Full house to have the seating for the first of the Centre for Criminology, also seminar series.
And if there are people in the audience who aren't on our seminar list or our
events list and therefore don't know about the rest of the seminar series,
there are some handouts at the end on the fall table which tells you about the other seminars and if you want to get on to the list,
just give me your email at the end of the seminar and I'll get you access to it.
So welcome to the first seminar. Welcome to the MSI students who are new and we hope you enjoy the series.
We have our first speaker, Professor Willem de Haan from the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology in the Free University of Amsterdam,
but also groaning university too. I think it's speak for people,
people who has enormous expertise over the years in various different criminology and criminal justice topics around the field of violence,
crime prevention, particularly around criminality and violence in the public domain, and how environmental factors affect that.
But today and I think this is partly why we have such a large audience,
he's going to talk about problems of anachronism and judgement of past international crimes.
So I think that would be of interest to our criminology students and to the transitional justice students who I think are also here.
So thank you very much for coming quite a way. And then we have technology as well.
That's fine. Thank you very much, Carolyn, for your were nice words of welcome.
I'm absolutely delighted and honoured to be invited to this place.
Excellent. And to see such a large turn up today.
I don't think it's for me, it's for the series and it's the first time.
And you're probably curious what it's going to be like.
And what I'd like to do is to share some thoughts of you on a problem we as
criminologist and criminal lawyers face when we're dealing with international crimes,
crimes against humanity that were committed in the past, even in the distant past.
Generally, the past is not something that criminologists care to think about very often.
We usually study contemporary problems of crime, security, criminal justice,
etc. And of course we talk about that and we think about that in the works we have.
And like I said, we don't give that very much thought, talk, thought.
It's it's self-evident evident, however, when we study.
Oh, that was too far away for you.
Okay. This was the purpose.
Now go to the next one. When we do research on atrocities that happened in the past.
Our research focus on state crimes of previous regimes.
We study old crimes from new perspectives.
These are titles from articles and books written in this field, and all crimes from new perspectives already signals what the problem is, namely,
that we have to be aware of some methodological issues implicated in the use of contemporary concept,
criminological concept to describe and explain historical events.
Next one, please. There's going to be a lot studying atrocities that were committed in the past.
Inevitably confronts us with questions like,
Can we legitimately ascribe meanings to actions they did not have at the time that these crimes were committed?
Or are we then culpable of anachronism?
And I'll explain later what that means, because we are applying contemporary concept to describe and explain historical events.
Is it, for example, acceptable to use a concept like Crimes of Obedience developed to explain a massacre committed in 1968
during the Vietnam War by American Sergeant William Kelly and his platoon in the village of M.I.
To describe and explain a similar event, a massacre that took place during the colonial war in the former Dutch East Indies in 1894.
An explanation. In April 1998, it became publicly known that Hendrik Colon, Dutch prime minister from 1925 to 1939,
had been involved in killings killings of civilians during the military expeditions into former East Indies.
Historian Herman Lagerfeld in his biography of Caroline Maxwell,
quoted from letters in which the 25 year old Lieutenant Caroline tells his wife and his
parents about a raid on the palace of the Raja in the town Shotgun Haggadah in 1894.
On the island of Lombok. That's one that was the opening picture and an imagination of the atrocity.
While it wasn't seen as an atrocity when this picture was made, this is a picture for schoolchildren, and it's from the Colonial Museum.
But this is the scene that I'm talking about and an excellent piece.
So Caroline writes to his wife,
I have seen a woman with a child of about six months on her left arm and a long lance in her right hand storming at us.
One of our bullets kills mother and child. We were not allowed to show mercy.
I had to have nine women and three children who were asking for mercy.
Rounded up and shot. It was unpleasant work, but there was no other way.
It was terrible. I'll stop now.
In a letter to his parents, he goes on. After. After the attack, the few remained who were asking for mercy.
13. I believe the soldier's questioning lay at me.
I turned around to light a cigar. There were some heartbreaking cries.
And when I turned around again, those 13 were dead to.
Next one, please. Disclosure of these passages led to what historian John Blocker called a war on colon.
Fellow historian John O'Brien argued that Lagerfeld, the biographer,
by accusing Klein retrospectively of war crimes, had committed a form of a historic moralism.
From a historical perspective, he argued, it is not allowed to apply contemporary values and norms to events that took place in the past.
Even if we find that according to contemporary standards.
