Nuremberg Undone

There is an understandable attraction to monocausal explanations. It is easier to say that poverty is the result of an individual’s moral failure. It is easier to say that extraordinary wealth is the result of the “genius” of one person. It is easier to say that America’s downfall is the result of Donald Trump. However, these explanations hide complexity, nuance, and history. They shift responsibility onto a single person, or single event, while ignoring all other factors. Nonetheless, I do believe there is a monocausal factor that can help us to understand everything that is taking place. It is analogous to a Biblical commandment or, for the scientifically minded, a cesium clock. It allows us to measure deviations from a single standard, a standard that was set at the Nuremberg Trials

The trials applied new legal standards to Nazi officials. It held that “[T]he state is not an abstract entity,” and its actions are “those of politicians who should ‘not be able to seek immunity behind the intangible personality of the state.’” (p. 283) This concept of personal responsibility for state actions, combined with the equally new legal concept of fundamental universal human rights, was the legal basis for the trials. These concepts had moved international law in a new direction.

Previously, the law held that “[T]he state must be free to act as it wished.” It could do “whatever it wanted to its nationals. It could discriminate, torture, or kill.” (p.81) Post-Nuremberg, international law prioritized the rights of the individual over the state, and major institutions (United Nations, International Criminal Court), agreements and treaties, held to this legal standard (or paid lip-service to it) to varying degrees. That is now a thing of the past. Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Modi, and Trump, have reverted to the old standard, and everything they have done can be explained as being an outright abrogation of and willful disregard of the supremacy of human rights. They have brought us back to the pre-Nuremberg Trial days, when the extermination of Jews, Roma, Poles, Russians, and many others, was “technically” legal. As a result, the Trumplicans answer to no one. They do not care who is maimed, tortured, or killed, in part because they are soulless creatures, and in part because they believe rights, laws, treaties, and so on, do not apply to them. Ironically, it is Nazified-Jews like Stephen Miller who has resurrected and repackaged ethnic cleansing and eugenics as the means to making America great again. The Trumplicans are taking us down the fork in the road that FDR had avoided. We have entered Americanized fascism.

(Quoted material comes from East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” by Philippe Sands)

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