On Aug 6, 4:41 pm, "Don Phillipson" <e...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> "The Other" <ot...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
>
> news:lytzdyme9h.fsf@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> > Nuremberg was a classic case of victor's justice. . . .
Nothing like a good ol' pedagogical hairball like that to be brought
up again for a vote, as another of those unquestioned truisms that
come to be regarded, around academe, or in the dark, smoky haunts of
wi-fi hotspots nearby, with all the honor, authority, and pedantic
patina of a Euclidean theorem.
> > I don't know the details, but as I understand it, many of the "crimes"
> > were no such thing. There was no treaty specifying "crimes against
> > humanity," whatever that means. The principle of "nullum crimen,
> > nulla poena sine lege" was totally thrown out.
As well it should have been, for very good and just reasons which, in
view of the increasing vapidity of this thread will hardly be intuited
in a million years.
And why? Why, oh, why, but WHY should this be?
Heh. Because intellectual/epistemological realism is like SIN to a
liberal idealist or "progressive", and besides which, the last half-
ass decent Spencerian social Darwinist is dead (or so they say) a long
time ago, of some Call of the Wild, like a morphine overdose in the
Valley of the Moon.
> Nuremburg officlals went to great lengths to explain themselves,
> foreseeing criticism later. I doubt if they foresaw our generation's
> readiness to dismiss their reasoning without reading it first.
But, as anyone who's ever read, and half-ass understood the 'moral
rationalism' derived of Kant's second critique, DAMNED WELL knows, you
can't get at anything like a fully justifiable moral law by arguing,
legislating or ruling from merely contingent empirical (historical,
political) anecdotal content of precedents, dictates and decrees as
from the common law; not when for the case in point, there is no
precedent, no known form of law to contain such a content.
So the second poster is correct (but for the wrong reason) to say that
no such "crimes" existed, which, in his terms IS to say there was no
"crime"--as if the mere word "crime" were adequate to describe the
offence, not just of "genocide", as if the Holocaust could be
relegated to some such sub-class of horrors in world events,
but . . .
No! There are no other like *contents* of empirical precedent or
rulings that would serve to fill such a form of that which had leapt,
fully formed from the grinning maw of a silver Death's Head on the
brow of Hitler's Third Reich. This was unlike anything to have come
from ancient savage societies of the earth, because it did not come
out of anything so primitive, but from one of the most civilized
societies known to the history of mankind..
It is therefore understood a priori without reference to any empirical
data of this crime or the other, that what Hitler did went far beyond
"crime" to WAR: to war, which is the absence of crime because it is
the absence of law, of order, of morality or justice. The very term
"war crime" is for this reason an oxymoron. Crime can occur only in a
context of law; and war can occur only when all law being trampled,
run over, right on past its worldly, national borders. Crime? What's
that? This is WAR . . .
Thus it would seem that once again, the second poster (actually the
third, not counting "Just Me" who never counts, as only stands to
reason, else why would he be called "Just Me"?) is not far off the
beam to cough up said hairball about "victor's justice"--if only, once
again, for entirely the wrong reasons . . .
War is a condition which falls entirely under that category defined by
Kant (whether he would like it or not) as FREEDOM. And freedom as he
defines it is that 'faculty' as formerly translated, but 'power' more
recently, in the latest Werner Pluhar translation; freedom is that
POWER which is never contingent or dependent (as the Buddhist puts it)
upon 'phenomenal' (karmic) laws of cause-effect.
Simply put, war is not just anti-legal, it is extra-legal, it
transcends all law. And war is the evil brother of Kant's Moral Law
which according to the philosopher is not just law as man in his
miserable, object oriented, pleasure/pain motivated, self-interested,
merely contingent way can write it--rather! It is law that is revealed
by its form, and totally not its petty content. And once its form is
understood, in all the grand universality of its categorical majesty,
only then may all the various contents be recognized the more surely,
and perfectly for either good or evil.
Surprisingly, if not counter-intuitively, for Kant, it is not because
man is essentially free that he is able to intuit the Moral Law, but
quite to the reverse: the Moral Law, like the laws of Nature existed
before there was a human content to fill it with every virtue and
abomination--but how the Hell is that?
