BELFAST RB BOOKLET 2020 - Flipbook - Page 83
Ci t y of Belf ast Grand Bl ack Chapt er - Dem onst rat i on Bookl et 2020
In Japan, the head of the occupation,
General Douglas MacArthur, broke up
the zaibatsu, the large conglomerate
cliques, that were blamed for supporting
Japanese militarists, and in turn he
introduced a range of reforms, from a new
school curriculum to a populist
constitution, designed to turn Japan into
a peaceful, electable democracy.
Special tribunals then charged those
thought responsible for crimes against
peace, war crimes and the catalogue of
horrors that came increasingly regarded as ..
'crimes against humanity' .. whereby in Tokyo,
leading Japanese generals and politicians
stood trial, and at Nuremberg senior Nazis
(those who had not committed suicide or
escaped), also appeared in the dock, before
corporate Allied judge panels.
Many folk however pondered if in fact the
trials were merely for moral justice, with an
example of this being in Tokyo, where the
emperor, in whose name inhumane crimes
had been committed, was actually shielded
from any attributable blame.
The trials were set up to form part of a larger
attempt to root out the militaristic and
chauvinistic attitudes that had helped to
produce the war, and in turn to build a new
world order hopefully preventing such
catastrophic happenings ever again.
Among the major western powers, the USA
which was very much the dominant partner in
the Alliance, took the lead.
In his 'FOUR FREEDOMS' speech in January
1941, President Roosevelt (above right)
talked of a new and more just world, with ..
'freedom of speech and expression and of
religion, and freedom from
want and fear. '
Later that year, in the
Atlantic Charter, both he
and Winston Churchill
sketched out a world order
based on such liberal
principles
as
collective
security,
national
self-
determination, and free trade among nations.
A host of other allies, some of them
represented by governments in exile, also and
readily signed on.
The Soviet Union back then may have
given a qualified assent, however its leader
Stalin never had any intention of accepting
what were to him .. 'alien principles.'
Roosevelt intended that the American vision
would take a solid institutional form within a
new United Nations (UN) organisation,
replacing the weaker, and former, League of
Nations but just as before, Stalin again merely
gave his grudging support.
The idea of universal standards being
upheld was now present, though not totally
perfect, particularly within the war crimes trials.
However the 1945 establishment of the
UN was soon to be reinforced in the
following year by the formation of the
International Court of Justice and further
endorsed in 1948 by the introduction of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This grand alliance held together uneasily
for the first few months of the peace, but the
strains were much in evident in their shared
occupation of Germany, where
increasingly the Soviet's zone of
occupation was moving in a
communistic
direction;
whilst the western zones,
under Britain, France and
the US all remained in the
more capitalist, though still, a
democratic one.
IN MEMORY OF THE FALLEN - 81 - AND THE FUTURE OF THE LIVING