Opening the prosecution of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg in November 1945, Justice Robert Jackson, on leave from the Supreme Court, said: “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
Submitting the likes of Herman Goering, Hitler’s deputy, to the judgment of the law rather than to the summary justice of a firing squad was “one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
This stirring evocation of the dangers to civilization, and of its corresponding duty of deliberation and restraint when faced with “racial hatreds…terrorism…violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power,” is powerfully captured in Nuremberg, a movie due for theater release Nov. 7, starring Russell Crowe as Goering and Remi Malek as a psychiatrist assessing the Reichsmarschall’s fitness for trial.
To evoke the bigness of the issues at stake, the movie effectively uses the words that lawyers and defendants actually spoke at trial, and sensitively deploys archival footage of concentration camp horrors. The result is a powerful creation that, in September, was given the longest standing ovation ever recorded at the Toronto Film Festival, where Nuremberg was first publicly screened.
The trial was unprecedented, establishing in principle and fact, if not on the basis of case law or treaty, that men who plan and execute aggressive war, especially if it involves deliberate killing of civilians, can be tried and will receive judicial punishment.
In 1999, for example, the Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević was tried for war crimes in Kosovo, with Nuremberg as the precedent. But he died of a heart attack before the hearings ended. He thus cheated the hangman, just as Goering had done with cyanide half a century earlier.
Exact parallels across history are rare, and it is difficult to envisage a modern Nuremberg-style tribunal being as effective again as was the original. War crimes are obviously being committed by Russia in Ukraine, with civilians targeted and murdered as acts of terrorism under the ultimate command of President Vladimir Putin. But to put Putin on trial would require his capture, which is highly unlikely other than in the nearly inconceivable event that Russia is utterly defeated. One of the prerequisites of the Nuremberg trial was that Germany surrender unconditionally. The allies could do whatever they wanted.
It gets even harder to imagine another Nuremberg-style trial being as achievable, let alone as salutary, in dealing with any of the other illegal warfare now being perpetrated with “racial hatred, terrorism and…the arrogance and cruelty of power.”
Look at the massacres being inflicted as you read this by Islamist paramilitaries in Sudan. They are rampaging through western Sudan after routing the national armed forces, and they are murdering thousands of civilian men, women, and children, including patients at a maternity hospital.
These are obviously heinous criminal outrages, or at least it is obvious to anyone reading this article. But unlike the Nazis, who knew they were perpetrating a terrible wrong and who took pains to lie and conceal their involvement, the Sudanese killers are proud, not ashamed of what they are doing. They post selfie videos grinning and shouting “Allahu akbar,” (God is great) against a massacre backdrop littered with burning cars and corpses.
They want global audiences to see what they are doing. They are not ashamed because they do not share our values. They are imitating Hamas terrorists, who on Oct. 7, 2023, took pains to capture and disseminate video of themselves murdering, beheading, burning, and kidnapping civilians in southern Israel. They did this, calculating with shocking prescience that it would win them support around the world, not merely horrified condemnation of decent people.
Not only do these Islamists reject the suggestion that what they are doing is wrong, but their reversal of the truth — they are the freedom fighters and their victims are oppressors — is supported by legions of Western left-wingers and some on the right. We cannot any longer agree that even chopping off a living civilian’s head with an agricultural hoe is wrong.
Everyone who cleaves to the principles that underpinned the Nuremberg trial of Nazis should support putting Hamas leaders on trial for the pogrom they perpetrated against the Jews two years ago. It was as pure an example of racial hatred, terrorism, arrogance, and cruelty, as can be imagined.
But what war crimes charges have actually emerged from the Israel-Hamas war? Why, they have been laid against the Jews. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants last year not against Hamas terrorists or their billionaire masters who are holed up in Qatar, but against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on the false grounds that they “used starvation as a method of warfare.”
Here we see the great principle and precedent set by the trial at Nuremberg utterly corrupted. In taking over international institutions such as the ICC, leftism has also corrupted the principles on which it was founded. Indeed, the principles are gone, except that they are cited in the furtherance not of justice but of ideological strife.
This has split the civilized world. Governments and individuals fundamentally disagree about whether racial hatred, terrorism, arrogance, and cruelty are wrong. It depends entirely on who is perpetrating the horrors.
If it is the work of Arabized Africans, it is acceptable, or at least prompts no action or even protest from those who falsely decry it in Israel, fighting a defensive war for its continued existence. In this case it is Jews who are accused of being Nazis.
BILL GATES SEES THE CLIMATE LIGHT
Everyone, except a nasty fringe group on the extreme right, recognizes that actual Nazis, such as the men tried and convicted at Nuremberg, were monsters who had to be punished. Unfortunately, however, such consensus is possible only because the crimes were committed nearly a century ago and the perpetrators were white supremacists who also controlled the government of a nation-state.
It is harder, not to say impossible, to reach consensus to condemn the same sort of behavior when perpetrated today by dark-skinned terrorists in pursuit of ends supported by the left half of the international ideological spectrum. The perpetrators are not men who lead a nation-state but men who, while showing themselves utterly unfit for the role, demand that they be allowed to do so.