By Mark Turley
‘Why, of course, the people don’t want
war… Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the
best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece… But after
all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always
a simple matter to drag the people along… All you have to do is tell them they
are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism… It works
the same in any country.’—Hermann Göring, April 18th, 1946[1]
The Trial of
the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal at
Nuremberg, (1945-6) indicted twenty-four Germans, of whom twenty-one ultimately
sat in the dock.[2] Plucked from a shattered nation,
interrogated constantly and largely held in solitary confinement, they
represented those whom the victorious Allies deemed to be the most culpable
remaining members of the National Socialist state. The prosecution of such a
diverse range of men – from political figures to military personnel, to
economic and industrial leaders – was an awkward task. International law was
created and bent to suit purpose and the woolly charge of ‘Conspiracy’ was
introduced to bind the cases together. Ultimately, after nearly a year of
proceedings and a barrage of evidence from all four of the Allied nations, eleven
men were sentenced to death [3], three received life
sentences, two received twenty years, one fifteen and one ten. The other three
defendants, Hjalmar Schacht, Hans Fritzsche and Franz von Papen were acquitted,
although all were immediately rearrested and convicted by German denazification
courts, receiving sentences of various lengths. At Nuremberg, there were no
innocent men.
By the time the
messy business of execution and disposal of remains had been concluded, the
Trial of the Century presented the world with eleven dead Germans and three
major conclusions. First of these was that it had punished aggression. The
Nazis were aggressive. The Nazis were expansionist. The Nazis were to blame for
World War Two. Secondly, it had punished tyranny. Nazi Germany had been a
dictatorship, in which no recourse was made to the views of the people. It had
assumed and consolidated power and imprisoned opponents. It had been
totalitarian, ruthless and oppressive. Finally, the tribunal had punished
‘racism’. The Nazis had subscribed to racial ideology. They wanted to secure a
future and land for the Nordic people. And rather than just moaning about it,
like many before them, they had actively sought an answer to the ‘Jewish
question’, through increasingly extreme means.
Or at least,
those are the conclusions the world was supposed to believe.
The first of
these stated aims of the Nuremberg lawmakers – to show that the waging of
aggressive war had no place in the modern world, would need someone or
something to arbitrate in such matters from that point on.
The United
Nations, established in 1942, by Churchill and Roosevelt, officially became
this arbiter. It is worth remembering that the organisation’s origins were in a
collective term for the Allied nations – the ‘United Nations’ were initially
the US, the UK, the USSR and France. Of the fifteen members of the UN Security
Council these four, along with China, have remained the only permanent members.
A quick glance
at the UN Charter shows some very Jacksonesque rhetoric, as its very
first sentence, ‘We, the United Nations,’ it declares, ‘determined to save
succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has
brought untold sorrow to mankind…’[4]
Just like so
much of the posturing at the trial, it gives the impression that everything is
being done from a high sense of altruism. Yet when one looks at the history of
the last sixty-two years, since Göring et al’s ashes were thrown into a
river, the UN’s influence on this matter is seen to be a dismal failure. It may
be true that we have avoided lapsing into conflicts as catastrophic as World
Wars One and Two and that Europe (or Central to Western Europe at least) has
managed to live in relative peace but this would seem to be something of a smokescreen.
We came perilously close to nuclear oblivion several times during the sixties
and seventies, yet even setting this to one side, one nation in particular,
with certain hangers-on has managed to repeatedly invade, bomb and commit a
variety of civilian atrocities, sometimes involving chemical weapons, since the
time the United Nations was formed. This leads us to open our eyes – and the
perception of rather a grim reality.
With the defeat
of Nazi Germany, the British Empire achieved its primary long-term aim, in
maintaining the European balance of power. However it did so at enormous cost
to itself. Britain has had to stand by, helpless, as its Empire has been
dismantled. The UK has been thoroughly usurped as the world’s leading power by
the United States, to whom it has become nothing more than an irrelevant ally.