The Dutch colonial army acted unacceptably. We should take into account that a century ago, public opinion looks at this differently.
From a historical perspective, Caroline should thus not be seen as a war criminal, but as a child of his time.
Next one. A case in point is that Colin was knighted with the military.
Dellums order for courage, prudence and fidelity.
In reaction to the Brown,
historian John Blocher argued that the acts of historical figures might have been considered immoral or criminal by their contemporaries,
even at the time they were committed. Lagerfeld in his biography, in fact, showed that at least one eye witness, a captain in the Army.
Called Class Acts, cold blooded murder, and noted that Colon had a reputation for being one of the worst attack killers.
Therefore, I cannot accept one cannot maintain, like the brand did,
that what we today consider crimes of war were necessarily seen as normal and acceptable at the time these events took place.
One cannot maintain that these were not war crimes just because they were not labelled as such.
At the time, they were committed. I'm ex-wife.
Oh, we were looking very hard. I was fine. Yeah. A professor of literary criticism argued that the brand's claim.
That forest from a historical perspective could and should be seen as a child of his time revealed a double standard,
if only because, quote, no one ever said that of Iceman or Carol Sheets in her view.
Therefore, Cullen is a criminal in the context of any time.
In an interview with collapsed biographer, it was suggested that following the standards of the Contemporary Yugoslavia Tribunal,
he Coghlan would have been a war criminal.
Even though the claim is clearly, if not intentionally anachronistic, we could consider this as an hypothesis and also hypothetically,
hypothetically verify whether Lieutenant Cullen would have been convicted by the ICC to why.
Such a legal thought experiment could, however, be conceived in two different ways.
First, as if the historical atrocities in which Lt Col was involved have taken place within the contemporary context of former Yugoslavia,
or as if the city had hypothetically jurisdiction over crimes committed in the past.
In the first case, the question to be answered would be,
is there sufficient evidence and are there sufficient legal grounds to conclude that Caroline,
or rather someone contemporary, behaving like him, would indeed be convicted by the US?
Should she asked you why? To answer this question.
Most relevant is the jurisprudence of the ICC.
Why that under certain conditions,
superior military commander or civilian leader can be held criminally responsible for international crimes committed by his subordinates?
Now I won't go into into the detail of the jurisprudence of the to why,
but we'll just say that on the basis of the facts and circumstances and supposing the evidence were beyond reasonable doubt,
Caroline would have been held responsible for crimes committed by his subordinates.
And. Been guilty of war crimes.
On the basis of the jurisprudence of the ITC. Why? Lieutenant Colonel Lang as a superior commander.
Would have been convicted for knowing that his subordinates,
subordinates were going to commit these crimes, given that they had already committed similar crimes,
possibly under his command,
and for failing to take necessary and reasonable measures to prevent these crimes or to punish the perpetrators for committing them.
This is all asantewaa jurisprudence.
In the second case that hypothetically the answer to why I have jurisdiction over crimes committed in the distant past.
It is arguable that the acts to which my admitted in his letters were unlawful under
international law at the time of their commission and violated international humanitarian force.
We're done talking about The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907,
and about the Martens clause prohibiting human rights violations out of legal details.
But even when we look at the distant past, there are juridical grounds to consider these acts as war crimes.
If anything, the legal thought experiment makes clear that this Lieutenant Caroline cannot simply be considered or excused as a child of his time.
From a contemporary perspective, he may be seen as a criminal in the context of any time,
and the events in which he was involved may retrospectively be seen as crimes of war.
Yet. I think we have to move on now that we have to at.
Yeah. Yeah. Historians.
Historians consider it senseless to judge events that received a moral meaning in a specific historical context on the basis of what we know now.
To some, it is a matter of a historic moralism if we've seen.
To others, it is a matter of senseless anachronism.
Like a historic moralism. The accusation of senseless anachronism could be brushed aside as merely rhetorical,
an effort to disqualify moral criticism and to protect the moral reputation of Prime Minister cool by his historical legacy.
I think that this, in part with the War on Kaline was about about his historic allegedly legacy in his reputation.
However, if we take the accusations seriously, the accusation of senseless anachronism, it raises the question what exactly is anachronism?
And what's the problem with it? And that's what I'll be talking.
No. Anachronism.
And against Chronos, time has been defined as the impropriety of depicting past phenomena in terms of present values,
assumptions or interpretive categories.
This is a fallacy which shows a lack of awareness that the past difference differs in fundamental ways from the present.
