Trying bin Laden and his SS 

By Bruce Walker
web posted October 8, 2001

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.
	
Trials can also be seen as the Australian jumping variety -
Kangaroo Courts - like the Moscow Show Trials. These trials
covered non-existent crimes and repulsed many of those who
had harbored fond thoughts for this mythical Socialist Utopia.
Some obviously phony mea culpa from Marxist pseudo-Muslim
thugs who have been left for a few days in the tender mercies of
those whose lives they have shattered will bring some sense of
retribution, but no greater purpose.

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 (feb6@enterstageright.com) is a senior writer with
Enter Stage Right. He is also a frequent contributor to The
Pragmatist and The Common Conservative.

Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com