Preperata’s
Russo-German ‘Eurasian Embrace’[5] had been prevented from
coming to fruition, but it was clear, that for the new western imperial power,
more work would be needed to ensure stability at the top of the global
hierarchy. Having thoroughly defeated Germany and criminalised its former regime,
placing compliant satraps in charge of the nation, who were eager to please and
only too happy to enforce the denazification purges expected of them, (Japan,
shattered and demoralised by nuclear attack, was placed in a similar position
of on-its-knees contrition) their attention turned to the Soviet Union and its
influence. Suddenly, the great evil of Nazism began to fade into memory, only
to be revived at such time when it would again become useful. Communism took
over as the spectre at the window. ‘The Red Menace’ was everywhere.[6] In reality, this was nothing more than history repeating
itself.
The western
Allies, now firmly led by the United States, with the UK in a state of
disrepair almost equalling that of the defeated powers, saw their only challenger
on the world stage as Soviet Russia, who had been allowed to annexe most of
Eastern Europe post war (not quite the Eurasian Embrace, but not far off) and
had the potential to spread its influence into Asia and beyond. American
foreign policy during the immediate post war years was formed with the sole
purpose of limiting the spread of Communism as far as possible. This, of
course, had nothing to do with ideology. They cared not a jot for the validity
or otherwise of Marx’ theories, just as they cared nothing for the pros and
cons of National Socialism. It was a simple matter of seeing off dangerous
competition – the potential for an empire to challenge theirs.
As a result we
saw the occupation of South Korea between 1945 and 1949, following a Communist
uprising. During the same period US Marines were garrisoned in China as a
protective force, as Communism threatened to take hold there too. From 1950 –
1953 American entanglement in Korea’s business evolved into the Korean War, in
which, having seen China readily succumb to Mao’s cultural revolution, despite
their presence, they responded to the attack of Communist North Korea against
the South, eventually ensuring that half of Korea at least did not become a
possible Soviet ally.
The infamous
Vietnam War, which stretched from 1959-75 began, like Korea, as a reaction to
attacks on US forces of occupation that had been there since 1955, who were
trying to limit the spread of Communism filtering down from the North. Linked
to the Vietnam conflict, we also saw the US engage in Laos between ‘62 and ‘75,
supporting anti-communist forces there. Less well known, but undertaken for the
same reason, was the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, in which US
troops were sent in to act as a counter-revolutionary force against communist
insurgents on the island.
Activity
continued in Laos and Cambodia in 1968, with an American bombing campaign along
the Ho Chi Minh trail. This tactic, heavily employed by the Allies in World War
Two in the Pacific Theatre and against Germany, was to be used time and time
again as the century progressed.
The propaganda
picture became more complicated in 1967, with the Arab/Israeli Conflict, when
the ghost of Fascism, Nazism and the Holocaust was revived having receded into
the recesses of the international consciousness. In 1973 this ghost was used to
assist in the facilitation of Operation Nickel Grass, in which the United
States came to Israel’s aid in the ‘Yom Kippur’ war. According to Norman
Finkelstein, this was a key period in the birth of what is described in certain
quarters as, ‘the new anti-Semitism’. This new anti-Semitism essentially refers
to any form of criticism of the Zionist state of Israel, an important ally for
the United States, within the volatile, mainly hostile, but oil-rich,
Middle-East.[7]
Having
stabilized the position with regard to their global superiority and with Soviet
strength on the wane, direct economic concerns, never too far down the list of
priorities of any great empire, began to take precedence. Oil, which in a very
real way had replaced Gold as the trading currency of the world, was soaring in
value. America’s attention thus turned to the ‘Libyan Socialism’ (not really
Communism, but with some similarities) of Colonel Gadaffi, whose military coup
had inconveniently disposed of oil-friendly King Idris. In 1981 there were
several small incidents with Libya, as the United States took it upon
themselves to enforce Libya’s contentious naval boundaries. This attempt at
provocation failed, so in 1986, with one of the most transparent excuses in the
history of international politics, President Ronald Reagan claimed that Gadaffi
was responsible for a terrorist bomb attack at a German disco that killed two
U.S. soldiers. Anyone who has followed world events in the last ten years will
see familiarities in this story. Here, for the first time was a Muslim nation
and accusations of them nurturing and encouraging terrorism, which they may
have been doing, but their potential threat to world peace was propagandised
out of all proportion. This led to Operation El Dorado Canyon on April 16th,
1986, when U.S. air and naval forces conducted bombing strikes on alleged
‘terrorist facilities’ and military installations in the Libyan capital of
Tripoli. The action was roundly condemned by most of the world, with its only
support coming from the UK, Australia and Israel. Unsurprisingly relations
between these nations and Libya were frosty for many years but have recently
healed to the point of Gadaffi agreeing to reopen Libyan oil to the west.
