lessons from history

from Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial:

The trial, in the final analysis, raises the distinction between law and justice. No saint or statesman lost his life or his freedom at Nuremberg. All the men who went to prison or mounted the gallows were willing, knowing, and energetic accomplices in a vast and malignant enterprise. They were all there for valid moral, if not technically perfect legal, reasons; but then, the murderer who gets off on a technicality has experienced law, not justice. …

It can be argued that evil unpunished deprives us of a sense of moral symmetry in life, and that to punish evil has a healthy cathartic effect, confirming our belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Nuremberg may have been flawed law, but it was satisfying justice.

Joseph E. Persico wrote those words in 1994. Twelve years ago it was uncontroversial for an author—a biographer and historian—to note that punishing evil is a good thing, because it restores our sense of a moral order to life.

Just sayin’.