Judgement at Nuremberg! ... Abbottabad?

Saw the above titled movie yesterday. Based on the famous Nuremberg trials, the movie follows the case as it starts off and till it ends with the sentencing of the Nazi judges (life imprisonment). 


My initial reaction to the movie was - this was unfair. These were (well some of them) people who held the offices on the basis of their capabilities not on the basis of the political affiliations. They had no choice but to continue in that office. Well technically they had a choice but if the other choice was death, imprisonment or social ostracizing, then it is not much of a choice is it.

On closer thought, however, I realized this was not very different from present day Al-Qaeda. A bunch of people who were guilty of perpetrating unimaginable crimes on humanity. Now, the thought process changed. I guess it has to do with living the horror albeit second hand (through the medium of television and the internet) and  reading about it in books or watching movies about it. Suddenly, I was in favour of getting these people tried and finding them guilty.


Coincidentally, I read another article on the common thread between the Nuremberg trials and the imaginary trials of Al-Qaeda operatives and that had quite an interesting take on them.

The article talked about how the Nuremberg trials served to deconstruct the "evil" that was Nazism and through the various judgments sought to bring to the fore the crimes that were committed. Cut to the modern day and instead of the lasting image of Bin Laden as a gun toting "Che Guevara " out to save the Muslim world from the evil West, we could have the final image of an old man, spouting gibberish. This would have done a lot more for trashing the man and preventing him from being taken up as a Saviour/Martyr by a host of lost, brainwashed people out to see a narrow minded world in place. We just have to think back at Saddam Hussain and how the image that stays in our mind when his name comes up is no longer a dictator or tyrant on a golden throne but that of a disheveled old man hiding in some bunker. 


Maybe his trial was a farce but it still served to remove the magic of revolution from being a part of him. And that is what counts. Today we can count on the majority of Germans hating Nazism because it was deconstruct-ed and put forth for the world to see that here is evil, we have tried it and found these are the crimes that have been committed. OBL will still live on because the final images were still of the man with the gun threating big America and as crazy as the reasons may be, it will still charm a few misguided revolutionaries. 


That is why I do not agree with the clamor for Kasab's death and ignoring the due judicial course of action. You would then be giving in to Clint Eastwood and his "the winner is the person who can draw and shoot fastest" type of justice which, although good for Hollywood profits, does not work very well in real life. You have to pull the evil out of the romanticism of revolution and lay it out to be seen for what it is - A CRIME. 


At the end of the day, democracy is not utopia, but the very fact that it exists and is shored by the pillars of an impartial judicial system removed from the police and state, free press and freedom of speech builds in its people hope. Hope that they too have a chance, that when it comes to fair trials they too can count on the judiciary.


The Architect in the movie "The Matrix" had said, "Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness."


But then Andy Dufresne said in "The Shawshank Redemption", "... hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. ... There are places in this world that aren't made out of stone. That there's something inside... that they can't get to, that they can't touch. That's yours. That is HOPE.