Next one. An example of anachronism is the use of the word holocaust.
It was introduced in 1948 and the Declaration of Independence of Israel to capture the special character of the genocide of European Jewry.
But only became generally known to the public following the Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning American TV series entitled Holocaust in 1978.
In 2001, the German Israeli historian Dan Deiner observed that, I quote, well into the 1970s,
wide ranging portraits of the A park would grant the Holocaust a modest, if any, mention at all.
By contrast, it now 2001 tends to fill the entire picture.
So just to show one example that we now tend to believe that what happened during the Second World War
that the kill and mass killing of the Jews had always been seen as and talked about as the Holocaust,
which is simply not true.
The Holocaust is a fairly recent concept in in public discourse, even though it was mentioned one time in the Declaration of Independence of Israel.
As a result of the growing popularity of the word Holocaust for many reasons that I can't go into now.
It was subsequently used to describe other mass killings,
like the famine during and after the Japanese occupation in the East Indies, which was called the East East Indian Holocaust.
The next one place. Or more recently, a book about the Spanish Civil War, 1936 1939, which was published and titled The Spanish Holocaust in 2012.
Explain these and other examples of anachronism.
Raise two sets of questions. First, is any form of anachronism senseless?
And in fact, senseless anachronism, therefore a play on Nazism?
Or can we just distinguish between senseless and sensible forms of anachronism?
And second, does each and every form of anachronism inevitably imply a historic moralism?
Or if well-founded moral judgements of historical events are possible.
After all, that remains to be seen.
Does this mean that the study of war crimes by historical figures should not simply be dismissed as ahistorical moralism and senseless anachronism,
but be taken seriously for what they were crimes of war, violations of human rights, etc.
Next one. In art, literature and audiovisual media anachronisms about there.
When you start to look at it, they're everywhere. And a very striking example of such an intentional use of anachronism was televised
was a televised reconstruction of the first day of the war in Indonesia.
The Dutch army intervened in 1948.
It was called a police show action with a euphemism, but it was fighting a war there.
What happened in 1974 was brought to the viewer in this program by life correspondents in Jakarta,
The Hague, Washington, etc. and it was as if colour television already existed in those days.
It was very made, very lively, very well, very well done.
And and they made very creative use of the way we look at news to consume news, digest news, etc., to get an understanding of what the situation was.
I thought it was brilliantly, brilliantly done. I could give many examples in in in art and literature of the deliberate use of anachronisms.
Sometimes it's unintentional, but often it is done with a certain purpose, a rhetorical purpose, an artistic purpose.
While in art, literature and the media anachronisms are accepted or at least tolerated in academia,
an anachronism tends to be considered a grave error, although there are some exceptions.
Like there are always some exceptions and here are some exceptions too.
For example, historian Peter Burke has argued that anachronism may indeed be productive for historians.
A very deviant position, I assume.
But as an example, he refers to the best selling book, Montague,
in which historian what you read described an 18th century village in the south of France.
The way a modern anthropologist would describe a village in the 20th century very effectively.
Anachronisms. May, according to Burke, therefore make the subject matter more interesting by introducing a dramatic human dimension in this way.
Next slide, please. Generally.
However, within within in history historiography they call it the methodological fallacy of anachronism is considered to be serious,
and it has even be called the historical sin of sense, having been caught in the act of committing such a methodological fallacy,
which happened to me when I was accused of senseless anachronism,
when I talked about this thought experiment with asked you why makes one feel ashamed for being so stupidly unscientific
and showing such a total lack of awareness of the fact that the past differs fundamentally from the present.
And when I imagined the situation that had happened, I still feel very uneasy about it even.
But even historians do not consider every form of anachronism a mortal sin.
According to some, for example, definitions of anachronism have in fact set the bar too, too high.
So you could say to some historians,
this is too dogmatic to say that each and every form of anachronism is a historical sin, let alone the sin of sins.
One reason for that, for this,
is that anachronism is unavoidable because historians are tied to the present and have knowledge which contemporary actors at the time never have.
And as a matter of fact,
most historical explanations are based on descriptions and classifications that were not available to the objects of research.
However, the fact that the historian is tied to the present does not imply that anything goes.
It is important to carefully distinguish between types of anachronism that are simply inevitable.
An anachronism that are not inevitable, but nevertheless may be legitimate or even desirable.
