One effect of the Nuremberg Trials was to establish moral
authority for the victor empires participating in the great wars, a series of
catastrophic human events that sullied all participants involved, though not evenly. Certainly the Nazi war crimes had to be illuminated and then dealt with for the sake of humanity in general.
But then on whose authority were the war criminals punished? They were punished by a collection of empires presiding over a litany of economic and war crimes themselves - with various genocidal processes logged away in the history books no less. It took the gradual and violent stabilization of the larger and more powerful world empires to mete out some semblance of collective justice, however imperfect.
After such traumatic events, the modern world had to be reconstituted through the crystallization of various collective traumas, and the resting of those crystallized traumas against one another, their explosive forces dormant but still possessing potentials.
And that set of legal
principles that was established in the wake of the trials is not even followed by
the empires riding on that legacy today. The Nazis - or at least their animating spirit - are re-emerging. We've collectively abdicated the maintenance of the conditions required for their eternal banishment.
