Trying bin Laden and his SS By Bruce Walker There are good and bad reasons to bring bin Laden and his fellow monsters
to before a court of justice. If the court is some risible tribunal like
the World Court and the trial is merely a vehicle for these goons to justify
their crimes in from of the world, then caution is wise. Trials can backfire:
Hitler turned his trials in Weimar Germany into vehicles for aggrandizement,
making himself and his nasty political movement the victims. One primary flaw with both these types of high profile trials was that the judicial system and the accused were largely singing the same tune. The German judges slapped the wrists of Hitler, making him a living martyr who didn't suffer much at all. The Soviet system physically and psychologically coerced many of the "traitors" and "wreckers" to say, and even believe, that they were guilty. But there is a third sort of public trial that is devastatingly effective. Whatever the debates at the time and the second-guessing of history, the Nuremberg Trials laid out methodically before the world the true horror of National Socialism. The system was not "fair" in our banal and picky sense of the word: the Nazis were guilty, and had been adjudged guilty by the whole world already. The trial was rather the drama of fully exposing the ghastly extent of their guilt. Himmler, Goring, and Streicher were not going to be acquitted. In the American criminal justice system, the Nuremberg Trials were more like the post-verdict stage in which Victim Impact Statements are presented. The victims or family members appear in flesh and blood to tell the jury, the judge, and the criminal just what pain has been endured. The Judgment at Nuremberg was not an actual establishment of the obvious guilt, but the process of forcing sadists and butchers to confront their victims in person or in film, so that no official or legal artifice could mask the true moral character of naked human depravity.
That is why we should capture the bin Laden, Hussein, Bashir (of Sudan), and the other vile men who enslave, torture, and murder. We should force them to face, within newly constituted governments in Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and other nations, the testimony of those survivors, those family members, those mutilated slaves, those suffering children. We should confront them before the world with indisputable proof that they are evil. Let the world see how wicked beings, which cloak themselves in Islam, treat other Muslims. Instead of the smirks of bin Laden, let us have him in the box of the accused, with the world watching, as women, children, cripples, and old people tell how dark is the heart of the Taliban and other nihilist terrorist groups. Let Muslims try Muslims for holocausts against Muslims. What America has experienced in terrorist attacks is nothing compared to what Hussein and bin Laden have done to the wretches within their savage grasp. The myth of oppression pervades much of the world, and nearly the entire Islamic world. How bin Laden, scion of a billionaire, can count himself "oppressed" defies logic, or rather reflects the twisted logic of an affluent Weimar Republic "oppressed" by Jews. It is imperative that the great lie be shown as that, and that the true face of the nightmare be exposed to the glare of spotlights. Some of the accused will feel shame; some will perversely feel pride; and others will lie and lie and lie. Indeed, it is as important for Muslims and America-haters and the world to see that Taliban, Hezbollah, and the other Ku Klux Klansmen of Marxist pseudo-Islam are not just evil. They also lie to their followers, lie to the world, and to even to themselves. How important is this? Will "humiliating" these Muslims make the world better? Emphatically, yes. The moral timidity of the democratic West in general can be explained - sort of - as post-colonial guilt. That viewpoint is neurotic, because the plain truth now is that Europeans did bring civilization, progress, and safety to much of Africa and Asia, but at least there is the a neurotic reason for this residual remorse. Europe, however, is not the primary target of these terrorists. America is. Why? Specifically because of our goodness. Muslims have some legitimate bones to pick with Germany (which treats Turkish guest workers like serfs) or France (which mocks Algerian refugees as "rag heads") or Russia (which held Muslims, like many other peoples, within Potemkin "Soviet Socialist Republics"). What is the brief of these peoples around the world filled with hate towards America? Envy. Resentment so strong that had our nation be on Mars instead of Earth, we would still somehow be the cause of all their self-inflicted miseries. This is a deadly vice for which these moral equivalent of Nazi Anti-Semites should feel deep seated and real shame. Yet they do not. Just as the primary victims of Nazism were Europeans, the home continent of this ideology of hate and death, so the trials were held in the heart of Europe, at the center of National Socialist German Workers Party power, at Nuremberg. When the trials were over, when film of the ghastly stacks of emaciated corpses was run, when the lips of victims of Earth made Hell spoke, then the pride of Aryan superiority quivered and broke, then the chance for a Second Versailles vanished, then the German people felt shame. It is interesting to note what happens without this cantharis. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there were no Gulag Trials. Post-Mao China has had no public remonstration for genocide in Tibet or the "Hungry Ghosts" of the Great Leap Forward. Pakistan, which inflicted upon their Muslim brethren and then countrymen in then East Pakistan, butchery, rape, and torture, has never held those soldiers and leaders to account. Turkey never prosecuted those guilty of murdering millions of Armenians. Russia has still not really blossomed into the great land it could be, and the Russian mafia is a notorious menace. China still runs slave labor camps and harvests human organs, among other horrible and ongoing crime. Pakistan is relenting - today - to pressure from America largely because the alternative is America turning to the much larger rival India. Turkey, along with Iran and Iraq, brutally suppresses Kurdish nationalism. None of these former monster polities have shown remorse, only limitation and containment and diversion. Right now we are juggling unrepentant nations whose commitment to liberty, safety, and civil society is much in doubt. Yet two nations which could prove real trouble to America and its allies do not threaten the safety of mankind at all: Germany and Japan. Both had war crimes trials. Both endured the humiliation of occupation. Both had the noxious elements of ideologies intolerable with human dignity ruthlessly purged. Both are peaceful, prosperous, and democratic. Indeed, if there was a flaw in the Allied post-war plans, it was in going to lightly on Japan. An effort to preserve Japanese dignity has allowed a generation of schoolchildren in Japan to grow up believing, essentially, that the Second World War began with Hiroshima. Germany, by contrast, made Holocaust denial criminal and de-Nazified the government and culture. We want a world of nations aware of the precipice of unmerited pride and limitless victimhood (which were the twin pillars of Nazi and Bushido savagery) and of the psychic costs of allowing Hitler, Stalin, and Mao running untamed. That requires more than a victory: it requires complete exposure of the full guilt of the wicked. That requires that all those who today chant slogans of hate towards America and its ideals, shrink and withdraw and recoil in revulsion and shame at their complicity in unconscionable offenses. Bruce Walker is a senior writer with Enter Stage Right. He is also a frequent contributor to The Pragmatist and The Common Conservative.
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