Umm, although this is rather off topic, I must disagree on virtually every point here.
The British plans to invade Norway were forestalled by the Nazi invasion, which was supported by a military coup by Vidkun Quisling.
True. Doesn't change the fact that the British planned and damn near executed this war crime. To say "forestalled" is to say "the invasion troops were already in their ships, but Hitler (and poor weather) defeated them by less than a week"! The charges on
planning the war of aggression should clearly have applied to Britain as well.
The "coup" by Quisling is often exaggerated in history, anyway. Quisling was a clown, and his coup was performed against a military that no longer existed, having dissolved when the Germans captured its bases and commanders one by one.
Vichy France was an ally of Nazi Germany, hosting air bases as I recall, which was in a full state of war with UK.
Not really. Vichy France was at peace with everybody when the Royal Navy first bombarded its ports. The strikes against Vichy naval forces were wholly preemptive, performed out of fear that Vichy
would ally with Hitler some time in the future. Miracuously enough, Vichy did not declare war on Britain even after having been attacked, nor did it ally with Hitler at that point.
The "hosting air bases" thing was the thin British excuse for conquering the French mandate holdings in Levant - regions approximating current Syria. But several other neutral nations allowed, in theory and sometimes in practice, similar Nazi use of their airfields. The British did not invade Spain or Sweden or Ireland or the United States for this. Although I'm sure they were itching to.
For comparison, other "invasions" of neutral entities include the takeovers of Madagaskar and Iceland, but both are quite distinct from the Vichy case. Madagaskar could be argued to have been under Free French influence to begin with, and Iceland specifically asked to be invaded. Then again, one should not forget that most of the Soviet victims also "asked to be invaded": it was a standard tactic to create a shadow "government" with its very own Quisling clone in the nations to be conquered, and then have this "government" ask for Soviet help and military presence. Germany liked to use the very same tactic, of course. (This practice even made it into the plotline of the prewar Tintin album "Spectre of Ottokar"! Talk about cynicism.)
The cases of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland are rooted in the destruction of the Russian empire, and automatically fall into a gray area. The territories "seized" from Finland and Poland can be viewed as border rectifications that correct unjust seizures by the Allies attack on Russia after WWI.
Why stop at the aftermath of WWI, though? The same areas were formerly "unjustly" seized
by Russia from their former masters.
Modern legislation on the matter is unambiguous: a war cannot be started under the pretext of continuing a previous one. A response to territorial loss is a war of aggression unless it is initiated in a "timely" fashion, as per the UN rules. The US could smack Saddam's hiney in the aftermath of the occupation of Kuwait, but the mandate for that piece of offensive action would not extend to 2003. (Nor would it extend to Clinton's cruise missile comeuppance, but that in turn came "soon" after Saddam's attempt at the life of George HW Bush, and attacks against heads of state are indeed considered just causes for a war of retribution by the UN rules.)
(Yes, the Allies attacked Russia after WWI---they were fighting the Bolsheviks.)
True. However, the Polish-Russian war of 1919-21 cannot be an excuse for the Soviet invasion by modern legal sensibilities.
Poland and Finland had separate existences in more recent times. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had not.
How so? The latter three were independent nations between the wars, and had been conquered from other political entities by the Russians in preceding times. If the excuse for Soviet aggression is "old times", then the Russians are the historical villains. If it is "immediately preceding status quo", then this is a clear-cut case of aggression against sovereign nations.
At this point, it is usually a good idea to remind people that Lithuania used to be one of the most "geographically powerful" and largest nations in Europe back when nationality began to be the "in" thing. Stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, she was no featherweight, but instead a fat target for territorial greed. To postulate that the later, humble incarnation of Lithuania would not be entitled even to whatever little sovereignty she could carve out of the world is pretty offensive. Bullies like Russia or Britain or France could stand to lose some of their turf... Not underdogs like recent Lithuania.
All the Baltic states legally oppress the Russians although most of whom were there before the existence of these states.
An interesting flip of causality here. Is this post-1990s reality in your opinion the reason why Stalin launched his war of aggression in 1940?
FWIW, Baltic legislation was among the most tolerant and alien-friendly (read: Russian-friendly) in the world prior to WWII. If there is some hatred of Russians today, I'd think it perfectly justified. Why feel any sympathy for the former evil occupation forces, which don't even deign to repent?
The point is that the issue is not simply aggression.
From the point of a war crimes discussion, the issue is exactly that simple. No amount of explaining and excusing will turn the crime of war of aggression into a non-crime by modern legal definition. The only thing that can do that is forcing the hand of the Security Council - which is how most wars that gain legitimacy today manage to gain that legitimacy.
In practical terms, old hatreds and wrongs count as legitimate
casus belli if "old" is defined as "less than two years". This is the time for mounting a "timely response" by the UN definition, and in practical military terms as well. Centuries-old grievances cannot be used as excuses for military action.
Nor is the true opposition to Victors' Justice some foolish Losers' Justice. The Nuremberg cases would not nor should not have been settled by principles of Nazi law.
Please clarify. Are you in support or opposition of Victor's Justice? By the second phrase of that paragraph, it seems you are in full support, but the first phrase is confusing.
In any case, it was a valid defense in several cases in Nürnberg that German law of the time did not condemn the action brought to question by the court. This mainly applied to actions performed before September 1939, though. In general, the Soviets were much more eager than the British or the Americans to pursue cases where a certain political decision supposedly leading to war was
retroactively defined as criminal. Such cases mainly concerned the other losing nations, not Germany, and were not part of the Nürnberg process as such, though.
Timo Saloniemi
Well, their dictates depend entirely on whose pulling the strings, I hope nobody is naive enough to think otherwise.
