No Shortage of Petty Tyrants and Collaborators

Remember the Nuremberg Trials? After eighty years I guess you can’t assume that everyone does these days so just to jog memories, they were a series of trials held after WW2 of Nazis who were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, more broadly. As well as publicly exposing the horrific acts committed by the Nazis, the trials created legal precedents that would become the foundation for international criminal law.

One of the most famous precedents coming out of the trials was the rejection of what came to be known as the Nuremberg Defense, the argument that a subordinate should not be held responsible for their actions if they were following the orders of superior officers. This was established under Nuremberg Principle IV, which states:

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Now, I’m sure that there would be much debate among lawyers over what being provided a moral choice would look like. But the fundamental idea of individual moral responsibility comes out of the 18th C. Classical Liberalism tradition, as well as some degree of common sense. Interestingly, this has been largely discredited these days in fields like criminology. Today, we’re more inclined to be sensitive to the many complexities involved which drive individuals towards criminal behaviour. Reducing crime to individual responsibility is, in fact, often seen to be a response which only makes things worse. The Nuremberg Defense would probably be seen as more defensible in modern democracies today, particularly with the levels of inequality and digital mind control we have going on.

But while I would not describe myself as anything like a Classic Liberal and defend the need to understand complexity and humans as primarily social creatures, as I did in my previous article on emergent simplicity, the idea of personal moral responsibility is not one we should throw out with the bathwater. As a virtue ethicist, I believe that taking on a role requires taking on the responsibilities associated with it, including understanding what those responsibilities are and being prepared to take responsibility for failures. I believe that there are virtues that should not be compromised in performing a role. There is no expectation of perfection here, but in Aristotle’s sense, the need to continually strive to be and do good to achieve both self-respect and respect from others.

I argue this in relation to what is happening in the US at the moment in the treatment of immigrants and the bombing of Iran, in which acceptance of the Nuremberg Defense could undermine virtuous behaviour. What got me thinking about this was watching the actions of ICE agents, National Guard Troops and even US Marines in Los Angeles recently. What I saw was a lot of highly trained, heavily armed and armour protected professionals bullying average Los Angeles citizens rightly protesting against injustice. Now, I’m not being naive here in thinking that there weren’t some bad actors and agitators among the protesters. But what I saw was nowhere near a fair fight, as we see in most of the wars being fought at the moment.

As Gavin Newsom, Governor of California argued, it looked like a massive overreaction. Of course, we all know why there was such an overreaction coming from Trump, but that’s not what I want to focus on. What disturbed me was how enthusiastic many of the agents and troops seemed to be about their job and how prepared they seemed to be to inflict harm on their own people. This is despite the fact that the actions were generally seen by legal experts to be illegal.

The significance of these events cannot be overstated. This was a powderkeg and just one spark could have led to the troops firing more than rubber bullets, as bad as this was, if the protesters had not restrained themselves. But to me, watching on TV, it looked like there were plenty of agents and troops just itching to pull the trigger. The enthusiasm of the ICE Agents to throw out immigrants or handcuff US Senators is also disturbing.

This to me is going to be the ultimate test of Trump’s authority and whether the US really does become an authoritarian dictatorship. It will be when Trump gives the order to shoot and kill US citizens, or even the undocumented, as he apparently tried to do once before but failed, because people around him said no. In such a scenario, what will the ICE Agents, National Guard Troops or US Marines do? Will they just follow orders, or will they question whether it is the legal or moral thing to do? Will they see their designated targets as Americans, or as obstacles to the supreme leaders power, as well as their own? These are the choices that military coups often emerge from.

As the title of my article suggests, my fear is that there is no shortage of petty tyrants as well as just mindless thugs out there, ready and willing to do Trump’s bidding. Trump seems to know this. Remember how he bragged that all the tough guys were his followers, like bikers and how he likes to appear at UFC events surrounded by mindless thugs who adore him, despite being such a weak and pathetic physical specimen himself. Will any of these men think about Principle IV from the Nuremberg Trials when they are called on to attack and harm their own fellow citizens? I don’t think so. I think that many will be so intoxicated by the power Trump gives them that they will be ready to kill anyone and history shows this to be often the case.

For those who do have a moral conscience and ask questions but choose to follow orders anyway, the trauma of killing fellow Americans and not some evil foreign adversary, will haunt them for life. But this is not just about US domestic issues. After the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites ordered by Trump, the outcome of which is contentious, Defense Secretary Hegseth and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, gave a press conference congratulating themselves on their perfectly planned operation. According to Hegseth:

"The order we received from our commander in chief was focused, it was powerful and it was clear. We devastated the Iranian nuclear program."

But from the commentary I read and watched about the attack from politicians and legal scholars, the overwhelming consensus was that the attacks were illegal. Both in regard to international law and the US Constitution. But I wonder, did Dan Caine, someone who would have been schooled on the Constitution and who swore to uphold it, raise this little problem with the President, or did he just blindly follow orders? Or worse, was he so excited about the prospect of deploying his expensive bombers on something other than a training drill, that he ejaculated in his pants.

The Nazi’s success was based on their ability to turn human beings into monsters, ready and willing to kill and torture their own citizens and this appears to be the project of the Trump Administration as well. But it was not only the petty tyrants and mindless thugs who were the problem but the collaborators, some of whom were tried after Nuremberg. These are the ones who aid and abet the tyrant in their self interest and at the expense of their own people. These are the lowest of the low on the moral hierarchy, what the Ancient Greeks may have referred to as Kakoi and the list seems to be growing as more and more appear to be tolerating and flattering Trump, rather than directly opposing him.

There is enormous complexity in all of this, which I acknowledge. Human motivation cannot be simply reduced to individual moral responsibility. There are deep questions around lack of meaning and mental illness in our societies, for example, which can drive young, aimless and insecure people into cults like Trumpism. These cults generate us and them mentalities and empower people to become petty tyrants and treat even other citizens as vermin, as Trump would say. There are the often overwhelming impacts of fear and insecurity which strip people of courage and self-respect, turning them into fawning collaborators and then there are just all of those narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths who get off on domination and cruelty.

But then there are the virtuous, or Agathoi. Those who have learned and practice virtues such as courage, justice, modesty and truthfulness. These are the sorts of people I follow on Substack, like Robert Reich, Bill McKibben and Sabrina Haake. Throughout history there have always been stories of individuals who have said no to tyrants, often at great personal cost. But these individuals who say no, can often cause cascading effects where more and more feel empowered to say no until the tenuous hold the tyrant has on human psychology is broken and the illusion revealed.

For this reason, while cognizant of the complexities, we should not give up on individual moral responsibility; not from a simplistic Classical perspective but from a Virtue Ethics one. The agents, troops and generals as well as the collaborators and sycophants, should be on notice that there are moral and legal responsibilities required of them and their jobs and that there will be a personal reckoning if they follow illegal orders to commit crimes against humanity. That being a petty tyrant is no better and being a mindless thug, no excuse. For the giving of support to tyrants to subjugate, oppress, kill and torture fellow citizens, there should be understanding, but no simple Nuremberg Defense.