Simple. Because the moral law and the natural law both have a common
mother namely, Reason or which is the same, rationality, sense, order,
hierarchy of category, species/genus/family/class,the Law of
Noncontradiction--then, as the first born daughter of the moral law IS
Freedom, this must be case, he argues, because (now dig it very
closely) if freedom were not predicated of the Moral Law, there would
be no necessity in a Moral Law, for wouldn't it seem that it is man's
freedom which makes the moral law necessary?
No. That's the cart before the horse. Since man is free to break the
moral law, this can only be the case, says Kant, because it is in the
nature of the Moral Law, to leave that option open to man--it would be
immoral of the law to do otherwise; it would be petty, weak, tyranny.
That terrible fruit in the Garden of Paradise, will have its tree
growing there.
Kant holds that it is a mistake to think that freedom stands in the
order of things prior to the moral law, because if this were so, the
Moral Law being merely contingent upon man's freedom to invent it,
could never be moral or lawful in any perfectly just sense of the
term. Man, in all his ingenuity and elegance of civility invents the
Nuremberg Laws of 1935, not the Moral Law of which Kant metaphysically
dreams.
To say that freedom exists within the moral law as part of its essence
is correct: freedom may be and is deduced from the Moral Law--that IS
the correct conception. Freedom is predicated of the Moral Law,
engendered of it, meaning that it is not born of the Natural
"phenomenal" order of things (which in many cases is disorder,
entropy, chaos, anarchy) but of the pure, noumenal, unknowable reality
behind nature.
The truth of what stands behind reality, the reality which provides
that a universe shall exist, is a rationality that is prior to all
experience, all sense perception, all empirical data and method.
There is reason behind reality, a perfectly ordered power of logic, of
law which is reflected in the faculty of reason, as to a far lesser
degree, in the laws of nature.
What is good and evil is not relative, not contingent, but absolute,
rational and lawful no different than E=MC*2; no different than it
might be said that the universe could not have come into being by the
wrong, by the defective, by the badly ordered, by the negligent, by
the insufficient, by the lawless working of reality. We can only know
nature by her laws. And we can only marvel at so much as we don't
know, not knowing the laws.
All the things that man's conscience prods him to know for what's
right versus wrong, in slavish desires, greed, self-love, sloth,
infidelity, abuse of freedom; all these things are shown for what they
are in light of what reality really is, as what we do is done under
illumination of reality, the Laws of Reason. Thus, all our actions are
played out as shadows on the wall of Plato's allegorical cave, as that
is the form of what we do projected there by the light of what is
right, what is real and not unreasonable, thence we see our actions as
of either grace or absurdity; simply, clearly by the cast of Reason's
light.
And this is that which both Aristotle and St. John called the *logos*.
Of course justice falls to the victor! The third poster is right, or
i.e., the pedagogical hairball is right. And what stands to be derived
from it is also right, that there really had been no need of any
Nuremberg Trials, because the Victor was free to be victorious,
entirely at liberty he was, being freed by the dogs of war, by Hitler
and Goering, to take Goering, Hess, Speer and all the rest, directly
out to the gallows and hang them without trial, as the final coup de
grace of the War; this they should have been perfectly free to do in
full expression of their freedom, their victory.
However, it was also within the discretion of the Victor's freedom to
decide for holding a trial, that these monstrous fools might be put
properly on display, might be brow-beaten, held to scorn, and by the
way, given a properly just op****tunity to defend themselves, or repent
of the evil they had done, to repent all the more of the freedom their
choice for evil had granted also as freedom to the victor. And that
was done, even to the extent that some cases were dismissed, some
delivered to a punishment less severe than was meted out to others--
that was all within the power of freedom, indeed of Justice, that
their defeat had conferred upon their victors.
The laws that derive of the Judgments at Nuremberg are so imperfect as
any other law that is drafted under the highly flawed instrument of
the human hand. But in the end, it doesn't really matter a damn,
because law has nothing to do with war, as war has nothing to do with
law; and war crimes trials have nothing to do with crimes or trials,
but only with war and nothing more; ceremonials celebrated at the end
of war, as the last battles of the war . . . Victor's Justice.
And Hoo-****ing-A-Ray!
--
JM http://whosenose.blogspot.com
http://jesu***egesis.blogspot.com
|
