Reader question: Please explain “victor’s justice” in this sentence - There is already worried talk of “victor’s justice”. My comments: This means people are worried that the person (who is currently on trial) may not get a fair trial. Victor’s justice, as name suggests, is a sort justice seen from the standpoint of the victor, the winner of, say, a war. The losers of the war are the ones who are on trial for crimes real or fabricated by the victors. And they, this time, may get treated roughly because they no longer call the shots. Losers, like beggars, cannot be choosers. This is similar to the Chinese concept of 成王败寇. That is to say, if you win, whatever you have done is right. If you lose, everything you have done is wrong, bad and atrocious. Which is just as well because both parties understand this coming in. In short, this sort of justice is not exactly fair, as seen from the objective eye or disinterested parties – not that they’re not interested, just that they don’t have personal interests in the dispute. Anyways, victor’s justice happens all the time. Of course. This is man’s history. This is civilization (or the lacks thereof) in a nutshell. The latest blatant example in my mind is the trial a few years ago of Saddam Hussein of Iraq. That war was, well, a mess to begin with. Allied forces led by America invaded Iraq on false pretences. The United States said they had to assault Iraq and remove Saddam by force because he was in possession of WMDs, or weapons of massive destruction. When they didn’t find any WMDs after occupying that oil rich country, they tried and later executed Saddam to close the book. The allied invasion itself was, understandably, never a subject of discussion at the trials. |