Recently, I have been trying to remedy a problem with unpublished posts on my blog page. Really, there are a ton of posts that I mean to develop and/or publish, but never quite get around to doing.
Here, below, is another one.
This is from slightly less than a year ago, prior to the 2020 election, and Trump's defeat. Still, it is relevant, or certainly seems so to me. Trump himself may no longer be the sitting president, but he still clearly exerts some serious influence over the Republican Party, or what has in reality become the party of Donald Trump.
The last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg Trials, Benjamin B. Ferencz, was warning about Trump's assault on the rule of law. Remember, Trump often times seemed to feel that he was above the law, and that minor obstacles like legal limits did not apply to him. That was bad enough before he ever ran for the White House, as a selfish and narcissistic real estate tycoon and reality TV personality. However, it was infinitely worse once he ran for, and eventually reached, the White House. Then, his abuses no longer were exclusively the domain of an entitled rich prick born with a silver spoon in his big mouth. Now, it was a direct threat to democracy, especially with his tens of millions of mindless, cultlish supporters, or the Cult 45, as they sometimes have come to be known.
Ferencz has seen the results of leaders of a powerful nation who did not know or recognize any limits to their power. Again, he was a prosecutor during the Nuremberg Trials just after World War II, and the defeat of Hitler's Germany. No, I am not comparing Trump to Hitler. Still, I would think that we should take the warnings of someone who played such a prominent role in prosecuting Nazi war criminals - and thus, knew some intricate details of how those horrors came about - when he is specifically warning us in the present day that we might be playing with fire, having an erratic leader with a false sense of entitlement continually overstepping his legal boundaries.
Here is the short piece that I wrote (but never quite got around to publishing) last year:
There is something that I found quite alarming recently.
The last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg Trials - yes, believe it or not, there is one prosecutor from those trials who is still alive, and that is not the shocking nor the alarming news - spoke about the Trump presidency. Specifically, he warned about Trump's war on law, his constant attacks on Constitutional rule of law.
Benjamin B. Ferencz was a young man back in the postwar years, when he was one of the relatively elite prosecutors entrusted with a truly historic trial, one that set the basis for international war crimes trials that have followed. To that point, nothing of the sort had ever really been attempted before. But it was clear, following the unprecedented criminal activity of the murderous Nazi regime in Germany, that they needed to be held accountable for their crimes.
Ferencz knew what can happen when transparently leaders hungry for power keep thwarting and undermining the law and grabbing more and more power. As the prosecutor of the most famous war crimes in history, he understood in horrific details just what this can lead to when gone unchecked.
The crimes that he prosecuted happened in another time, in another country, and even on another continent. That much is true. There are differences, and nobody is going to make comparisons to the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his Nazi regime.
Still, he is warning us, here in the United States in the present day, about the dangers of allowing a transparently power hungry regime - and in particularly a notoriously power-hungry megalomaniac in the White House - who make it known, time and time again, that they feel themselves above the law, and not beholden by any kind of legal limits. He knows only too well that this can lead to disaster. Already, Trump has been allowed to get away with far, far too much. But we may now be on the precipice of an abyss, and it may well be what remains of our democracy can plunge into that abyss, never to fully return or be restored.
Please take a look at the article (see link below) that elaborates on what Ferencz sees wrong with what is presently going on in the United States. It is certainly worth a look:
Nuremberg Prosecutor’s Warning About Trump’s War on the Rule of Law The Daily Beast Benjamin B. Ferencz ,The Daily Beast•July 19, 2020
https://news.yahoo.com/nuremberg-prosecutor-warning-trump-war-090342221.html?soc_src=hl-viewer&soc_trk=fb
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