Nuremberg now

Unmoored may come to be a leading term to describe these times. Domestic politics unmoored from the lives of most Americans. Foreign policy unmoored from conflict and suffering in the world. A host of dithering over a wall we know will never be built, “battleground” scuffles about irrelevant pundits speaking on college campuses, marches (with placards!!) “for science.”

At root: thinking unmoored from the actuality of a God-made world, fallen, broken, in need of earthly redemption while a heavenly redemption waits.

Leading commentators lately have sounded alarms on these fronts. David Brooks in one April column described the crisis from the university losing faith in the Western civilization narrative (something no Christian parent looking to send a child to college should take lightly). Another New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, begged his secular liberal readers to return “en masse to church,” arguing even mainline liberal Christianity was better for America than no Christianity at all.

Those are long-term quests. My concern is more pressing, my plea more urgent. Children the world over today, tomorrow, and the next day face atrocities, are dying, because our leadership in the West has forgotten how to think. When the kinds of atrocities described in “The ISIS hostage crisis” unfold over a period of years without organized remedy, we must admit to being one culturally lost and politically shriveled superpower.

The Nuremberg jurists saw in two world wars what was in the heart of man.

Daily I receive emails asking “how to help” in the Middle East. Giving to a legit aid group is a good thing, but generosity on the back end won’t make up for bad policy and insecurity at the front end. Even at this late date, a no-fly zone in Syria (why was it not imposed the night U.S. Tomahawks flew?), a safe zone for refugees in Turkey patrolled by UN peacekeepers, a war crimes tribunal specially constituted to try ISIS all are places to start.

Secular liberals put too much stock in individual grievances and want only to invest in institutional solutions. Religious conservatives have put too little stock in communal remedies, content with individual acts of kindness where complex, long-term effort is needed.

We’ve walked these roads before. This spring marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution and U.S. entrance into World War I. Both launched a 20th century—despite innovations and individual prosperity—bathed in blood and oppression. World War I, with its 17 million dead, still ranks among the deadliest conflicts in all human history. It set the stage for World War II, and—along with the advent of the Soviet Union and the Cold War—ushered in the Holocaust of Jews and a forgotten holocaust of Soviet subjects under Stalin.

But in such carnage are moments when wrongs are righted and bloody pages of history turned. The Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945 brought a remarkable close to the Nazi era within months of the end of the war. With Nuremberg came passage of a fourth Geneva Convention in 1949, which set new international standards governing civil wars, multinational intervention. It set requirements for the humane treatment of enemy combatants, prohibited hostage-taking and torture, granted humanitarian access to “wounded, sick and shipwrecked” on either side of a conflict.

I love what British journalist William Shawcross, whose father was a jurist at Nuremberg, says: “Nuremberg’s value to the world lay less in how faithfully it interpreted the past than in how accurately it forecast the future.”

The Nuremberg jurists saw in two world wars what was in the heart of man—that man’s wickedness “was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). Their genius was to see that mere acts of vengeance by World War II’s victors would lead only to another world war; and to aspire to a civilized body of international law, a communal structure to lean on, when man’s wickedness again prevailed.

We owe the Nuremberg jurists and others for giving us common language and legal foundation in this 21st century to speak of war crimes and genocide. We owe the next generation to put that foundation to use in word and deed.