Michael Moore

11/21/2025

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg Trials. This was the international military tribunal where prominent members of the political, military, judicial and economic leadership of Nazi Germany who carried out or otherwise participated in the Nazi Holocaust and other war crimes were put on trial.

In 2018, I spent an afternoon with Ben Ferencz who, at the age of 99, was the last living prosecutor of the Nazis. Without Ben, these Nazi war criminals may never have been brought to justice. Without the Nuremberg Trials, we would not have the modern system of international criminal law. It helped establish new legal principles and led directly to the creation of the Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Criminal Court.

Basically, the Nuremberg idea was: No one is above the law — not even states. Not even powerful leaders.

Today, 80 years later, whatever system of human rights and international law we were pretending to uphold has collapsed. The mask is off.

In August, Vladimir Putin, a man who has had an ICC arrest warrant out for him since 2023, was welcomed to Anchorage, Alaska by President Donald Trump.

In January of 2024, The International Court of Justice said that Israel was plausibly committing a genocide in Gaza. Since then, most human rights organizations (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc) have declared that Israel *is* committing genocide. In November of 2024, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. Yet every few months, Netanyahu is welcomed in Washington and New York, by Democrats and Republicans, getting standing ovations while addressing both houses of Congress, and still getting unlimited military and diplomatic support from the U.S.