If only GOD was a book acquisitions editor in London or New York ....

...HE probably say "we seem to have plenty of books on enacted war crimes but what about the even bigger war crimes that were crimes of intention , not of fully carried out action ?"

Because Christians - along with a lot of other religions and even some non-religious people - believe that it is mental intentions , even more than as actual actions, that makes something a crime and a mortal sin.

So when two drunk teens shove each other around outside a bar and one drunk hits a rail and dies, this is less a crime (or a sin) than a spouse who cold-bloodedly hires a hit-man to kill their spouse , but who is foiled when the police get wind of it first.

One person dead in case a , no one dead in case b.

The churches and the public (and sometimes even the police, the crown and judges here in Nova Scotia ) tend to regard the second crime as far worse than the first.

But the same set of moral values does not seem to apply in the case of war crimes that were intended or could have been foresee .

Podgorica bombings a war crime ?

The Holocaust has seen many books published about it because it is clearly a major war crime in intent --- and in actions carried out.

But Allied bombings of transport facilities or factories in occupied cities such as Podgorica, Montenegro when you know bombing inaccuracies routinely means most bombs fall off target and kill civilians - isn't that fully a war crime  ?

(Particularly as under international law the last recognized government of that country has to approve any bombardment of enemy troops occupying its lands - and this wasn't done in this particular case.)

And the German Hunger Plan intended to kill far more people (most of the peoples in the western end of the old Russian Empire) than all the Jews in the entire world .

If the absolute death count (intended or actual) remains a good moral measure of a war crime, was this not something we should be given the opportunity to read more about ?

True, the Hunger Plan was only partially carried out , while the Jewish Holocaust was mostly carried out - but is this a good enough reason to see it almost totally ignored ?

(In fact, the central and eastern Jewish Holocausts would still have happened, inside the workings out of the Hunger Plan.)

Allied War Crimes of reckless disregard and of intent

Similarly, in late 1942 - early 1943, the medical elite in America and Britain (shamefully me-tooed by the rest of the Allied world's medical elites), decided to "finesse" their way around the possibility of a repeat of WWI's pandemic of Spanish flu-pneumonia .

That potential pandemic would be caused by :

(A) the failure of the only possible current cure (Sulfa drugs) due to rapidly growing bacterial resistance to those drugs.

(B) the Allies' refusal to massively ramp up production of the only currently available alternative cure, penicillin, by all means possible.

A repeat of the WWI pandemic , due to the expanded war area and a bigger world population , would probably have killed more people than WWII actually did kill from combat-like causes ranging from bullets to deliberate starvation.

How would the citizens of Nuremberg have regarded being sat in judgement upon by lawyers from Allied nations that had permitted an even greater death toll than anything Hitler had dreamed up ?

No pandemic happened in WWII's Allied world - though during some winters large outbreaks of respiratory disease had the authorities secretly panicking.

So human editors say - "yes our medical leaders' intentions were recklessly evil - but do one died as a result - so where's the crime ? I don't see a book ."

Is there any wonder that I sometimes wish I was sending my manuscript of "Pax Penicillia" off to  God-the-book-acquistions-editor ?