I ask this - that you watch the 6 minutes plus of the video I have embedded here.
If you want, just ponder what you have seen. Or if so inclined, you might continue below the fold to see if I have anything of value to add. . .
The movie "Judgment at Nuremberg" was released in 1961. Abby Mann adapted it from his television drama. It was nominated for 11 Oscars, winning 2, for Mann's adapted screenplay and for Maximilian Schell as best actor playing a German defense lawyer.
I am writing this in the early evening on Sunday, knowing I will post it on Monday. Leaves on the Current and I had returned from a pleasant day, visiting craftsmen whose work we admired at the Mountain Heritage Arts & Crafts Festival, encountering people new to us whose work appealed to us, coming back to a leisurely light meal at a favorite hangout not far from home.
We returned to our domicile and embarked on some domestic tasks. I took a break, and while I sipped a beverage turned on the tv, to encounter the end of the film.
Judgment -
The scene above hit me hard. Perhaps it is that like many I am still not happy at the lack of accountability for when those in authority in this nation do wrongs. Perhaps it is because justice cannot be meaningful if it is only the punishments administered by victors upon the defeated.
You can read the entire speech offered by Tracy as Judge Hayward here.
Let me focus on parts.
The real complaining party at the bar in this courtroom is civilization.
If civilization does not insist on standards and hold to account those who violate them, then there are no standards, and the very idea of civilization is itself in peril.
The principle of criminal law in every civilized society has this in common: Any person who sways another to commit murder, any person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of the crime, any person who is an accessory to the crime — is guilty.
who sways another by political persuasion or military order, it does not and should not matter. All who participate in what violates civilized law are guilty, and no rationalizing can make it otherwise.
But this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary — even able and extraordinary — men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat through the trial can ever forget them: men sterilized because of political belief; a mockery made of friendship and faith; the murder of children. How easily it can happen.
In our time, the rationalization of collateral damage of wedding parties by weaponized drones operated from sealed rooms half a world away, rationalization of torture, and of ghost prisoners . . .
There are those in our own country too who today speak of the "protection of country" — of "survival." A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient — to look the other way.
If we use the means of the enemy, do not we lower ourself to that level we claim to abhor?
If expediency is the standard, if what works is the standard, then where is there any morality? Is not then the only standard success, and there is no cost to be measured or morality to be asserted?
Where then do we begin to draw lines and say some things are simply not acceptable? What then do we teach our children about right and wrong, that if it works it is okay, or if no one catches you there is no crime?
Well, the answer to that is "survival as what?" A country isn’t a rock. It’s not an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult.
Which is why the ticking time bomb scenarios we have been offered, the rationalization that are opponents are not national actors and thus not protected by international law are so corrosive to the principles on which this country was theoretically founded.
Our Constitution and its amendments speak not of citizens but of persons - whether those be enemy aliens, resident aliens, undocumented aliens, are not they still persons?
Have we forgotten the words so many of us learned from Shakespeare, in the speech of Shylock, which should caution us that as we act towards others we can expect them to act towards us? Perhaps I can refresh minds with this:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes; hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer that a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? why revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
And should any attempt to use these words of the Bard to rationalize acting towards others as they have acted towards us, is the standard that if some acts with cruelty towards us we are supposed to act with similar or greater cruelty? An eye for an eye? Making the whole world blind?
We teach not by our words alone, but especially by our actions. Every parent surely knows that. Any teacher paying attention is painfully aware that if her words are contrary to her actions what the students will learn is the actions, for that is the reality.
If we rationalize our wrongdoing, we justify similar wrongdoing on the part of others.
To return to the movie speech, the conclusion before imposition of sentence, the final words of the speech:
Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.
The final words of the speech. But not of the lesson. Not of the movie.
One German judge, Janning, has acknowledged his wrongdoing. After he and the others have been sentenced to life imprisonment, he asks to see Judge Hayward. He acknowledges that his sentence was just. He entrusts the American Judge with the best recollection he can make of the cases he perverted. And then there is this exchange:
From Janning:
Judge Haywood...
the reason I asked you to come...
Those people...
those millions of people.
I never knew it would come to that.
You must believe it.
And Hayward responds:
Herr Janning...
it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.
Great art is not necessarily history. But it may provide an even deeper truth.
Unwillingness to look back, to hold to account, harms us all.
Justice deferred is a perversion of justice. It is even more than a denial of justice.
It is a judgment not to hold to account.
It is a decision to allow wrongdoing to be uncorrected, to allow wrongdoers to go free with impunity.
Today I saw the end of a movie.
Today I was again reminded that we have as a people and a nation been unwilling to hold ourselves to the standard we imposed on others.
It does not matter that our crimes were not so great, that we did not slaughter 6 million in extermination camps and by mobile execution squads. It does not matter that we did not start a war that destroyed many millions more lives.
Two lines from the movie - words in a drama but words that should speak to us with power, and move us to demand that we act.
The first: Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.
For if we unless we accept that, the value of a single human being, then we will find ourselves damned by the words of the final line: it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent
What will be our judgment? Will it be justice?
I wonder . . . .