So, um, the criminal state is basically a, a term that I found-

[překlad do češtiny] Pojem zločinný stát jsem zaznamenal u řady různých právních myslitelů, filozofů a politických teoretiků.

Významný německý filozof Karl Jaspers jej použil k popisu nacistického státu.

Také Hannah Arendtová označuje nacistický stát za zločinný.

A Aaron Treinin, sovětský právník, který zavedl pojem zločiny proti míru, tento termín rovněž používal.

Všichni tito myslitelé sdíleli názor, že zločinný stát se zásadně liší od pouhého velmi špatného režimu.

V dějinách existovalo mnoho zločinných vlád, ale jejich argumentem bylo, že v případě zločinného státu se celý státní aparát proměnil v zločinnou organizaci.

I have to ask you about Gaza with regard to genocide because-

And they're like, "Say what?" [laughs] So walk us through some of that history.

Yeah.

So, um, up until World War I, you could say that, um, states, and by states we're really talking about Western states.

That's within the kind of the, like the notion of international law was really understood as a system that, um, dealt with the relations between Western states.

And the idea was that Western states really had these basic prerogatives.

And, uh, one prerogative was a Western state has the, uh, right to treat its legal subjects any way it wants without any kind of external legal scrutiny.

And the other was that, uh, Western states have the right to basically go to war for whatever reason they want.

Mm-hmm

Um, so could you give us a sense, like, in the broadest terms, like, um, why you think the shift away from aggression towards a more atrocity framework happened, um, when it happened, and, like, was it good or bad?

Yeah.

A- absolutely.

And, and I think one of the things that I tried to do in the book is to say that, you know, if you go back and look at the, um, creation of the charter for the, uh, for the Nuremberg trial, if you kind of look at the debates that were going on, that the jurors who participated themselves, even though they wanted to focus on aggression as this kinda the paradigmatic crime of Nazi Germany, they really had some confusions as to what exactly they were criminalizing.

So there was this very interesting conversation that took place between this French delegate to the drafting of the charter for the International Military Tribunal, for the Nuremberg Charter, this, uh, guy, this French professor, a jurist named André Gros, and Robert H. Jackson, who we call was the sitting, uh, associate justice.

He was an associate justice of the US Supreme Court who took a leave of absence to kind of-run the US prosecution.

And Andrew Gross said, um, "Okay, if we're gonna criminalize aggression, what makes it a crime if it's not associated with any, let's say, other awful things like war crimes or crimes against humanity? What makes simply, let's say, violating the territorial integrity of another state or violating the political independence of another state?" Again, it might be an illegal thing, we might not like it, but what makes it an international crime? And Jackson gets pretty impatient.

Um, whereas the, the imperative of having these less brutal wars seems to, like, dominate how we talk about every war.

And question number three, why can't we have both?

Okay, so let's try to deal with each of those questions separately.

And maybe the first thing I'll do is try to connect this notion about these two paradigms that I introduce in the book back to this concept of the criminal state.

So if you look at what this Karl Jaspers was saying, um, in his interview in Der Spiegel, in the German news weekly, uh, he basically was working from the assumption that the core crime of the criminal state was its acts of extermination, that at its core, a criminal state is an exterminatory state.

And I think many of us today, if we had to kind of characterize what do we think of as the core crime of Nazi Germany, we would kind of agree that the core crime was its acts of genocide, its systematic destruction of civilian populations.

UmIf you go all the way back to the Nuremberg trial, the Nuremberg trial actually had a different understanding of the core criminality of the Nazi criminal state.

And again, by the criminal state, I think the idea was that, um, this wasn't just simply bad leadership or bad regime.

And then question number two, you write about the, quote, "age of testimony" and, quote, "beginning there." So what changed in the courtroom itself?

And question number three, why can't we have both?

Okay, so let's try to deal with each of those questions separately.

And maybe the first thing I'll do is try to connect this notion about these two paradigms that I introduce in the book back to this concept of the criminal state.

So if you look at what this Carl Jaspers was saying in his interview in Der Spiegel in the German Newsweekly, He basically was working from the assumption that the core crime of the criminal state was its acts of extermination, that at its core, a criminal state is an exterminatory state.

