purpose of the present posting is to underline that
contemporary prosecution of war criminals in the United States and Canada
is not an impartial attempt to hunt down people who are guilty of crimes,
but is rather a political statement being made by special-interest groups
who are wealthy enough to pressure a branch of government into serving as
an instrument of their public-relations campaign. More specifically, the
special-interest groups have engineered the spending of tax money primarily
to prosecute septuagenarians and octagenarians against whom the evidence is
shaky, and often consists of little more than that they were members of a
force some of whose other members are known to have committed crimes.
Now what the Viet Nam documentary that I mentioned above reminded me of is
that if Americans were impartially interested in prosecuting people who
were guilty of crimes without regard to the nationality of those people, or
without regard to where and when those crimes were committed, then they
have walking among them many thousands of Viet Nam veterans, and military
personnel at all levels right up to the secretary of defense, Robert
McNamara, who are guilty of war crimes. These people have not yet gone
senile and are still strong enough to survive a prosecution. The evidence
against them is fresh, and is overwhelming � I just saw some on television
the other day � evidence of crimes sometimes comparable in magnitude to
those committed by the Germans in World War II. The war criminals
themselves have been videotaped voluntarily confessing, describing their
crimes in excruciating detail. The chief difference between the crimes of
the Nazis and those of the Americans is that the Americans often did not
have to look into the eyes of the people they were killing, but sanitized
the killing so that it could be done efficiently and coldly by pushing
buttons removed from the locus of destruction�-a detail which I would guess
would not be accepted as a defense, or even an extenuation, in an impartial
trial.
If the standards used to prosecute Nazi war criminals were adopted to
prosecuting American war criminals, then Commander-in-chief Richard Nixon,
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and
General William Westmoreland (for starters) would have been hanged
following a Nuremberg-style trial; thousands of lower-level veterans would
have been hanged or jailed for war crimes; and today branding a Viet Nam
vet as a war criminal would not even require evidence that he had
participated in any crimes � it would be enough that he had worn an American
military uniform.
And so, if a Ukrainian is known to have worn the uniform of a village
police force some of whom had collaborated in German war crimes, then he is
branded as a war criminal even in the absence of any evidence that he
directly participated in any criminal activities. But if an American
testifies to the world that he participated in the murder of Vietnamese
civilians, then he does so with a "Shucks, weren't we naughty!" attitude,
secure in the knowledge that the OSI will never come after him.
That's why the OSI should be disbanded�-it is not an instrument of
justice; it is an instrument of propaganda.
Lubomyr Prytulak