Conceptual anachronism is inevitable. If the historian has the ambition to describe and explain past deeds,
then description and explanation will demand categories not available to the agents, the historical agents themselves.
It would, for example, be legitimate to describe people as homosexuals,
even if they lived in a time when the concept of homosexuality had not yet entered the vocabulary.
This form of descriptive anachronism would be appropriate, however,
only if homosexuality were defined in terms of the behaviour of people having sex with people of the same sex.
It would not be allowed to project a modern idea of homosexuality on an earlier period,
nor to impose modern values about sexuality on a situation in the pre-modern world.
But even such a form of judgemental anachronism could be legitimate, as, for example, in the case of violations of human rights.
In a discussion of the work of the famous historian historian quant Quentin Skinner,
he is claimed to have stated that we cannot logically denounce the Chilean country for failing to uphold basic,
basic human rights because they never had any intention of doing so.
In response to this claim, it has been argued that,
of course we can't criticise the Chilean country for not upholding basic human rights and we should.
Because in this case it's perfectly in line with Skinner's thought to condemn the agent as ignorance or maliciousness.
This is a fairly sophisticated and detailed debate between Skinner and other historians that I cannot go into now,
and possibly I'm not even able to to to analyse in all its finesse finesses that theoretical historians have.
But I thought the debate is interesting because it's it's about such a clear case of a military dictatorship in South America.
And the question whether or not we ask as as as we speak now are legitimately could legitimately
condemn these historical actors for having done what they've done in cases like this.
Anachronistic use of contemporary concepts, theories and perspectives, alien to two historical agents is perfectly legitimate.
It may even be desirable because past agents may have deceived themselves about their motives or simply have possessed a more
limited understanding of the processes they took part in or witnessed than historians enjoying the benefit of hindsight have today.
In other words, anachronistic unfaithfulness to concepts and categories of past agents does not
always constitute an historically incoherent interpretation of past deeds.
It's some, in some cases, retrospective application of contemporary theories and conceptual frameworks to historical events will
allow a better understanding of historical events that was possible while they were taking place.
Understanding the past in contemporary terms, stronger than in its own terms, can be a manifestation of historical sophistication.
And I'm going to do. We had that.
Yeah. Now we're going to take a legal perspective on anachronism.
And I'd like to say, especially to the students, to signal to me, please, when, when I'm losing you.
And in the argument, don't be shy. You're doing me service.
If you stop me and say, Oh, wait a minute, I didn't get this.
So maybe, maybe just I stop here for a minute to see if it's been somewhat clear to you what I've argued so far.
Have you have you understood the problem, that you can be humiliated by historians if you don't if you don't watch your step
when you're dealing with historical with historical human rights violations,
all we need to be to be on guard with them. So that's clear, I think.
And have you understood why, even when you take historians to task,
that there is there is leeway there to use contemporary the contemporary concept that we as criminologist I used to work with,
to use them to to understand, to explain, even to describe to some extent what happened in the past.
Or is that? How's that? Speak up.
How you're doing? Me servers. Okay.
Maybe you're all lawyers now and then. We're going to continue with with the law perspective.
Now, what historians consider as anachronistic from a legal perspective will be seen as a violation of the principle of legality.
The operative moral principle in criminal law demands that person faces criminal charges
only for an act that has been criminalised by law at the time the act was committed.
No. Retrospective application of law.
In international criminal law.
This is and this is an all legal principle, right. But in international criminal law, everything is more more liquid.
Zygmunt Bauman would say it's more you know, it's more and more still contested.
It's it's it's in flux. It's changing.
So in international criminal law, it may be admissible to convict to convict a defendant,
even if at the time the crimes were committed, these actions were proved propagated and enforced by the state.
And an obvious example for that is that this is that at the Nuremberg trials,
some lawyers argued in favour of the defendants that the genocidal actions committed during the Third
Reich did not constitute crimes because they were not violations of law in effect at the time and place.
During the trial. This argument was overruled. However,
by the contrary argument that it was more significant that these actions were criminal under Germany's treaty obligations and pre-existing German law.
And ultimately the Nazis would be tried and convicted also for crimes against humanity,
which were not yet officially recognised as a legal category in international criminal law.
Since then, in international criminal law, there is a tendency to relax the principle of legality in exceptional situations.
In these cases, a violation of the legality principle is seen as not only morally justified, but even legally legitimate.
In 1968, the convention of non applicability of statutory limitations to war crimes and Crimes against Humanity was adopted,
which guaranteed imprest repeatability for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
As a result, the prosecution of these international crimes could be no longer restricted by time limits.
