who authorized the code, was the mihtary officer who also gavernGeneral Sherman’s soldiers their carte blanche to burn, loot,rnmurder, and rape their way across what had been the richestrnsection of the United States. This same government and samernofficer bore responsibility for setting up the first concentrationrncamp, designed to intern possibly pro-Southern Indians in thernSouthwest; this same government’s troops in Colorado massacredrnan Indian encampment at Sand Creek at the very samerntime that their comrades-in-arms were putting the torch to therncities of Atlanta and Columbia.rnI have dwelled upon the war crimes of the United States, notrnbecause I hate my country or want to blacken its reputation.rnMany other countries have worse records. But war is usually arndirty business, and few nations have clean hands. One factrnalone should make us despise the entire procedure set up atrnNuremberg: the fact that Stalin, his hands reeking with thernblood of 50 million victims, was one of the prosecutors. Nonernof the Nazi defendants, perhaps not even Hitler, could matchrnStalin, who even managed to prosecute the Germans for thernmassacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest—a crime committedrnby the Russians themselves.rnThe so-called New World Orderrnthat so many American conservativesrnare obsessed with is onlyrnthe American Empire doing businessrnunder a new logo.rnUnderneath all the horror stories of rape camps and massrnmurder, there is an underlying principle to the State Departmentrnline, and it is this: Human beings are individuals whosernonly group affiliation is to a state that protects their humanrnrights. Differences of religion and nationality are insignificant,rnand it is morally wrong for members of one group to discriminaternagainst members of another. In Bosnia, for example, thisrnmeans that a Serb would be wrong not to want a Muslim tornmove into his neighborhood or to prevent his daughter fromrnmarrying a Muslim. When these prejudices become a policy ofrntrying to preserve a Serb village or ensure Serbian political andrnmilitary control over an area, the acts are not only wrong butrncriminal.rnFrom this perspective, all the parties in Bosnia are guilty ofrnhuman rights violations, but the Serbs are guiltier than the rest.rnWhy? Because the Muslims, in their desire to control the entirernregion (let us not make the mistake of calling it a country)rncould play the multicultural card—some of the descriptions ofrnSarajevo make it sound like San Francisco or Madison, Wisconsin;rneven the Croats—once they were bullied into forming arnfederation with the Muslims—they, too, were grudgingly multicultural.rnOnly the Serbs were honest in declaring their intentions,rnwhich was to have either a separate Serbian state or else arnBosnian Serb republic within what is left of Yugoslavia. In therneyes of the international community, that desire by itself is arnwar crime.rnNow, I am not going to try to tell you that Bill Clinton andrnMadeleine Albright really care about human rights. In fact, arnglance at the Geneva Convention will reveal at once thernhypocrisy of the United States and Germany, since the preamblernto the latest version adopted in 1977 contains this loftyrnstatement: “Every state has the duty, in conformity with thernCharter of the United Nations, to refrain in its international relationsrnfrom the threat or use of force against the sovereignty,rnterritorial integrity or political independence of any State.”rnWhat else was the breakup of Yugoslavia but the threat and thernuse of force against that nation’s territorial integrity?rnWhere did such an idea come from? Since the Renaissance,rnphilosophers have dreamed of such an internationalrnlaw, and by the 18th century most European nationsrnwere waging war according to certain rules which forbade thernmurder of prisoners and excessive mistreatment of civilians.rnIn one sense, this is only good business: if wars are frequent,rnthen whatever the Germans do to the French, they may, inrnthe course of a few years, get a taste of their own medicine.rnThe rule of tit-for-tat develops spontaneously even duringrnmodern wars: in World War I, for example, French and Germanrnsoldiers respected each other’s mess times and struck up a tradernin cigarettes, wine, and food, until their officers put a stoprnto it.rnBut the kind of international law that has developed in thern20th century is neither pragmatic nor humane. It is a kind ofrnreligion—the glowing noxious gas given off from the decay ofrnWestern Christianity. Religious people, who see the image ofrnGod in their fellow human beings, are sometimes reluctant tornindulge in gratuitous brutality. But Western society has beenrnonly superficially Christian for the past two centuries, and internationalrnhuman rights are simply the idea of divine law withrnGod left out. Since, for people like Helmut Kohl, MadeleinernAlbright, and Bill Clinton, there is no god but ambition, power,rnand wealth, they are forced to disguise their crimes and doubledealingrnwith the rhetoric of human rights and international law.rnThis idea of human rights has been kicking around for aboutrn500 years, but it took concrete shape during the French Revolution,rnwhen the Jacobins proclaimed their Declaration of thernRights of Man—the right to life and property, the freedom ofrnthought and religion. But what they did was a dress-rehearsalrnfor Russian communism: they destroyed churches, murderedrnpriests, raped nuns; they confiscated property, massacred arnlarge part of the upper class, and waged a genocidal war of exterminationrnagainst the Catholics of the Vendee. They evenrncreated a whole class of people called “suspects” who had norncivil rights, and there were proposals to take the children of suspectsrnaway in order to indoctrinate them.rnThe Soviet constitution, too, breathes with the warm glow ofrnhuman rights, and since World War II the nations of the worldrnhave ratified or endorsed or proposed charter after charter onrnwomen’s rights, children’s rights, religious rights, and ethnicrnrights. During exactly the same period, the civilized wodd hasrnwitnessed an epidemic of child prostitution. Fifty years ago arnman who assaulted a little girl or a little boy would not have tornworry about getting a fair trial, because he would never havernlived that long. The same goes for the rapist and the childmurderer.rnNow these psychopaths and degenerates are veryrnunlucky if they have to spend five years in a psychiatric hospital.rn12/CHRONICLESrnrnrn