To be brief and to the point. Tonight, Oct. 6, 2020 the New York Times posted a story you should find and read about then Atty. Gen. Jefferson Beuregard Sessions (yes that is the bastard’s full name) ordering the separation of children from their parents at the border on behalf of Donald J. Trump,and Stephen Miller and other gangsters serving Trump to fulfill Trump’s criminal demands.
Well, you could write reams and reams and reams about this. I will not.
I will simply observe that of the 5.8 million Jews murdered by Germany and Germans, not Nazis, that’s too easy and too accomodating – by Germany and Germans and their main accomplices, Lithuanians, Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians — 1.2 million were childen 12 years of age or younger.
When that and so much more was placed on trial for judgement at the principal war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg at the close of 1945 and the start of 1946 the chief prosecutor was then United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had elevated Jackson to the court from his service as attorney general of the United States, ironically the office held by Sessions for 18 months under Trump.
Jackson agreed to undertake this extraordinary role at the behest of President Harry S Truman (Truman used a middle initial but did not have a middle name so, properly, there is no period after the middle initial – just a peculiar note for the grammatically meticulous).
In his lengthy, eloquent and enompassing charge to the tribunal, Justice Jackson laid down the seminal modern foundation of international criminal law, addressing plotting and planning war, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
I have read it several times over the years. It is easily found on line if you want to read the entirety.
It is necessarily a long document covering 12 years of history and national and international crimes on a gargantuan scale.
Perhaps though the most chilling, compelling and surely succinct statement from Justice Jackson’s charge to the tribunal is this – this that applies equally tonight to what was done in our name — in our name as Americans — to children from Mexico and Central America 75 years after the Holocaust.
Justice Jackson said to the tribunal, as we must say to ourselves tonight as Americans:
“The real complaining party at the bar is civilization.”
Peeling the Onion 