Another OU student made this observation on his blog:
Adolf Eichman’s trial
Eichman’s whole defence was based on his denial of responsibility and he was only doing as he was told. I do find it interesting how this bureaucrats who where responsible directly at the camps also used this defence at Nuremberg and more recently Oskar Groening the book keeper at Auschwitz.
The whole Authoritarianism thing a complete area on its own as there is a definite case of further investigation needed into why socially superior society accepts these individuals as authority.
which prompted these thoughts:
I did a Coursera course on international criminal law which talked about how the “I was only following orders” defence was challenged at the Nuremberg Trials and created a precedent for international justice by rejecting it. I find that whole history—from Nuremberg to modern day decisions about what legal action can be taken across borders—fascinating. We now have continental courts of justice and war trials procedures and all sorts of good stuff to improve the safety and security of (most) everyone on the planet from abuses by their own government.
But the pendulum seems to have swung the other way from the principal established in the mid-1600s of sovereign states having absolute control of internal affairs, (“Westphalian Sovereignty”) to NATO saying the Westphalian principles are undemocratic and humanity is not relevant and then Tony Bliar simply called it anachronistic and that you can therefore attack who you like with impunity which, it appears, he could.
When I take a step back and look at the last 1,000 years of European history, it seems in this past 20 years we have undone the work of the preceding 350 in a supposed pursuit of justice on behalf of the citizens of other countries. We have scrapped the idea of governments killing their own citizens and replaced it with it being OK to kill the civilians of other countries.
The victims of the Nazis got justice (as much was practically possible, anyway) at Nuremberg. But where do civilians killed by Western airstrikes get their justice? As Hilary Benn said yesterday: “Ve are only folloving ze orders of ze United Nations!”
So that’s all right then.
As for accepting authority, the Milgram Experiment was the one where unwitting volunteers were talked into electrocuting people to death because the bloke in the white coat told them to.
When Hilary Benn¹ gave his speech, the bit about “We are only following a UN mandate” was the bit that won over the MPs: knowledge that whatever happens, not only does their collective responsibility mean they are only a tiny bit to blame if things go wrong, it was all the UN’s idea anyway. They can vote for war and airstrikes that will kill civilians² with impunity.
Maybe that right there is a very good argument for our elected representatives to be held responsible for their actions, not just those of countries we don’t like, and I don’t mean at the ballot box. Maybe we should be sending our war criminals to trial as a lesson to the others. Maybe the MPs will cheer less than they did last night when they voted for war.
¹ The son of Tony Benn, the man who said “When there is a great cry that something should be done, you can depend on it that something remarkably silly probably will be done“.
² The first targets are to be oil fields and related infrastructure. These are operated by civilians. (Why weren’t these destroyed over a year ago? Oh, yeah, the oil has to keep flowing, doesn’t it? Even if it is bankrolling Islamic State. Until it ends up all over the media that Israel and Turkey are cheerfully buying it for sale to the world market. But it’s not all about oil, oh no…)