As a promise to myself in retirement I have been watching great films I missed the first time around. Last night it was Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremburg, which has a timeliness for today's war-morality issues despite its grounding in World War II and early Cold War politics.
Granting wars by nature are fairly nasty affairs, the Nuremburg court instead was charged to bring justice in the special matter of "war crimes." (As if making war itself escapes the scope of crime--like maybe it's just an extension of diplomacy by dramatic means). Ostensibly trying to assess responsibility of civilian leadership for the Holocaust, the drama repeatedly reveals more than enough wrongdoing to go around and examines the hypocrisy inherent in winners judging losers.
While the justices in question formulate verdicts and sentences appropriate to their best thinking--with even one of the defendants agreeing to their decision--the world has moved on. A reversal of enemy and ally occurs when the Soviet Union institutes the blockade of West Berlin. American authorities realize they must eventually restore at least West Germany to the status of European military power to maintain a balance on the continent. They urge the justices to soften judgments and sentences to the requirements of Realpolitick.
The American justice (Spencer Tracy) has been honestly trying to ascertain all of the factors confronting the German judges under Nazi rule. Finally he determines that, however much they sought to limit the abuses of the Nazis, by knowingly cooperating with them in the sterilization or execution of even one innocent, the German judges had opened the door to the slaughter of millions.
I found it a compelling drama, something like a meditation on what happens to us as we cooperate in any way with evil, tempted by the prospect (as usual) of accomplishing even greater good. The same topic challenges us today in many ways.
We use a somewhat sloppy "targeted killing" technique (drone warfare) in which we "take out" (date? No, murder.) people maybe only suspected of plotting terror against us. If we kill anyone else with them we assure ourselves they deserved it for hanging around with suspected terrorists. We don't never kill no innocents. Besides war is war and that's allowed, right? Better them than us, right? Anyway my country right or wrong.
We maintain an enormous supply of weapons which cannot be used morally in any sense. In this I agree with the Iranian Islamic authorities who hold atomic weapons as inherently immoral. Yet we keep them, underscoring our very credible threat to use them. We are the only nation which has used them. Doesn't that make us the most monstrous terrorists in the world?
Then there's that sticky problem of torture. President Obama said we have forbidden the use of torture. But we haven't given up rendering our prisoners to nations who haven't got our good manners. "Look forward not back," he said. If we did look back, would we stop with Bush II, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld? Or might we have to look at Clinton, Bush I, Reagan, Carter, et cetera?
It appears we have a longer history of waterboarding than we'd like to think: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175653/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_the_hidden_history_of_water_torture/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=d0fecba228-TD_Turse
Love, Peace, and Hope,
James Manista
PS: I have begun blogging at Blogger under the title The Whole Truth and Nothing But. Most of what I've posted so far are earlier writings. When I get through that stash I'll switch to more of postings like this.
No comments:
Post a Comment