
“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
Source: Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World
But as the Nazis learned in 1945, unemployed war criminals can usually find work with the new hegemonic power.
"The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege" (2011)
“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
Source: Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World
“It is a crime against the State to be powerful enough to commit one.”
C'est un crime d'État que d'en pouvoir commettre.
Araspe, act II, scene i.
Nicomède (1651)
Internationalism and Nationalism (1952)
Source: "1.The Bourgeois-Nationalist Concept of the Nation" https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1952/internationalism_nationalism/ch01.htm
Pentagon briefing, March 20, 2003 http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2072
2000s
“A king is sometimes obliged to commit crimes; but they are the crimes of his position.”
Political Aphorisms, Moral and Philosophical Thoughts (1848)
“You have taken from me the one privilege of civil war – the power of granting life to the defeated.”
Unica belli
praemia civilis, victis donare salutem,
perdidimus.
Book IX, line 1066 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia
1960s, The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement (1967)
Context: A profound judgment of today's riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, 'If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.' / The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos.
“They thought war was a game and every defeat only made them more eager to play.”
Philip of Valois, King of France, regarding his more reckless nobles, p. 4
The Grail Quest, Heretic (2003)
“A crime is something someone else commits.”
Source: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Part Two, Chapter XX