Congratulations to the Rutgers and Minnesota students who clearly understand that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

In 2006, I attended a protest against Condoleezza Rice’s appearance as a commencement speaker at Boston College at the height of the Iraq War. BC, allegedly a Catholic college, honored her even though Pope John Paul II (now Saint John Paul II) and the Vatican he headed had explicitly condemned the invasion and war she helped to plan. Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran said it would be a “crime against peace.”

Vatican Strongly Opposes Iraq War

“This crime against the peace was a brand new charge, never before seen in international law. American prosecutors, led by Justice Jackson, had a more sweeping view of justice in mind. They saw the supreme crime at Nuremberg not in any specific act of Nazi mass killing, nor in the construction of the death camps like Auschwitz. For American prosecutors, the supreme crime was a completely new criminal charge: waging aggressive war, or the crime against peace.”

— from “The Ghosts of Nuremberg” by Michael Gaddy