Don’t cry for Saddam and his “show trial”
The loaded phrases “show trial” and “show execution” have been used by the Left recently to describe the judicial proceedings regarding Saddam Hussein (just Google “Saddam ‘show trial'” and you’ll find plenty more examples).
Ah, the Left should know about “show trials”-they championed them and applauded them (and practically invented them), back in Moscow in the thirties. Take a look and you’ll see a description of a bunch of real show trials.
It’s part of the debasement of language that Saddam’s trial can be called a “show trial.” I’ve read many essays that make that accusation, and most of them seem to have no conception of what a show trial actually is, or what might be wrong with it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong, for example, about a trial that is for public consumption. In that sense, of course, Saddam’s trial is “for show;” how could it not be? The same was true for the Nuremberg trials, the proceedings that set the precedent for trying leaders of a defeated regime for the offenses known as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that trying a defeated former dictator and tyrant in a court of law is an inherently murky situation. The law is not really designed to deal with this sort of thing–war is. The idea of bringing defeated heads of state to trial is a relatively new one, and international law is confused on how to deal with it, as well (just look at what happened with Milosevic).
What are the alternatives to such a trial? The tyrant can get off scot-free and go to a cushy exile somewhere like Saudi Arabia, where he gets to die in bed at a ripe old age. This, for example, is what happened to the notorious Idi Amin of Uganda. To most, that’s a solution that fails abysmally in serving the cause of justice.
The second alternative, the time-honored and traditional approach, is to kill the leaders in question without even the pretense of a legal proceeding, if the opportunity presents itself. After all, such dictators tend to be violently deposed; it’s very unusual for a person of this type to give up power voluntarily. Live by the sword die by the sword, and all that. And this might have happened to Saddam at the very moment he climbed out of his hiding hole.
But the decision was made to do something more progressive. It’s considered an advance over that kind of summary justice to have a trial; that’s what happened with Saddam. And of course such a trial, by its very nature, must be “for show.” That is, it is for the people of the country in question–as well as other tyrants of like ilk, and the world–to view.
The purpose? To show the superiority of court justice to the random murders the person in question has perpetrated. To allow the traumatized people of the dictator’s country the satisfaction of seeing the formerly all-powerful leader brought low by the justice system, and forced to watch the proceedings as his own crimes are paraded before him.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that sort of “show.” It represents an improvement of sorts over the first two alternatives mentioned. Certainly, no one would suggest that a secret trial would be better. No, there’s no way around the fact that trying a former dictator is inherently a “show,” in the sense of an object lesson and a demonstration. But that’s not the “show” that makes a trial a true “show trial.”
It’s often said that “show trials” are ones in which the outcome is a foregone conclusion and the guilt of the accused is known. But that can’t be the definition, either, because then all such trials of former mass murdering dictators would be “show trials.” After all, it’s not as though they are routine suspects picked up because they happen to fit the description of some eyewitness to a crime.
No, their crimes are already well known and documented, and their identity is not in question. So of course, by the time a trial of such a leader commences, even though they are de jure legally innocent till proven guilty, it’s realistic to say that they are de facto regarded as guilty by most who have followed their history (which, after all, is mostly in the public domain). The trial functions–and cannot help but function–more as a documentation and demonstration of that fact.
There’s no way around that truth. The mental gymnastics required to ignore Saddam’s known and vast history of human rights abuses are too much for most people to perform. Nor does this mean his trial is inherently unfair.
His trial, of course, was imperfect in terms of the definition the ACLU would give for such things. It was an Iraqi proceeding, and each country’s legal system is quite different. But there’s no question that Saddam was not railroaded. Nor was he convicted of crimes he did not commit. Nor was he tortured to extract some sort of confession. And these elements are the key attributes of “show trials,” such as the Moscow variety.
The Moscow trials were applauded by American Communists and supporters of the time, however. The following was typical of the reaction:
…Communist Party leader Harry Pollitt, in the Daily Worker of March 12, 1936 told the world that “the trials in Moscow represent a new triumph in the history of progress.” The article was ironically illustrated by a photograph of Stalin with Nikolai Yezhov, himself shortly to vanish and his photographs airbrushed from history by NKVD archivists. In the United States, Communist proponents such as Corliss Lamont and Lillian Hellman also denounced criticism of the Moscow trials, signing “An Open Letter To American Liberals” in support of the trials for the March 1937 issue of Soviet Russia Today.
Later, even Khrushchev acknowledged that the trials were, quite simply, frameups to get rid of Stalin’s enemies, the confessions that so impressed Western Leftists extracted by torture. In Orwell’s chilling 1984, he based the treatment of Winston Smith at least partly on the example of these trials and similar ones staged by the Communists.
It’s an interesting example of projection, once again, that Leftists today make the charge of “show trial” towards Saddam Hussein’s, when the Left presided over the most prominent example of the genre in recent memory. And, by the elastic definition the Left now holds of the term “show trial,” no trial of a former dictator for war crimes could help but be a “show trial,” because all are conducted with an eye to the purpose of “showing” to the world what that leader has done, all begin with factual knowledge of the perpetrator’s well-known guilt, all have elements of vengeance for the terrible crimes committed, and all have partly political aims.
There is absolutely no way to avoid these things. But trials such as Saddam’s lack the elements that would make a trial truly a “show trial” and a sham: framing the innocent with trumped-up charges, confessions and testimony extracted by torture (true torture, by the way, which isn’t the same as sleep deprivation).
However, if the Left ever gets its chance to try Bush and Rumsfeld for war crimes, you can rest assured they’ll consider those to be no “show trials” at all, but the fairest of fair proceedings.
