Truth & Reconciliation or Nuremberg Trials 2.0?
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As the Trump administration descends into convulsive fin de regime death throes, it is time to get serious about planning for a national reckoning. In this we are at a crossroads. In cinematic terms, it's a choice between Long Night's Journey Into Day or Hang 'Em High.
Put me in the latter category.
Some good old American rough frontier justice is what's called for with those who tore babies from their mothers' breast, declared members of a major world religion off limits to the USA, sicced no-ID stormtroopers on peaceful protesters, brazenly committed treason and golfed while a quarter million of their fellow citizens succumbed to a deadly virus. And that's only a partial list. The Trump clan has been aptly described as nothing short of a First Family crime spree.
So, bring out some pliant judges. Stage some quickie trials. And off to the gallows. Then we can begin the process of reconciliation. Badda bing. Badda boom.
I know. I know. Only in my fevered dreams. Alas, let us explore some more nuanced approaches for dealing with the criminals of our very own, home-grown Reich.
Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen recently wrote about this in the New Yorker:
American political culture turned forgiving and forgetting first into a virtue and then into a fetish. A reckoning would require a future Biden Administration to dispense with this tradition. A reckoning may take different forms—investigations, hearings, trials, public assemblies—but it must be a national project, not the heroic quest of a lone federal prosecutor, state attorney general, or investigative reporter.
Rather than prosecutions, she says, we might be better served by a national "storytelling" whereby, as with truth and reconciliation commissions, victims and oppressors freely talk about the policies and actions that damaged the nation. In doing so, leaders who made and carried out those policies would be so shamed that they would be viewed as pariahs and denied the prestigious fellowships, think tank and future government jobs and tv pundit perches typically handed out to top post-regime factotums.
Harvard professor Jill Lepore favors a slightly different approach. The truth and reconciliation model is a "terrible idea" best reserved for historical crimes on a mass scale. Trump and his cohorts in crime "should be investigated by journalists, chronicled by historians and, in some instances, tried in ordinary courts." By fortifying these institutions, the sins and crimes of bad leaders will be exposed and addressed in the courts of both public opinion and law.
My senior year college thesis in international law examined the impact of the Nuremberg war crimes trials over time. I was fascinated from an early age on why average citizens, especially of advanced industrialized countries, can descend into evil and willingly become active partners in carrying out crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes against peace. Most of the senior Nazi leaders were highly educated men from middle class families. Yet they followed the devil's path to genocide, murdering POW's, invading peaceful neighboring countries and extrajudicial killings.
The Western allies felt strongly that lack of accountability - specifically in a court of law - would only make future would-be transgressors easier formulators and accomplices in such crimes. U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, who served as chief counsel at Nuremberg, 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." Having a relative who fought for the Axis piqued my interest further.
In my diplomatic career, I actually rubbed shoulders with war criminals. These were some of the Khmer Rouge leaders responsible for the genocide of some 1.7 million of their fellow Cambodians. They participated in UN-sponsored peace negotiations to end that country's years-long civil war. I was the U.S. representative (alternating with our ambassador).
Son Sen was the Heinrich Himmler of Cambodia. He was head of the regime's own Gestapo, the Santebal, and oversaw the KR's death factory, Tuol Sleng prison. I sat across Son Sen at the negotiation table in the royal palace in Phnom Pen for a year-and-a-half. He was the most chilling human being I've ever encountered. Son Sen played a direct role in designing the prison's torture chambers and overall operations. Whole families were rounded up as enemies of the state, and methodically processed through his murder machine. Still others were used for grisly medical experiments.
Like his cohorts in the Khmer Rouge leadership, Son Sen was French-educated. He showed up at talks dressed in spiffy Thai silk suits, accompanied by KR Foreign Minister Khieu Samphan, a mild mannered, pasty-faced accomplice in murder. Son Sen had the face of a merciless killer, stone cold and utterly devoid of humanity. His few attempts to smile came off as evil sneers. If anybody deserved to meet justice, it was these men.
Justice eventually did catch up with them, in divergent ways. Khieu Samphan was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment by the UN-sponsored Khmer Rouge Tribunals in 2014. Son Sen and thirteen members of this family, including women and children, were shot to death in 1997 on orders from the dying Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. The bodies were then run over repeatedly by a truck.
The crimes of the Trump administration, of course, don't approach those of the Khmer Rouge or the Nazis. But crimes they are nonetheless. Ivory tower scholars can pontificate in their most erudite manner for a national "storytelling" and such. And maybe they're right. But color me vengeful. I've seen the bloody results of misrule up close and personal. Leave the storytelling to shame Trump's Vichy enablers in Congress. Those responsible for tearing babies from their mothers' breast, siccing secret police on their fellow citizens, colluding with Moscow and all the myriad transgressions we know about and will inevitably learn of need to be tried and, if found guilty, sentenced in courts of law. If not, expect rinse and repeat. The ground for evil will remain fertile and evil men and women will find it easier to return to the American stage.
See also:
What Are the Chances Trump Could Actually Go to Jail?
People I've Known Who Died Violent Deaths, and Deserved It: Part I