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War CrimesArbitrarily, after World War II, the victorious Allies decided that certain behaviors, long tolerated during wartime, were suddenly "War Crimes" and therefore prosecutable. This renders a sheen of legitimacy over the expected mass execution of the opposition leadership. Of course, war crimes with the fortune of having been committed by the Allies themselves were overlooked: to the victors belong the spoils. One could argue that the Holocaust is atrocity enough to justify this sheen, and this is no doubt true; but the Japanese did not participate in extermination of European Jewry; they were prosecuted for fighting an aggressive war, regarded as a virtue prior to the Allied victory. Witness the Spanish-American War.
Geneva Conventions
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