Victor’s justice?

Reader question:

Please explain “victor’s justice” in this sentence - There is already worried talk of “victor’s justice”.

My comments:

This means people are worried that the person (who is currently on trial) may not get a fair trial.

Victor’s justice, as name suggests, is a sort justice seen from the standpoint of the victor, the winner of, say, a war. The losers of the war are the ones who are on trial for crimes real or fabricated by the victors. And they, this time, may get treated roughly because they no longer call the shots. Losers, like beggars, cannot be choosers.

This is similar to the Chinese concept of 成王败寇. That is to say, if you win, whatever you have done is right. If you lose, everything you have done is wrong, bad and atrocious.

Which is just as well because both parties understand this coming in.

In short, this sort of justice is not exactly fair, as seen from the objective eye or disinterested parties – not that they’re not interested, just that they don’t have personal interests in the dispute.

Anyways, victor’s justice happens all the time. Of course. This is man’s history. This is civilization (or the lacks thereof) in a nutshell.

The latest blatant example in my mind is the trial a few years ago of Saddam Hussein of Iraq. That war was, well, a mess to begin with. Allied forces led by America invaded Iraq on false pretences. The United States said they had to assault Iraq and remove Saddam by force because he was in possession of WMDs, or weapons of massive destruction. When they didn’t find any WMDs after occupying that oil rich country, they tried and later executed Saddam to close the book. The allied invasion itself was, understandably, never a subject of discussion at the trials.

In other words, victor’s justice. It is what passes off as justice in all human societies at any rate. It may not be fair, but on the other hand arguments can be made that no justice is entirely fair because things are viewed simply viewed differently by people of different interests. Hence, therefore, a BBC comedy show once had this verdict on the Iraq war:

“Is it a just war? No, it’s just a war.”

Here’s a media example of “victor’s justice”, this time a story (in full) reflecting on Nuremberg:

Did Hitler’s crimes justify the Allies’ terror-bombing of Germany? Indeed they did, answers Christopher Hitchens in his Newsweek response to my new book, “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War”:

“The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.”

Atheist, Trotskyite and newborn neocon, Hitchens embraces the morality of ‘lex talionis’ - an eye for an eye. If Germans murdered women and children, the British were morally justified in killing German women and children.

According to British historians, however, Churchill ordered the initial bombing of German cities on his first day in office, the very first day of the Battle of France, on May 10, 1940.

After the fall of France, Churchill wrote Lord Beaverbrook, minister of air production: “When I look round to see how we can win the war, I see that there is only one sure path ... an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”

“Exterminating attack,” said Churchill. By late 1940, writes historian Paul Johnson, “British bombers were being used on a great and increasing scale to kill and frighten the German civilian population in their homes.”

“The adoption of terror bombing was a measure of Britain’s desperation,” writes Johnson. “So far as air strategy was concerned,” adds British historian A.J.P. Taylor, “the British outdid German frightfulness first in theory, later in practice, and a nation which claimed to be fighting for a moral cause gloried in the extent of its immoral acts.”

The chronology is crucial to Hitchens’ case.

Late 1940 was a full year before the mass deportations from the Polish ghettos to Treblinka and Sobibor began. Churchill had ordered the indiscriminate bombing of German cities and civilians before the Nazis had begun to execute the Final Solution.

By Hitchens’ morality and logic, Germans at Nuremberg might have asserted a right to kill women and children because that is what the British were doing to their women and children.

After the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945, Churchill memoed his air chiefs: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.”

Churchill concedes here what the British had been about in Dresden.

Under Christian and ‘just war’ theory, the deliberate killing of civilians in wartime is forbidden. Nazis were hanged for such war crimes.

Did the Allies commit acts of war for which we hanged Germans?

When we recall that Josef Stalin's judges sat beside American and British judges at Nuremberg, and one of the prosecutors there was Andrei Vishinsky, chief prosecutor in Stalin’s show trails, the answer has to be yes.

While Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were surely guilty of waging aggressive war in September 1939, Stalin and his comrades had joined the Nazis in the rape of Poland, and had raped Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, as well. Scores of thousands of civilians in the three Baltic countries were murdered.

Yet, at Nuremberg, Soviets sat in judgment of their Nazi accomplices, and had the temerity to accuse the Nazis of the Katyn Forest massacre of the Polish officer corps that the Soviets themselves had committed.

Americans fought alongside British soldiers in a just and moral war from 1941 to 1945. But we had as allies a Bolshevik monster whose hands dripped with the blood of millions of innocents murdered in peacetime. And to have Stalin’s judges sit beside Americans at Nuremberg gave those trials an aspect of hypocrisy that can never be erased.

At Nuremberg, Adm. Erich Raeder was sentenced to prison for life for the invasion of neutral Norway. Yet Raeder’s ships arrived 24 hours before British ships and marines of an operation championed by Winston Churchill.

The British had planned to violate Norwegian neutrality first and seize Norwegian ports to deny Germany access to the Swedish iron ore being transshipped through them. For succeeding where Churchill failed, Raeder was condemned as a war criminal and sent to prison.

The London Charter of the International Military Tribunal decided that at Nuremberg only the crimes of Axis powers would be prosecuted and that among those crimes would be a newly invented “crimes against humanity.” This decree was issued Aug. 8, 1945, 48 hours after we dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima and 24 hours before we dropped the second on Nagasaki.

We and the British judiciously decided not to prosecute the Nazis for the bombing of London and Coventry.

It was an understandable decision, and one that surely Gen. Curtis LeMay concurred in, as LeMay had boasted at war’s end, “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

After the war, a lone Senate voice arose to decry what was taking place at Nuremberg as “victor's justice.” Ten years later, a young colleague would declare the late Robert A. Taft “A Profile in Courage” for having spoken up against ex post facto justice. The young senator was John F. Kennedy.

- Victor's Justice Vs. Morality: The Hitchens Conundrum, Global Research, June 26, 2008.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.