The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer
– James Baldwin
The legacy of Nuremberg is with us once again, less as a reminder of the power of the legal system to punish those who enabled and enacted the horrors of Nazi Germany than as a warning that the spirit of Nuremberg must be reclaimed as a moral and political imperative. That spirit matters at a time when the Supreme Court is increasingly turning the law into an instrument of reactionary concentrated power, desecrating morality, crippling the foundations of democracy, and reproducing the worst dimensions of gangster capitalism. Nuremberg made clear that judges and other officials cannot use the authority of law to cover up and legitimate actions that are morally depraved and politically destructive. Its lesson for the present is stark: when law is emptied of justice and used to normalize cruelty, annihilate democratic rights, and place concentrated power beyond accountability, legality itself becomes a weapon in the destruction of democracy. The reactionary Court has become part of a political order whose governing ethos increasingly resembles what Jeet Heer, writing of Trump, calls being “besotted by the romance of gangsterism.”
Click her to read the full essay: Nuremberg’s Warning: When Law Legitimates the Machinery of Authoritarianism - CounterPunch.org
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