After Libya,
international incidents of aggression continued unabated. In 1988 the USS
Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner and in 1989 the United States invaded
the state of Panama in ‘Operation Just Cause’ to depose General Noriega who
had, previously been on the payroll of the CIA, working to advance US interests
in Central America. These were to prove to be only the preliminaries for the
final aggressive acts of the twentieth century which would spill over into the
twenty-first.
1991 saw the
first Iraq or Gulf war. This oil-rich region was crucial to a western world
thirsting after dwindling reserves. After its climax, US troops were stationed
in Iraq with the official reason of counteracting ‘oppression of Kurdish
people’. Yet Saddam Hussein’s regime remained in place and oppression
continued, while American bombing of the region went on intermittently.
In 1998
President Clinton ordered military strikes against alleged terrorist sites in
Afghanistan and in 2003, after the jolt provided by 9/11 in which a small band
of mostly Saudi Arabian[8] extremists managed to live up to
every line of US/Israeli ‘Islamo-fascist’ propaganda, the invasion of
Afghanistan and then the second Iraq war were waged on the premise of
harbouring terrorists and the possession of weapons of mass destruction. This
happened despite mass protests in both the UK and the USA, disagreement within
the international community and dissenting views within both national
governments. Speaking in 2004, President Bush likened the ‘War on Terror’ to
the fight against Nazism, saying, ‘Like the US involvement in World War II, the
war on terror began with a surprise attack on the US. Like the murderous
ideologies of the last century, the ideology of murderers reaches across borders.’
Yet, as is now
well-known, weapons of mass destruction were never found and are now believed
not to have existed. US and UK leaders blamed this mistake on poor
intelligence, but the second conflict in Iraq was still ongoing as this article
was being written, five years after its beginning. Estimates as to casualties
vary. A report published in the British Medical Journal, ‘The Lancet’ in
October 2006, said that up to that point, 654,965 Iraqis had met violent death
as a result of coalition occupation. Over half of these, the study claimed,
were women and children. A more recent survey, conducted by the British
research group ORB stated that by September 2007, the figure was 1,220,580.[9] Other studies suggest lower figures. As a result of the
war, some two million Iraqis have become refugees. Some analysts question the
numbers, but even if they are wrong by a factor of two, which few believe, they
are still highly significant. Remember too that this is only since 2003. The
region has undergone sustained attack, largely through air strikes, since 1991.
Total deaths are very difficult to calculate. A report by an organization
called Medact, led by Beth Daponte, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon
University, estimated over 150,000 civilian Iraqi deaths[10]
either during or caused by the first Gulf War. A total figure for the
intermediate period could not be found, although the investigative journalist,
John Pilger, asserted that a 1999 report by Unicef calculated half a million
Iraqi children who had, by that point, met their deaths through starvation or
disease as a direct result of sanctions.[11]
Even if the
figures can be quibbled with, it is clear that the human cost of the last
sixteen years of action in Iraq has been enormous. The only purposes of this
tragedy that are apparent are the establishment of American bases near the last
world sources of easy-to-pump, high quality, surface oil, an attempt to create
another oil-friendly regime in the region and the related matter of increased
security for the state of Israel as it continues on its path to being the
dominant nation of the Middle East.
One wonders, if
at any point in the future this may be referred to as an Iraqi Holocaust? What,
we might ask, have the ordinary people of Iraq done to deserve this slaughter?
To which side of the conflict can we truthfully apply Mr Bush’s terminology of
the ‘ideology of murderers’? [12]
In the face of
sixty years of sustained aggression from the USA (the above events are only a
small selection of their military endeavours since 1945) the United Nations has
become a secondary factor in world affairs. Perhaps not even that. There is
little they can do when a powerful nation chooses to pursue its own path.
It is
impossible, after seeing what the main player behind Nuremberg has been doing
since, to believe in the sincerity of their expressed aims at the trial. A
nation which claimed it wanted to save the world from the scourge of war and
which gave death sentences to eleven men it deemed to be guilty of starting one
has had a foreign policy based on little other than aggression and the rule of
force ever since.
