I have a bone to pick with columnist Charley Reese. In a recent article he was commenting on the upcomming military trials of terrorist suspects. He says that this is just vengance dressed as Law and no better than the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals…in his mind there seems to be no such think as a war crime. he begins by saying:
“President Bush is correct to refer to the proposed military trials of the six alleged terrorists as similar to the Nuremberg trials of several Nazis. In both cases, the law is made a farce.”
I would not applaud our Commander in Chief’s use of comparative history. It downgrades the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Flying a suicide mission in an airplane was not new. The target was different, the aircraft were commercial and filled with innocent civilians but these were means to an end and not an end in themselves. The Nazis’ camps were dissaembly lines. It was murder on an industrial level. There was no target other than extermination. Again, I am not saying that taking aircraft passengers hostage and flying them into a building is not horrible, but compared to Nazis’ crimes…there is no comparasion. We have seen religious wars. We have seen suicide attacks, but we never saw and hopefully never will the world see again the Nazi machine of genocide. Mr Reese continues:
“In the case of the Nazis, if the Allies wanted vengeance, and they did, they should have rounded up the Nazi leadership and shot them. That, at least, would have been an honest act of vengeance. Instead, they set up a propaganda farce at Nuremberg and pretended they were going to provide a fair trial to the defendants.”
Mr Reese seems to be ignorant of what did happened during the trials, although I cannot fanthom why that is, since he is old enough to have been close to the events. If Nuremberg was just propaganda and the outcome never in question that they would all be shot then how come some were not shot and some even found innocent of the charges made against them? Some like Albert Speer were given 20 years imprisionment…so much for vengance by firing squad. Maybe Mr Reese would have preferred firing squads right away, but that would have made martyrs and given credit to the Nazi ideology. The trials were made to expose the moral and philosophical bankarupcy of the Nazi ideology. Is that propaganda? Not when the opposite result is obviously repugnant.
Our author though contests that the germans had violated no law…no positive law perhaps. The laws of germany had obviously been made to favor the nefarius designs of the Third Reich. So what then? Is the holocaust not a crime because the executioner’s Law said this was legal? This, interestingly enough was Goering’s defense, and now an american is going to repeat it? As he sees it: “The Allies, to remedy that, dreamed up some laws that had hitherto not existed.”
So there is not a virtually universal condemnation for murdering innocents? Is it not immoral? And is not Law prescriptive of moral values? Does it not direct the population by proscribing what it ought to or ought not to do?
Fine, ignore my questions, but here is another argument: Positive Law is just that: dreaming up laws that had hitherto not existed. The allies then pursued justice as everyone has done before and will so after.
Mr Reese adds:
“They said that launching a war of aggression was a crime. If that’s the case, George W. Bush had better stay out of the reach of any international tribunal, because that’s exactly what he did in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
He has a point here, but that was not the only accusation. Counts 1 and 2 were directed to the method of conducting war, and we must admit that the germans were very original in their performance of a war. They certainly were not guided by the priciples set by Von Clawswitz. Counts 3 and 4 are linked to the holocaust. Mr Reese has a particular view on the matter:
“Then they said that there was such a thing as a crime against humanity. Since humanity encompasses the whole human race, and since no Nazi crime was ever committed beyond the reach of the German army, which was confined to Europe and, for a short time, North Africa, obviously the Nazis were not guilty of that.”
A crime against humanity is not a crime against the entire population of the earth but against a body of people. You don’t need to attack every people on earth, but pursue, on a large scale, the demise of a body of people, of a people.
The Mr Reese says in brief:
“All I’m saying is that it was a mistake to disguise vengeance in the robes of the law. Doing so made a farce of the rule of law, and we are paying for it today. We are now stuck with an international tribunal free to charge anyone with “crimes against humanity” on a purely arbitrary basis. Practically, that means any petty leader unfortunate enough to lose a war can find himself on trial. Some Israeli leaders, for example, are afraid to travel in Europe, lest they be arrested and charged with war crimes.”
First of all, in my opinion, Law is always arbitrary. Asks yourself if someone ever asked you whether marihuana should be illegal or if the speed limit should be 55-65 mph? Do you know all the Laws? I doubt, but that won’t stop someone from charging you with a crime, though it would be an arbitrary indictment. For polygamists, their custom should be legal, but the goverment has arbitraterly concluded that it should be illegal. That is how stuff works. Laws are not unanimous so therefore, for some, it has to be arbitrary. Second of all, the nazis were not “petty”, the holocaust was not just “petty” anything. The gravity of the circumstances justified the proceedings in my opinion. People jump to quickly to equate Bush with Hitler or Israelis with Nazis which is ridiculous and sad.