The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

deathbed moment of crystal clarity.
In the meantime, the civilized world is struggling to find legal ways, insulated by due
process of law, to punish criminals guilty of genocide. The principle was staked out at
Nuremberg, and it became part of international law with the Genocide Convention. Now the
first efforts are being made to punish perpetrators of genocidal acts in the ruins of
Yugoslavia.
Many feel despair that the way is so difficult. But there are always time lags between the
several stages in translating moral and religious guilt into civil and juridical guilt. First there
is the realization that some wickedness is not like an earthquake or a flood: it is wrong, and
someone did it. Then there is the time lag until the thought penetrates the communal mind that
if someone did it, that person can be punished (and others so inclined be discouraged).
There follows the time lag until the crime is defined and punishment decreed for
perpetrators. Finally, there is a time lag until the laws that are on the books generally can be
enforced.
This has been the sequence in the history of murder, polygamy, dueling, feuding,
infanticide, slavery, and a dozen other greater or lesser evils that were sins before they were
seen as crimes and treated as matters of criminal law. Rather than being discouraged by our
seeming impotence in the face of great genocidal evils in Rwanda, Burundi, “Bosnia,” and
elsewhere, we might take courage in the thought that everyone is miserable about it. We are
in the time of the last “lag,” when the law is written down but enforcement is partial and
sporadic.
In earlier times there was neither hesitation nor embarrassment on the part of rulers. The
makers and shakers of primitive societies have always piled the skulls high to vaunt their