Continued... (Narrative Protection of Evil) 👆

When the Second World War ended, one of the most important reasons for holding the Nuremberg trials was to confront society and the world with the truth. If, instead of trials, the leading figures of the Nazi apparatus had simply been summarily executed or eliminated militarily, many uninformed followers of their deadly ideology might have transformed them into heroes.

Justice, in its most authentic meaning, is not only punishment. It is the effort to ensure that the crime is not repeated: to separate the path of the future from the past, not by erasing memory, but through social awareness.

Without the Nuremberg trials, perhaps the language that produced and justified the crimes would never have been fully exposed and broken.

What separated the future of the German people from their past was not only the military collapse of Nazism. It was justice’s commitment to exposing the truth of the diabolical narrative apparatus through which evil had been produced and justified. Only such an ethical commitment to justice—justice understood as the disclosure of evil—can prevent the cycle of evil from being repeated in society.