Another stark contradiction of Nuremberg and the United Nations’ professed yearnings for peace can be found in a state it was instrumental in helping to create. Since its inception in 1948, the State of Israel has provided the ‘homeland for the Jewish people’ that Wise, Weizmann, Untermeyer and others had been campaigning for many years. Conversely, the time between then and now is referred to by the Palestinian people as the Naqba (tragedy). The development of this tragedy has implications when analysed in the wake of Nuremberg. Repeated British statements in both the White Papers on Palestine (1922 and 1939) established initial plans for accommodating Zionist demands.
Another stark contradiction of Nuremberg and the United Nations’ professed yearnings for peace can be found in a state it was instrumental in helping to create. Since its inception in 1948, the State of Israel has provided the ‘homeland for the Jewish people’ that Wise, Weizmann, Untermeyer and others had been campaigning for many years. Conversely, the time between then and now is referred to by the Palestinian people as the Naqba (tragedy). The development of this tragedy has implications when analysed in the wake of Nuremberg. Repeated British statements in both the White Papers on Palestine (1922 and 1939) established initial plans for accommodating Zionist demands.
‘Unauthorized
statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a
wholly Jewish Palestine. Phrases have been used such as that Palestine is to
become ‘as Jewish as England is English.’ His Majesty’s Government regard any
such expectation as impracticable and have no such aim in view. Nor have they
at any time contemplated, as appears to be feared by the Arab delegation, the
disappearance or the subordination of the Arabic population, language, or
culture in Palestine. They would draw attention to the fact that the terms of
the Declaration referred to do not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should
be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be
founded `in Palestine.’ In this connection it has been observed with
satisfaction that at a meeting of the Zionist Congress, the supreme governing
body of the Zionist Organization, held at Carlsbad in September, 1921, a
resolution was passed expressing as the official statement of Zionist aims ‘the
determination of the Jewish people to live with the Arab people on terms of
unity and mutual respect, and together with them to make the common home into a
flourishing community, the upbuilding of which may assure to each of its
peoples an undisturbed national development.’[13]
Initially then,
the idea of the British Mandate was for the Jewish population already in the
region, together with Jewish immigrants from Europe, to become part of a
Palestinian state in which both Arabs and Jews would coexist. This vision met
with agreement from both sides. By 1948 however, following the events of the
war and repeated agitation from Zionist leaders like Weizmann, who apparently
found the idea of living alongside Arabs distasteful, and the withdrawal of the
British who were suffering from attacks on their troops from both sides, this
had become a two state solution. The representatives of the Palestinian people
did not agree to this partition of their territory and this resulted in the
Israeli war of independence, in which the new state of Israel occupied even
more of the region than had been originally proposed. During the occupation of
this territory, the Palestinian communities of the area simply disappeared, either
killed or forcibly ejected from their homes and turned into refugees. Norman
Finkelstein described this process as one of ethnic cleansing and stated that
it was not a matter that could be under dispute ‘the scholarly debate now
focused on the much narrower, if still highly pertinent question of whether
this cleansing was the intentional consequence of Zionist policy or the
unintentional by-product of war.’[14] Bearing in mind that
what is being described is an occupying power murdering and mistreating
civilians, it would seem that Finkelstein is outlining something similar to the
‘intentionalism v functionalism’ debate which for many years dominated academic
discourse about the Holocaust. Add to this the numerous allegations of torture
and mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli hands and Israel’s brutal
put-downs of Palestinian uprisings, where youths throwing stones are met with
machine guns and tanks, and it can be seen that the victims of Nazi evil, just
like its conquerors, are more than prepared to create their own atrocities, to
act aggressively and to commit violations of human rights when it suits them.
Nuremberg’s
other conclusions fare little better. Issues related to the practice of modern,
representative democracy are too numerous to be dealt with in this article. For
now it will suffice to say that there is much about it that is very
undemocratic. The media, wealthy elites and special interest groups all wield
subversive influence. The ideal of rule by the people, for the people is as
distant as ever. It is not necessarily a system that the west should be
exporting to the rest of the world, especially when such export seems to be
largely conducted via guns and bombs. If there is a genuine moral obligation to
force other nations to adopt representative democracy through violence, then it
is not one that is readily apparent.