I remember one anecdote from Svetlana Stalina memoirs: when she were a teenager, her father said to her. “You think you are Stalina? No. And I am not Stalin either. That is Stalin! – and showed her his portrait on the wall.
Dictators of this kind are not just persons in flesh and blood; they are idols, and even their portraits have magic powers over their subjects. And to cast down an idol it is not enough just strip it of physical power, you must also desecrate it. Mark Steyn has good point about it:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Sat…e? cid=116746764
I haven’t heard much about Saddam’s execution being a “show trial”, however I have seen some criticism — and I believe it justified — concerning the way the execution was carried out (I assume everyone has watched the cellphone video, by now.) It was just a bad scene, but, more important, not likely to promote reconciliation. We’ll see.
Furthermore, the hanging was definitely a show. I don’t see how anyone can watch it and consider it other than a Shi’ite lynching: and in honor of MOQTADA, who has American blood on his hands from the Spring of 2004, and who now commands probably the largest army in Iraq, next to ours. All in the name of fundamentalist theocracy. Frankly, it would have been better if we had hanged him.
Congratulations from Spain. I have read some of your articles and I can only say that I am also a neo-neocom. Now you are into my favourites.
I wonder how many of those who condemn Saddam’s trial also lament the fact that Pinochet escaped justice. Not a few, I suspect.
International law needs some new genius on the order of Hugo Grotius to devise a legal framework for dealing with people like Saddam — not to mention Hitler, had he been caught alive. You can’t just kill ’em out of hand, since that’s just the kind of thing they’d do, and you want to be better. But giving them a trial with all the procedural protections of an “ordinary” defendant is just as bad. As you say, there can be no real presumption of innocence.
Nor do we want a system (which unfortunately seems to be developing) in which any leader’s political opponents can go jurisdiction-shopping until they find someone willing to try them for “war crimes” or some such — as happened with Pinochet.
We need a clear and realistic definition of criminal leadership. Something which covers the Hitlers (legally elected!) but doesn’t destroy the principle of sovereign immunity.
Along with that we need a system for dealing with such monsters, so that they don’t go off to serene retirement. You want to hold out that chance, though, so that minor-league monsters won’t always fight to the death because there’s no alternative. I’d happily see Kim Jong Il pensioned off to spend his days in a Bangkok hotel working his way through the local prostitute supply if it means his people can stop eating bark.
Unfortunately we seem to be moving toward the worst of both worlds — the civilized states are too civilized to get their hands dirty, so it’s left to brutes and thugs to deal with brutes and thugs. Which means that eventually there is nothing left but brutes and thugs because the civilized people have ceded them all power.
Epitaph on a Tyrant
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
–WH Auden
neo: However, if the Left ever gets its chance to try Bush and Rumsfeld for war crimes,
Having a “show trial” of a real tyrant is one thing — using political power to bend the justice system so as to attack one’s political enemies is quite another. I think if the left were ever in a position to indulge its vicious fantasies in this way, then that would simply mark the end of justice and legitimacy in the true sense, and the beginning of a reign of brute power — i.e., we would be effectively in a new civil war.
“reconciliation” *snickers*
Executions are to get rid of people, not to reconcile anything. Reconciliations are for the living, not the dead.
Just another example of the propaganda apparatus of the Left, Neo. It’s been going full steam ever since the Republicans dared try to help the meek and weak.
The Chalice of Righteousness rightfully belongs to the Left, you know.
Steve, you never advocated in 2005, to kill Moqtada or any other harsh method used by the United States. Stop posturing as if you could have seen the future back a year or 2 ago.
Real “show trials” can be conducted only in specific environment of totalitarian state, as Moscow trials of 1937. The most important part of them was not court proceedings per se, but their media coverage and organized campaign of meetings at all major factories, with mandatory participation of all workers, resolutions of these meetings and so on.
All trials are “for public consumption”. People are only willing to forego private vengeance in favour of impartial justice if they are confident that offenders will be held to account, so the rule of law can only be maintained if justice is seen to be done as well as actually being done.
In the case of dictators, a public trial is particularly important in order to destroy the mythological figure the tyrant has made of himself. The image of the superhuman leader is replaced with the image of a very ordinary-looking man, standing powerless in the dock like any common criminal.
Trimegistus – the concepts of “criminal leadership” and “sovereign immunity” are mutually exclusive. If a leader can be prosecuted for his actions by some international court he no longer has sovereign immunity.
In any case, there are so many despotic regimes in the world that it would be impossible to get international agreement on any definition of “criminal leadership” unless it was too narrow to be useful and/or impossible to enforce.
At most you could get some nations to recognise the concept to varying degrees, inevitably resulting in “jurisdiction-shopping” and cynical attempts by political partisans to prosecute their opponents.
The best summation of this trial gave Mark Steyn:
“There can never be “justice” for murderous dictators – there’s simply too much blood. But there can be retribution, and a final line drawn under a dark chapter of history as he’s shovelled into his grave.”
Don’t cry, be happy now.
“The purpose? To show the superiority of court justice to the random murders the person in question has perpetrated.”
Perfect. Such trials are in some sense as much an enactment as a judicial proceeding, but they are an enactment of the values the society hopes to have. At a superficial level, there is no difference between a show trial and an attempt to fit political crimes into some sort of identifiable structure. The difference is ultimately one of attitude and humility. The show trial must be defended as “real” in all accidentals. With this trial, there was universal understanding that this was an attempt to get as close to justice as possible.
Fake trials to go with the fake liberals, eh neo?
Good post.