r/Foodforthought

Excerpts:

You needn’t be a law-of-war expert to render judgment on Trump’s threat this week. If he wants to bomb power plants and clean-water facilities, seemingly to punish the Iranians as a way to get leverage over the regime, it’s obviously immoral. But there’s also a term in international law for deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure to inflict suffering on a population. That word is “war crime.”

And if he carries out war crimes with impunity, the West will have lost whatever moral authority remains in its grasp. The Geneva Conventions, the laws of armed conflict, and the architecture of rules designed to spare civilians from the worst of war are symbolic of all that we stand for in the West — of how democracy restrains our inner demons. But those principles are not self-enforcing. They’ve endured because Western nations, led by the United States, treated them as binding on themselves first. The moment America becomes the country that bombs desalination plants and calls it diplomacy, we have not merely broken a rule. We have announced the rules are dead. Every authoritarian watching in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang will take notice.

Excerpts:

He wanted it big. He wanted lots of gold, lots of marble. He wanted visitors awestruck by his architectural expansion of the country’s symbolic seat of power. “They should sense the strength and grandeur of the German Reich as they walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Adolf Hitler told his chief architect, Albert Speer, outlining his plans for an extension to the old Reich chancellery, at Wilhelmstrasse 77 in Berlin.

Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

In the coming years, Hitler would employ his Reich chancellery extension as a marble-and-gold-gilt symbol for impressing celebrities, most notably film and stage actors, and for intimidating foreign dignitaries.