After cruelty

Oleg Orlov, leader of the human rights organization Memorial and Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2022, has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “discrediting the Russian army.”

According to Orlov, for “writing an article in a newspaper that describes the Russian political regime as totalitarian and fascist.”

Mariana Katzarova, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Russia, describes the trial as “an orchestrated attempt to silence human rights defenders.”

What will happen when they get it?

Orlov asked the judge directly: “Don't you have the same fears?

Aren't you afraid to see what our country is becoming, our country that you love too?

Aren't you afraid that not only you, but also your children and, God forbid, your grandchildren, will have to live in this absurdity, this dystopia?

In other words, don't you see that when you have banished justice from this world, you will have to live in it?

Many push the genocide machine convinced that, if they remain at the side of the executioners, it will never knock on their door.

Many distribute lies thinking that legitimate objectives can be achieved with weapons of social destruction.

Even the millionaires who burn the planet in the face of warnings from the scientific community think that the New Zealand bunker will keep them from paying for their excesses.

All contemporary totalitarian regimes require the blind faith of at least part of the citizenry.

But they can only exist when the Judiciary abandons the principles of justice and begins to work on the legal, ideological and pseudoscientific arguments necessary to legitimize their crimes.

Orlov's question seems doubly relevant to me.

If they win, what will become of the judges when justice no longer matters?

The 16 jurists and lawyers who participated in the third of the Nuremberg trials for implementing the judicial and legal system of the Nazi regime, including nine senior officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice, did not discover it.

They also did not respond to Orlov's question.

They invoked the defense

nullum crimen sine lege

, which says that no one can be charged with a crime or subjected to criminal sanctions for an act that was not defined as a crime at the time it was committed.

They were following orders.

“

Befehl ist befehl

!”

(an order is an order).

The one who did answer was Ernst Janning, the jurist played by Burt Lancaster in

Winners and Losers

, the film that Stanley Kramer directed in 1961. I feel that Orlov asked with him in mind.

“Those of us who understood what was happening, those of us who knew that the words were lies and worse than lies, why did we remain silent?

Why do we participate?

—says Jennings in his exciting monologue—.

Because we loved our country.

What does it matter if a few political extremists lose their rights?

What does it matter if a few racial minorities lose their rights?

It's just a passing phase.

It is just a stage we must go through.

It will be discarded sooner or later.

Even Hitler will be ruled out, sooner or later […] And then one day we looked around and discovered that we were in even more terrible danger.

The ritual begun in this courtroom spread across the country like a raging, roaring disease.

“What was going to be a ‘passing phase’ had become the way of life.”

If cruelty and lies prevail over humanity and justice, it does not matter who wins.

We all have to live.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_