This was meant for crimes during the Second World War.
To prevent that those have committed them would, after all, go free, but has since been applied on a much broader scale.
In Argentina, for example, prosecutions and trials of suspects of human rights violations during the military dictatorship of 19 six,
76, 1983 have been resumed after the Supreme Court of Argentina ruled in 2005 that amnesty laws of the 1990 were unconstitutional.
Exactly. Because these crimes were imprisoned, corruptible.
Therefore they could still be prosecuted 30 years or more after the events took
place by declaring war crimes and crimes against humanity in proscriptive,
all the legality principle is somewhat relaxed.
You could say a legal anachronism, which I use as an equivalent or historical anachronism.
The legality is no longer unattainable.
There are situations where it's seen as more morally acceptable or even even mandatory to relax the principle,
to go ahead with prosecution trial of these horrific crimes, even when they were committed in a distant past.
Q But even in cases in which suspected perpetrators themselves are no longer alive,
and that's usually where a criminal trial ends, think of the trial against Milosevic or Milosevic died in prison.
That was end of story. And when we had a talk at the university with Alfons Ory, one of the sitting judges on the on the trial against Milosevic,
and I asked him if it would be imaginable to continue the trial for for for truth finding.
He said, well, we are judges, we are not historians.
And that was for him. End of story. Now, for historians, that's that's different.
And maybe for criminal charges, criminologists.
And it needs to be different, too, because there seems to be room for historical injustices in in international law,
not so much international criminal law maybe, but in international law.
And that is the evolution of what we call a right to truth, which is now to be recognised by a number of human rights treaties,
the right to truth grants, victims of human rights violations and their relatives.
A fundamental and in proscriptive.
All right to know the truth about the circumstances of their human rights violations and in the case of deaths or disappearance,
the fate of the victims. The right also holds when the perpetrators have died,
not being prosecuted or being granted amnesty, as was the case in Argentina between 1989 and 1990.
Victims of human rights violations and their relatives may claim their right to truth until they die.
But the right to truth is also a right of society at large.
And because of the public interest in the truth. It's not strictly a strictly legal, but political, historical, historical, moral.
You could say that historical interest to a proscriptive ability becomes virtually endless, regardless of how much time has gone by.
It will never be too late to ask for the historical truth.
In this way, justice can be done concerning what had happened in the past.
And this also applies to the excesses that took place during the Dutch colonial wars
and more specifically during the above mentioned military actions in Lombok in 1894,
where in which lt could not kalayaan was involved.
With regard to such painful episodes in the national history,
it can no longer be maintained that historical events are to be seen strictly within their own
historical context and to be judged exclusively according to the values and norms of the time.
If only because painful episodes in history and uncomfortable historical events.
Won't go away. They will continue to haunt us, forcing us to realise that the past is not over yet.
Because justice has not yet been done.
In this way, they live on in the here and now, influencing what we think or try to forget as well as what we do or don't do.
In order to do justice to the past,
we need to rethink the notion of anachronism and especially the linear conception of historical time on which it is based,
a linear conception to which most historians still subscribe.
Doing justice to the past requires a radical critique of this dominant concept of historical time.
And such a radical critique has been offered by the French philosopher science Michel Sarah,
who considers a linear notion of time to be naive and unrealistic because it only causes problems in how we think about historical processes.
As he argues in no uncertain terms, quote,
All our difficulties with the theory of history come from the fact that we think of time in this inadequate and naive way.
The life and work of historical figures is continually being historicist by locating them outside the here and now,
creating historical distance, despite the fact that in reality, says Sara.
Few people and even fewer thoughts are completely congruent with the date of their time.
Ideals, norms, values. They float.
They move back and forth. In history, you cannot exactly locate them.
The way is supposed to be in linear time.
At first you had the Middle Ages and then you had the Enlightenment,
and then you had the 18th century Ampere, etc. and then we had modernity, and then we had laid modernity.
It is not when you look in actual detail how ideas develop.
That is not exactly how history evolves.
So rather than located historical facts and events on a linear timescale, Sarah proposes a multi temporal perspective.
Explain. The right to historical truth demands that linearity be replaced with a more complex notion of time.
And an example of such a complex notion of time is offered by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida,
who treats time as spectacle, arguing that traumatic historical events like atrocities,
massacres, human rights violations in the past, that they do not belong to the past, but continue to haunt us as spectres, as ghosts, to the present.
