Pursuing Truth, Seeking Moral Justice

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My book is a moral critique of the legal system precisely because of its narrowness. It is looking in many ways for what I would describe as Wiesenthal's standard of justice. I reject purely retributive legal justice: You've lost money, it must be remedied by receiving compensation in a monetary way. If a crime has been committed, somebody must be punished, whether by putting him in jail, or killing him. That's a very narrow sense of how to relieve people of damages that were done to them. To give them remedies, or to do what's legally called justice. That's different from the sense of doing what's just.

Wiesenthal was interested in something wider than the purely retributive. It's also about truth. We need to know what happened. Nuremberg in many ways is an example of moral justice. Many people don't remember that Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who was the Secretary of Treasury during World War II, believed that if you see a Nazi you kill a Nazi. That that was most efficient way and the most legally correct way, given the enormity of the crime. You see a Nazi, you hang him from the closest tree.

That was the original thinking in the aftermath of the war. What ultimately prevailed was [the perspective that emerged from the war-crimes tribunals at] Nuremberg. The legacy of Nuremberg was that justice required that the community witness and participate, that testimony is taken, that you hear the witnesses, the testimonies of survivors, that you hear the testimony of the perpetrator, that you assemble all of the documents and all the documentation and the film footage, that you keep a historical record. Because truth is the ultimate imperative of what's just. You have to know what happened, and why it happened, and who ultimately bears responsibility.

And if you hang people from a tree or shoot them in the head, you don't know that. That's what's called historical justice. That's why I am saying it's a mistake to focus on the hunting of people. It seems to me that it's better, it's a more accurate sense to understand Wiesenthal's quest as ultimately moral: We are keeping tabs on you and we want to make an accurate historical record, for now and for the future, of what happened.

Exactly. Another Jewish idea is repair,

, which goes back to the question of forgiveness and the opportunity for confrontation. If you get shot in the head there's no potential for confrontation. The ability to speak to what has happened, to speak to the people, the perpetrators, to say, "This is what you did to me, or to our people, or to us." And if necessary hear what they have to say. And when you shoot someone in the head you lose that opportunity.

Yes, I think that the lessons of the Holocaust are very confusing [from the perspective of] Christian theology, which focuses on the redemptive quality of suffering, that suffering is good. As Terrence Des Pres reminded everyone in his book "The Survivor," it's very confusing to Christians because in fact the survivor of the Holocaust knows that suffering at this level is senseless. It's not human, this is not what you mean by suffering as being good. And under such circumstances, turning the other cheek--forgiveness--is never morally necessary. Apologies, however, are morally necessary.

The Germans suffer with this now; no nation has ever been in a greater state of moral scrutiny and inquiry than the Germans. And they wonder whether they ever will be forgiven, as if that is somehow obligatory after 60-some years of both contrition and acknowledgement and apologies. The answer to that is that the acknowledgments, the contrition, and the apologies are all morally necessary. But forgiveness is not obligatory. It strikes me that it cheapens the apology if you have to be forgiven. It seems to me that it's a very narcissistic thing

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