Of all our living Presidents, I think my favorite by far is President Bartlet. Of what genius was that man possessed what imbued such empirical wisdom though he served only seven years in the West Wing. To paraphrase our greatest living President, all positive change happens only slowly.
Indeed as I sat swatting flies at the Extraordinary Chambers a few weeks ago, awaiting the signature of a judge to grant me top secret access to the case files - and therefore validate my existence - I had ample time (five hours in fact) to contemplate those words.
History proves (if it proves anything) that hastily drawn plans or quick, zealous prosecution of even the most articulate plans leads to naught but disaster. Please see, The Great Leap Forward, the Patriot Act and The Producers - though not the producers of The Producers.
Many weeks ago now I was asked by some guy who claimed to be a Dean of a law school what I thought to be the crime of the Khmer Rouge. I didn't have a cogent answer then....and don't have one now, but perhaps an attempt can be made. In fact, I find the individual crimes committed by the CPK cadres to be of nothing but the most mundane kind.
Murder, torture, rape, slavery, and humiliation are but typical expedient brutalities - the too-oft sought refuges of Mankind's imaginations.
Even if we are to compile those small acts into larger transgressions of a general morality, turning them into, say, something we might call genocide or crimes against humanity, we are amply supplied of heroes and demons who prove the supposedly exceptional to be anything but.
That our most celebrated forebears - Scipio, Alexander, Elizabeth, Peter, Karl, etc. - are for their parts guilty of sanctioning murder, torture, forced marriage, and slavery; that men are yet boiled alive and suffer other horrors in obscure political corners; that the efficacy of torture is today debated within even humanity's most enlightened, and law-abiding societies is that irascible stain upon Mankind's hand which renders our greenest histories red.
If then, the individualizing title, "The Crime of the Khmer Rouge" cannot be supported by even widespread and state-sanctioned terror, what can it be supported by, if anything?
It is my ironically ill-contemplated belief that the one thing that best creates a crime deservedly preceded by the agnominal "the" is the abandonment of a patient civil society in favor of unthinkingly zealous pursuits of machinations based on arbitrariness, cliquishness, and invented revenge.
If such a thing sounds undramatic, you're right. But often the most innocuous sounding phraseology has marked the most terrible of crimes: Xeres' "discovery of Peru", Stalin's abhorrence of "silk gloves" and that phrase which now belongs to the ages, "Arbeit macht frei." I would argue similarly, that the crimes which these phrases denote are made salient not because of murder and mayhem of whatever scale, but because they mark points where men otherwise of conscience and dignity made the innocuous turn to expedient machinations predicated upon irrational notions - the antitheses of the patience of civilization.
In this way, they are properly discussed as extraordinary examples of crimes "contre la société civile."
Ignoring the basic begged question of what Justice is (and, of course, the question of whether it is possible to find), the smaller yet equally natural proceeding question is what type of justice the Extraordinary Chambers will mete to counter these extraordinary crimes.
That justice is, I think, the creation of a legal apparatus in total opposition to that of Democratic Kampuchea. It is the insistence on due process; the requirements of evidence; the preservation of the fundamental rights of the accused to face his accusers and the evidence before him. It is the time taken to ensure these things hold true in the face of the pressing desire for action and result.
In short, it is the creation and preservation of those things upon which men and women can rely to mount rational defenses against the anti-social.
To borrow from and add to a statement of that man who claimed to be the Dean of a law school: It is the salvation of humaneness, humanity and, civilization.
The Court must, therefore, eschew to the largest extent possible the characteristics which mark the opposite and most especially therefore, that thing which informs it: haste.
Gotta run,
-J
