ALT: a happy new year 2026 greeting with fireworks in the background

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.Read the rest of this letter and more of my writing at michaelmoore.com, link in bio.