Tuesday, May 01, 2007

A couple of Jackson quotes

From a talk that Noam Chomsky gave at Trinity College Dublin, I was exposed to the following interesting quotes by Robert Jackson, the chief US prosecutor at the Nuernberg Trials (Chomsky introduced these with regard to 'universality'):
  • "If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us." (couldn't find a more definitive source)
  • "We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity's aspirations to do justice." (link)
If you have the time, listen to the talk, it is quite revealing!