Should Saddam be tried at the Hague instead?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes.

No. It would take forever. You know that in the Milosevic trial the orginal Judge (Richard May) died before the prosecution (or was it the defense? See this has been going on so long that...) even began?

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What's illegitimate about the current court?

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What's illegitimate about Iraq?

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How exactly is it a kangaroo court? Yes, Saddam will be found guilty and executed; but this isn't because the trial is a stitch up. It's because he's as guilty as hell and (seeing as his defense is a new version of the classic "Tyrant's Defense") he knows it.

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Irrelevent. The Nuremburg trials happend in a country under military occupation. Were they illegitimate?

You need to understand something here; most Iraqis want to see him swing. Now they probably aren't happy this isn't being done in the traditional Iraqi way (ie; drag him through the streets of Baghdad, cut him into little pieces and hang up what's left from a bridge) but they seem to have accepted this way of doing things. Most Iraqis wouldn't trust an alledgedly impartial international body to try Saddam and probably would see such a trial as illegitimate in some way.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

BTW, what is Mr. Hussein's defense?

As I understand it, his defence is that he is the President of Iraq and under the terms of the Iraqi constitution (as it was when he was in control) he is immune from suit. He claims the court is improperly constituted, and he does not recognise it as having the legal jurisdiction or authority to put him on trial.

As JFK spotted a while ago that's amusingly similer to the one used by Charles I after the English Civil War. We all know how that worked out

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Cromwell was unusually 'posthumously' executed, he was dug up in 1661 and given the old hung drawn and quartered treatment.

"Posthumously executed" being a euphamism for "desecration" I presume?
You can't kill someone who's already dead after all... I've always thought there was something more than just slightly pathetic about digging up a couple of skeletons and smashing them up, but maybe that's just me.

Oh and that sort of weirdness wasn't quite as rare as you might think... the idea of corpses being somehow untouchable is a pretty modern idea.

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That's not even close to being accurate except in extremely simplistic terms and even then not very...
Then again most of what's said about Cromwell isn't close to being accurate, but gets remembered anyway (a couple of sieges by English troops on cities being defended by other English troops in Ireland being the best example...) a product of several centuries of libel and propaganda. In recent years, schools [in England at least] have taught a much more balanced view of the various civil wars, revolutions and political strife in the 17th century.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I believe that, in sixteenth century Scotland, the idea of posthumous punishment was carried to an even greater extreme. In one case, a dead man was summoned to face charges of high treason; his bones were exhumed, presented at the bar of the court, and endured a posthumous trial and execution.

Interesting; I had thought that that was a sort of urban myth. Seems not. I suspect the reason for that sort of thing (and the public executions as well) was down to society in general being much more brutalised than it is now.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Scotland remained an independent nation until the Act of Union in 1707, we just shared the same monarch from 1603 onwards.

True. Sort of. Also note that the Civil War basically started in Scotland what with the fuss* over the Prayer Book and all that.

*See? I can use euphamisms too!

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Charles was handed over to Parliament by the Covenanters though...

...now if you were complaining about Cromwell turning up in Scotland and routing the Covenanters you'd have a better case to be complaining about

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True, but by the end of the War (actually since the Prayer Book fiasco) it's not like Charles had much either.

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Sorry about that, it's unintentional; I've seen far too much nationalist re-writing of Scottish and Welsh history sadly (the former is more irritating than the latter as it's entered the mainstream), and I tend to get a bit snappy when I see something that resembles it even slightly.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The academics of Scottish history in their own opinions are righting wrongs.

By committing new ones? Not that that's at all unusual with historians.

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True. And I wish they would focus more on that rather than bemoaning the abolition of a Parliament that only allowed about 2500 out of a million or so people vote in elections for it...

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Which is a shame. Nothing wrong at all with a patriotic perspective, but (judging from the published stuff I've seen, which may be too small a sample) a lot of the stuff coming out of Scotland recently is unreadable unless you share the Nat viewpoint (and the same is the case with all the old Whiggish stuff published down here).

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You need to stop reading the Daily Mail

I'd say that most developments in English history recently have been pretty good (especially the longterm decline of Whiggery) and the fact that what's been published over the past few years (books, journals, everything) has been a lot better (overall) than even twenty years ago pretty much proves that.

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No... it doesn't actually. It hardly covers the Empire at all; slavery (and the tendency is to focus almost as much on America as the Empire) is pretty much the only exception.
The problem is a pretty simple one; no matter what angle is chosen a lot of people will get very, very angry (one side won't accept talking about what benefits there were, the other side just goes into a fit whenever the Empire is presented as anything other than positive). I'd like to see it get taught more though; but from a fairly objective viewpoint.

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Yes, I had noticed that. A pretty recent development actually and a suprisingly honest one (much better than the whole cult of victimhood that reigned supreme from the '30's until the '80's or so).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh, I should also add that the amount of attention that goes on slavery is insufficient...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's happened in modern times too. After the Duvalier regime was overthrown in Haiti the people dug up the elder Duvalier's body and beat the crap out of it.

Not quite the same; in this case it was the state that smashed up some skeletons. But, yes, Haiti is a pretty brutalised and morbid society so that makes sense.