And I think many of us today, if we had to kind of characterize what do we think of as the core crime of Nazi Germany, we would kind of agree that the core crime was its acts of genocide, its systematic destruction of civilian populations.

If you go all the way back to the Nuremberg trial, the Nuremberg trial actually had a different understanding of the core criminality of the Nazi criminal state.

And again, by the criminal state, I think the idea was that This wasn't just simply bad leadership or bad regime.

So what changed in the courtroom itself?

And question number three, why can't we have both?

Okay, so let's try to deal with each of those questions separately.

And maybe the first thing I'll do is try to connect this notion about these two paradigms that I introduce in the book back to this concept of the criminal state.

So if you look at what this Karl Jaspers was saying, um, in his interview in Der Spiegel, in the German news weekly, uh, he basically was working from the assumption that the core crime of the criminal state was its acts of extermination, that at its core, a criminal state is an exterminatory state.

And I think many of us today, if we had to kind of characterize what do we think of as the core crime of Nazi Germany, we would kind of agree that the core crime was its acts of genocide, its systematic destruction of civilian populations.

Um, if you go all the way back to the Nuremberg trial, the Nuremberg trial actually had a different understanding of the core criminality of the Nazi criminal state.

And again, by the criminal state, I think the idea was that-Um, this wasn't just simply bad leadership or bad regime.

And then question number two, you write about the, quote, "age of testimony" and, quote, "beginning there." So what changed in the courtroom itself?

In, in plain language, what's the difference between these two paradigms, question number one? Why does this shift matter, question number two? And question number three, why can't we have both?

Okay, so let's try to deal with each of those questions separately.

And maybe the first thing I'll do is try to connect this notion about these two paradigms that I introduce in the book back to this concept of the criminal state.

So if you look at what this Karl Jaspers was saying, um, in his interview in Der Spiegel, in the German newsweekly, uh, he basically was working from the assumption that the core crime of the criminal state was its acts of extermination, that at its core, a criminal state is an exterminatory state.

And I think many of us today, if we had to kind of characterize what do we think of as the core crime of Nazi Germany, we would kind of agree that the core crime was its acts of genocide, its systematic destruction of civilian populations.

Um- If you go all the way back to the Nuremberg trial, the Nuremberg trial actually had a different understanding of the core criminality of the Nazi criminal state.

And again, by the criminal state, I think the idea was that, um, this wasn't just simply bad leadership or bad regime.

And then question number two, you write about the, quote, "age of testimony" and, quote, "beginning there." So what changed in the courtroom itself?

And question number three, why can't we have both?

Okay, so let's try to deal with each of those questions separately.

And maybe the first thing I'll do is try to connect this notion about these two paradigms that I introduce in the book back to this concept of the criminal state.

So if you look at what this Carl Jaspers was saying in his interview in Der Spiegel in the German Newsweekly, He basically was working from the assumption that the core crime of the criminal state was its acts of extermination, that at its core, a criminal state is an exterminatory state.

And I think many of us today, if we had to kind of characterize what do we think of as the core crime of Nazi Germany, we would kind of agree that the core crime was its acts of genocide, its systematic destruction of civilian populations.

If you go all the way back to the Nuremberg trial, the Nuremberg trial actually had a different understanding of the core criminality of the Nazi criminal state.

And again, by the criminal state, I think the idea was that This wasn't just simply bad leadership or bad regime.

So what changed in the courtroom itself?

Why did you start it there?

This, uh, it w- [chuckles] it's kind of interesting.

You know, Germany, uh, I think has the, you know, the deserved reputation of being a state which has done a pretty good job of confronting, you know, this, uh, horrific past and that, that's represented in the, the Third Reich.

Um, at the same time, if you look at the, the German legal system, it compiled a pretty pathetic record of dealing with, you know, in prosecuting, uh, former Nazis, many, many of which ended up living in particularly West Germany and then, you know, come nineteen ninety with-- we just now call the Federal Republic of Germany once, uh, East Germany basically disappears.

And, uh, one of the things, this is kind of, you know, a legal technicality, but your audience loves legal technicalities.

So, uh, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Crimes against humanity is first recognized as an international crime basically at Nuremberg.

So what were these new challenges that arose out of the, the shift to the atrocity paradigm?