Inflation is not just about Money

What passes for International Justice is a sham, propped up by a vocabulary stripped of its original meaning.

By Hans Vogel

If ever there was miscarriage of justice, it was the so-called Nuremberg Tribunal. Though it was essentially a kangaroo court, a shameful charade no different from the sessions held by Judge Roy Bean in 19th-century Texas, it has acquired the status of a seminal event in establishing what is considered international justice.

What is more, in spite of being a sophisticated, slick version of the judicial practices made notorious by Nazi judge Roland Freisler, the Nuremberg Tribunal is regarded generally as the basis of international justice, the standard by which all all kinds of violations and infringements are being judged. One might say that what is pompously referred to as international justice is in fact no different from the Freisler version of Justice. Essentially, it is the kind of judicial practice where the defendant is already convicted before appearing in court.

The Nuremberg Tribunal established the so-called Nuremberg Principles and pronounced verdicts against “war criminals.” These were only Germans, of course, because no “war criminals” from the US, England, the USSR or from any other enemy of Germany were ever tried. The selective nature of the kind of international justice delivered and propagated by the Nuremberg Tribunal was just too attractive to ignore. Therefore, it served as an example for some other notorious kangaroo courts, the first of which was the ICTY, the “International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,” operating from 1993 to 2017. Created specifically to deal with “war crimes” committed by the enemies of the US and its NATO vassals when these were busy destroying and terrorizing the remnants of Yugoslavia. The ICTY was based in the Dutch city of The Hague, the self-styled “City of International Peace and Justice” and did exactly what it was set up to do. In 2006 former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who as a lawyer wanted to do his own defense, proved to be such a headache to the court that he was suicided in his prison cell in The Hague. Of the more than one hundred defendants dragged before the ICTY, almost one hundred were found guilty, and nine of these (ten percent!) died in custody.

In 2002 The Hague became the seat of the International Criminal Court, ostensibly set up to serve as a sort of permanent and impartial worldwide Nuremberg Tribunal. The ICC’s broad and seemingly impartial scope prompted the US to declare it would not allow US citizens to be prosecuted by the new court. Several countries, including China never even bothered to adhere to the treaty setting up the ICC. Russia and other initial signatories subsequently withdrew from the treaty. Of course, the ICC is just as much a kangaroo court as the Nuremberg Tribunal.

The ICC’s utter failure has apparently not influenced the recent decision by the EU, England and the Ukraine to set up yet another kangaroo court. It was decided to create a special tribunal “to prosecute Putin’s war crimes.” Such is precisely the objective of special tribunals. It is first decided which individuals and groups to prosecute, and these invariably are enemies. Subsequently, a crime is identified and then the defendants are dragged before a court composed of judges who if not already corrupt, are lured, cajoled or forced into that position.

The practice of creating special tribunals after the collapse of the Soviet Union was obviously inspired by the political and ideological (not judicial!) success of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Although the term “war crime” had already been invented a few decades earlier (when in 1918 the US, England and France wanted to prosecute their German adversaries for “war crimes”) it had not led to the setting up of an international kangaroo court.

From 1994 to 2015 the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) operated in Arusha, Tanzania, to prosecute suspects accused of taking part in the “genocide” in Rwanda during the bloody civil strife in that nation. In 2009 the Special Tribunal for Lebanon was set up in the town of Leidschendam near The Hague, which until the court was closed in 2023, made it the “International Suburb of Peace and Justice.”

Post-World War II propaganda dressed in the cloak of official history has elevated the Nuremberg Tribunal to almost divine status, as some kind of celestial court which for the first time ever succeeded in prosecuting and sentencing the perpetrators of the worst crimes ever committed. The perpetrators of these crimes—whether real or imputed—and especially their leader Adolf Hitler, were henceforth officially and systematically presented as the worst evil-doers the world has ever seen, indeed as the personification of pure evil.

The supreme crime they were accused of and sentenced for was the so-called holocaust, the planned and systematic extermination of European Jews. Although there were substantial numbers of holocaust survivors, it has been almost universally accepted that over one third of all Jews living in the world in 1939 were exterminated. The neologism “genocide” (a Latin term meaning the killing of an entire tribe) was created specifically to indicate the mass killing of Jews. Yet unlike “holocaust” (with a capital H) the word genocide today no longer exclusively refers to Jews. That was a wise decision, because if a genocide would truly have taken place, there would not be any Jews left today.

Although the literal meaning of the word “genocide” (actually a rather rare occurrence in history) is a wild exaggeration, it has become a standard fixture of international legalese. Ironically, as a result of its widespread and uninhibited use, the term has lost the meaning it still had. In other words, like the German Reichsmark in the early 1920s, “genocide” has become devalued due to inflation.

Indeed, inflation is not an exclusively monetary and economic concept. Like currencies, words and expressions are also subject to inflation due to being used just too often. Not only “genocide,” but also “holocaust,” “democracy,” “free speech,” “antisemitism,” “far right extremism,” “conspiracy theory” and, yes, “justice” itself. The list of such devalued words and expressions is actually impressively long.

Many people, notably politicians and journalists tend to use weaponized terms, expletives, insults, nasty epithets as well as political terms without bothering too much about their true, original meaning. Not seldom such words then come to indicate the very opposite of their original meaning. Thus, the expletive “motherf….r” sometimes becomes a term of endearment. Indeed, there are hundreds of such cases of inverted meaning in English and the same phenomenon occurs in all other languages. In short, the thoughtless and indiscriminate use of words will always erode their original meaning and eventually make such words empty expressions. Like devalued currency bills, those words litter the pavement, only to be lifted up occasionally by a slight breeze.

In a sense, it is really ironic that the terms genocide and holocaust have become worn out, devalued due to spiraling inflation. After all, with Jews having a reputation for being sort of proficient with money, to the extent that the adjective “Jewish” is almost a standard epithet for the substantive “banker.” And don’t we all know that it is the bankers who are always responsible for creating inflation?

As for the elusive concept of “international justice,” given what has been going on in Gaza since October 7, 2023, it also utterly devalued. No politician with any intelligence or self-respect can afford to use these words and expect to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, after the idea was first floated in 2022, the European Commission, the Council of Europe and the Ukraine’s unelected president have recently decided to create a tribunal to prosecute “Putin’s war crimes.” What will that court be like? Where will it be located? Not in The Hague, but perhaps somewhere in the Ukraine, which would no doubt guarantee the court’s absolute impartiality. It will pour out accusations and verdicts against putative and elusive Russian perpetrators, because the elites and state media in the EU and England keep telling the public that only Russians commit “war crimes.” The very existence of the new court will be the implicit denial of Ukrainian war crimes, and accordingly free the leaders of the EU, England and the Ukraine from having to explain that anomaly to the public.

Needless to say, the new tribunal will be as scrupulously impartial as the Nuremberg Tribunal, the ICTY and the ICC. Incidentally, here we have another word subject to inflation: “impartiality.”

As so often in history and in most nations today, the real culprits will go unpunished. True justice is and will probably always be a chimera.

All we can hope is for Karma to do its job.