Reply #60: You Mis-Read The Statute, Sir

[The Magistrate]

The International Criminal Court has not done so. You continue to ommit the element of intent, without which the acts listed do not constitute genocide. Nor does the committal of some of these acts establish genocide is occuring. Any act of war kills members of the group with which hostile relations exist, and causes serious bodily harm and mental distress to other members of it, and frequently inflicts on it conditions that could well lead to its destruction if the war should persist long enough. Buit war is not genocide, and no judge in a war crimes tribunal woiuld rule that it was. You might as well argue that the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq makes the U.S. the victim of genocide at the hands of various Iraqi and jihadi militia bodies, or that the attacks of 2001 were genocide: these things, after all, kill or killed some members of a recognizeable national group, and inflicted serious bodily harm and mental distress on other members of it. Indeed, you could even argue that the killing of a single person, if they are a member of a recognizeable national, etc., group, constitutes the crime of genocide, on the line you are pressing.

"They say war is an art, but it's not. It mostly consists in outwitting people, robbing widows and orphans, and inflicting suffering on the helpless for one's own ends, and that's not art: that's business."