Lately I’ve been doing a lot of reading about wars, war crimes perpetrated by opposing sides as well as trials for these heinous acts of what I would call cowardliness by individuals/groups that have lost every sense of basic human values. Obviously it is right/proper that these individuals/groups face the full force of the legal justice system for their crimes – that is until Justice is transformed into an act of sheer Revenge then we could be in a sense blindly feeding off these crimes and letting them undermine our own sense of humanity and moral judgement. This is how I personally feel when I see old seemingly ill people at the most vulnerable stages in their lives being dragged in courts and asked to serve for crimes they may have taken part in decades ago though in many of these situations they were not primary influencers of these crimes. I believe it is right that these people face their day in court but sentencing them in my opinion serves no one and can only undermine/infect our own sense of humanity; this is my personal opinion. It is certainly true that we need to learn the hard lessons of history but at the same time we should not allow that past to stand in the way of how we decide to shape our future otherwise we’ll just be reshaping the past because distorting our sense of moral judgement takes us in that direction.
Just a thought!