They won't go away. They stick up their ugly hex heads.
Every once in a while when when politicians, whether politicians like it or not.
So as long as as as justice is done, as transitional justice hasn't run its course,
as peace hasn't been created these days, these events of the past, they haunt our stay.
They won't go away. And to capture that notion that the past is part of the present, Derrida talks about spectral spectral time,
the spectral notion of time where past and present are intermingled, if you like.
Now, some have countered that Derrida does not, in this way succeed in escaping linearity altogether,
and therefore it might be preferable to follow elsewhere in his alternative, alternative,
topical, topological notion of time for which he has the example of a handkerchief.
I quote Michel, Sir, if you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it a certain fixed distances and proximity.
If you scatter circle in one area, you mark out nearby points and measure far off distances.
Then take the same handkerchief and crumble it by putting it in your pocket.
Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed if further, you tear it in certain places.
Two points that were close can become very distant as we experience time.
It resembles the crumpled version much more than the flat, overly simple, simplified one.
According to Michelle, Sarah Thyme is best be described as a topological sheet, which wraps itself around the world.
Although it may be true that the reader's notion of spectral time did not succeed in escaping linearity altogether,
and that Sarah's supple, adaptable, multi-directional notion of topological time is more realistic.
I'd say that the notion of spectral time may still be useful.
Indeed it reminds us it can shed some clarifying light on the complex and difficult relationship with the past as they emerge and emerge,
for example, in transitional justice, where we have to deal with the past in these complex ways and and and try to to bring the past and and
the present together in order for people to allow them to to live on and to live together in the future.
So. And maybe in terms of criticism of linearity, there might be some shortcomings in that in the notion of spectral time.
I think the two for for us as criminologist, we we can use both notions just to to be aware.
First of time is not not linear and and and multidimensional and complex.
And secondly, this spectral notion that that this this nonlinear notion of time is very useful for
the spectres that haunt us when we're dealing with phenomena of transitional justice.
I conclude that it does make sense to anachronistically consider events in the past as international crimes,
regardless of whether or not contemporaries could consider them as such as international crimes.
Obviously they couldn't. In order to try to understand the motives of the perpetrators of these crimes, which is what criminologists tried to do.
We need to locate them in the social, cultural and political context in which they took place.
So there I would go along with the ethno graphical historical perspective that you have to to also see them as children of their time.
That you do try to understand the moral constraints, for instance, that they're that they're acting with them.
But to judge the events in which they were involved,
there is no reason to strictly limit ourselves to the values and norms that were held at the time.
Strictly speaking. Yeah, that's this philosophy.
Philosophers always do that. To to to to rewind conclusion and apply a conclusion to.
To the argument itself.
So strictly speaking, one could argue that giving up the linear notion of time renders the notion of Americanism itself senseless.
Isn't that sophisticated, right?
However, I do not want to suggest that we should discard the notion of anachronism entirely by declaring it itself senseless.
I think it has a function, especially for for us, for non historians,
because it serves as a reminder that we need to rethink the notion of time in order to do justice to,
to the past, especially to the,
the painful episodes in the past in our colonial history and in the past of military dictatorship and in transitional justice towards the past.
Historical truth and justice require the application of both past and contemporary perspectives to historical events.
Because even if historical crimes did not exist, did not yet exist legally, they could not at the time be understood as international crimes,
the acts and events which these concepts to which these concepts refer now, they were historically they were committed in reality.
So we cannot just argue, going back to the beginning of this talk, they didn't exist because people didn't have a name for it.
You know, these atrocities took place in reality and we have to relate to them in terms of truth and in terms of justice,
if only because not to do so also implies a moral stance.
Retrospective moral judgements of past events are justifiable if those judgements have a sufficient factual basis,
are carefully and reasonably made, and offer a contribution to public historical debate.
Thus, if reflexively applied anachronism do make sense and may therefore be justified in the context of the
work that we do in criminology criminal criminal law with regard to process of transitional justice.
In short, it does make sense to define past wrongs anachronistically as crimes, even if most contemporaries at the time did not consider them as such.
Moral judgements of historical events do not.
Be solely to events need not be solely based on values and norms that were dominant in the past,
but may and in fact must to take into account considerations that we have as contemporaries
without running the risk of becoming a historically moralistic or senselessly anachronistic.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Officer.
Extremely thought provoking and.