Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

The Nuremberg Trials, after the 1945 fall of the 3rd Reich.

I'm glad they happened, but from a purely legal POV they're highly questionable.

I've always wondered about this. Not only were the actions legal in Germany at the time but the international laws and human rights didn't exist yet either.

If you also consider that recently many dictators and criminals never even went to the The Hague despite international involvement (Gaddafi, Hussein, Bin Laden, ...) it seems a lot like it's just a handy tool we pull out when it's convenient rather than the moral authority it was intended to be.

I'm all for stopping the bad guys, but "justice" seems to be entirely arbitrary if you look close enough.

> I'm all for stopping the bad guys, but "justice" seems to be entirely arbitrary if you look close enough.

History and justice is written by the victors.

No, it's not. It's written by historians and they're very interested in losers and ordinary people and what they eat and what they like, etc.

That's the wonderful XXI century.

Things didn't use to be that way. And even now the winners are the ones deciding what documentation to keep or destroy, what the media and the public are allowed to know, and what historians get funding.

Yet, the winners never had so little control. And after enough time, your comment gets correct.

  Things didn't use to be that way.

But they did. The most successful series of books of all times (the Bible) was written by a people who were beaten, broadly persecuted, and generally not considered victors in any practical matter.

The preservation of those books and decisions regarding doctrine took place in part at the direction of emperors establishing new state religions, so again, what remains is what was preserved by the victors.

The way the Nazi regime came about did use loop holes in the constitution of the Weimar Republic, but it was still problematic. Kind of like how the Bush administration defined prisoners in the 'war on terrorism' as 'enemy combatants', which somehow meant none of the Geneva conventions apply.

I think technically it meant that the Geneva conventions were applicable to them, but as the enemy combatants, not civilians. (There is an important distinction with unlawful combatants there.)

from wiki:

"""In the United States the phrase "enemy combatant" was used after the September 11 attacks by the George W. Bush administration to include an alleged member of al Qaeda or the Taliban being held in detention by the U.S. government as part of the war on terror. In this sense, "enemy combatant" actually refers to persons the United States regards as unlawful combatants, a category of persons who do not qualify for prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Conventions."""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_combatant

Reply on news.ycombinator.com