Via the progressive political web site Blue Mass. Group and Newsweek magazine, I came across an insightful and relevant quotation from Robert Jackson, a highly-regarded Supreme Court justice who was appointed the chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal at the end of World War II. In his opening statement, Jackson said:That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.Those are brilliant and profound words. Christopher Dodd, the Democratic senator from Connecticut whose father was an assistant prosecutor to Jackson at the war crimes trial, says that Nuremberg is "the place where America's moral authority in the second half of the 20th century was born." Now, Dodd fears, the US has squandered that authority in Iraq.
The aggression of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (and their allies) led to six years of war, unrivaled destruction and at least 60,000,000 dead, yet America and her allies had the principles and the foresight to use the rule of law in dealing with its enemies -- something the Axis powers had not done. In this era of secret detention sites, indefinite terms of imprisonment and acceptable degrees of torture, our nation would do well to take note of the examples that our war-weary forefathers set for us and to aim at nothing lower than the bar that they so wisely and courageously set.
1 comment:
At one time we were the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now it’s patriotic to be afraid and patriotic to be willing to give up some freedoms. I always told my kids when they were growing up to take the high road, be able to look at yourselves in the mirror and like what you see. Do we like what we see when we hold up a mirror on ourselves now. Unfortunately I think a large part of the country has stopped looking.
9-11 could have made us better, could have fundamentally changed this country’s direction. Unfortunately we are ruled by cowards, who when it came to choosing the high road, sent brave people off to fight for them, and we were told to go shopping.
The sadness of 9-11 isn’t found in the lives lost, it is bigger than that. The sadness of 9-11 is in what we have become, what we could have been.
The America of the Nuremberg Trials is now the America of secret trials and Abu Ghraib. Unfortunately we have gone by the bar our war-weary forefathers set and being wise and courageous isn’t in our leaders vocabulary anymore.
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