Chapter 5 and 6 Flashcards
What is government?
The entity that produces, implements, and administers a society’s laws.
We must distinguish among those governmental or political actions…
- Prohibited by the state’s laws
- Those defined as criminal by international law
- Those regarded as criminal on some other criteria of harmfulness not necessarily recognized by either the state’s laws or international law
When does prosecution of state crime and political white collar crime may involve some unique difficulties?
When the accused are part of the lawmaking and enforcement apparatus
What is perhaps the broadest charge associated with governmental crime?
Abuse of Power
When does abuse of power occur?
When the state assumes and exercises power it ought not to have
What is the second basic concept associated with governmental crime?
Corruption
What does corruption most typically involve?
The misuse of political office for material advantage, although it encompasses acts undertaken for political advantage.
What has corruption been applied to narrowly?
- The violation of specific laws
- Typically for some form of payment
- More loosely as deviation from ideal or expected patterns of behavior
What is probably the activity most closely associated with political corruption?
Bribery
What is anarchism?
The state is inherently aggressive and fundamentally unnecessary
What had been even more destructive than imperialistic endeavors?
Waging of war
What does jus post bellum mean?
Justice after war
What has been identified as war crimes
- The use of poisonous gases
- Biological and chemical weapons
- Nuclear weapons
- Mines
- Indiscriminate attacks against civilians
- Carpet bombing
- Collateral damage to civilian targets
- Gratuitous attacks on dams, dikes, waterworks, and nuclear stations
- Wanton destruction of property and theft
- Enslavement
- Forced labor
- Enforced prostitution
- Systematic rape
- Hostage taking
- Genocidal actions
- Use of death squads to murder civilians
- Reprisal killings
- Collective punishment
- Use of child soldiers
- Mistreatment of prisoners of war
What has been widely condemned as criminal by many people all over the world?
U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War
What are the specific accusations of illegality by U.S. forces?
- Use of napalm during air strikes
- Chemical warfare
- Torture of prisoners
- Burning of villages
- Illegal detention of civilians
- Bombing of hospitals and dikes
- Moral corruption
- Sabotage of the Vietnamese economy
What was the My Lai Massacre?
504 Vietnamese men, women, and children were killed by Lt. William Calley and his troops in 1968.
What are the more recent U.S. military ventures?
- Invasions of Grenada and Panama
- Mining of Managua (Nicaragua) harbor
- Gulf War against Iraq
- Participation in the NATO action
- Actions in Afghanistan in 2002 as part of war against terrorism
- “Operation Iraqi Freedom”
What may be the single most prominent case of a state widely labeled as criminal because its criminality was virtually its defining feature?
Nazi Germany
What is genocide?
Crimes against humanity/killing your own kind
What happened during the regime of Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge?
2 million Cambodian urbanites, members of the intelligentsia, and others murdered
What is perhaps the single most dramatic, fully documented, and extreme case of genocide ever?
The Holocaust by the Nazis during WWII
What elicited little attention from the United States or other countries?
The alleged killing of between 300-400,000 people in the Darfur region of Sudan and the displacement of some 2 million people in 2003-05
What is a repressive state?
Does not go so far as waging a formal campaign of genocide, but it is systematically deprives its citizens of fundamental human rights
When was the United Nations formed?
After WWII, partly in response to the gross and conspicuous abuse of the most fundamental human rights by the totalitarian gov’ts of the time