Racism too, is
a sticky topic for the victorious powers. Although the American Jewish
community have thrived, post war, to the point where despite only comprising
two percent of the population, nearly fifty percent of the nation’s
billionaires are Jewish[15], other minorities do not fare
so well. Twenty Four percent of blacks live below the poverty line in the
States, for example, as opposed to eight percent of whites.[16]
Three percent of the black male population of the United States is in prison,
as compared to less than half a percent for whites.[17]
Tokenistic, yet powerful evidence of America’s racial divide was also provided
by the pictures of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.
The scenes, broadcast worldwide, showed a form of economic apartheid, whereby
the black underclass found themselves bereft and stranded, while the rest of
the population escaped. As, apparently, race is only skin deep and theories of
racial difference are evil and automatically lead to exterminating
millions in death camps, we cannot ascribe any of this to racial difference.
These kinds of discrepancies can only be the result of an utterly racist
American society. It should be remembered too that immediately after Nuremberg
and until the 1960s, racial segregation was still official policy in the
southern states.
This means that
when looking at the aftermath of Nuremberg, we are faced with a situation in
which the three great evils of Nazi Germany, for which it was put on trial
before the world, were all conducted, for years afterwards, to varying degrees
by the main prosecuting power and its closest allies. There is a word for this
sort of thing. And it is ‘hypocrisy’.
It is clear
that the real result of Nuremberg was a world order built on moral hypocrisy.
The victors glossed over their war crimes and socio-political shortcomings and
continue to do so, while overplaying those of the enemy. They did this, a la
Göring, to sway public opinion in favour of their imperial agenda. And it has
worked. A few examples from recent history will suffice to show how readily
people have accepted this ethos as their own.
In his State of
the Union Address before Congress on January 29th 2002, President George W Bush
famously described North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an ‘Axis of Evil.’[18] ‘States like these, and their terrorist allies,’ he said
‘constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By
seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing
danger.’ Just over a year later, in March 2003, the war in Iraq began.
On the 24th of
September, 2007, one of Bush’s Axes of Evil, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of
Iran, arrived at Columbia University in New York to speak to the students and
faculty. His visit provoked a full day of intense protest from massed crowds
who believed that giving a platform to the man who denied the Holocaust and
said ‘Israel should be wiped off the map’ was to provide him with credibility.
It should be pointed out here that these views, falsely attributed to
Ahmadinejad by the media, result more from alarmist editing and misquotation
than a genuine attempt to engage with his statements. Ahmadinejad’s repeated
line on the Holocaust is that it should not be regarded as immune to
examination and re-interpretation, which is an eminently reasonable standpoint.
He has never actually denied it. The Arab news network, Al Jazeera, quoted the
Iranian President as saying:
‘they (the
governments of the west) have fabricated a legend under the name of the
Massacre of the Jews, and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself
and the prophets themselves…If somebody in their country questions God, nobody
says anything, but if somebody denies the myth of the massacre of Jews, the
Zionist loudspeakers and the governments in the pay of Zionism will start to
scream.’[19 ]
The idea of the
Holocaust being a ‘myth’ or a ‘legend’ is one that he has often expressed, but
this does not necessarily mean he believes the whole narrative is pure
invention. After all, most ‘myths’ or ‘legends’ contain a core of fact.
In a 2006
interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel, he further defined his
position:
‘If the
Holocaust took place in Europe, one also has to find the answer to it in
Europe. On the other hand, if the Holocaust didn’t take place, why then did
this regime of occupation (Israel)... come about? Why do the European countries
commit themselves to defending this regime? Permit me to make one more point.
We are of the opinion that if a historical occurrence conforms to the truth,
this truth will be revealed all the more clearly if there is more research into
it and more discussion about it….We don’t want to confirm or deny the
Holocaust. We oppose every type of crime against any people. But we want to
know whether this crime actually took place or not. If it did, then those who
bear the responsibility for it have to be punished, and not the Palestinians.
Why isn’t research into a deed that occurred 60 years ago permitted? After all,
other historical occurrences, some of which lie several thousand years in the
past, are open to research…’[20]
It is clear
that Ahmadinejad is not making statements of Holocaust denial, but rather is
expressing doubts and asking questions of the obelisk which has been
constructed around it, in particular its effect on the people of Palestine.
This leads on to his line on Israel, which has been similarly misrepresented.
According to Juan Cole, the Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian
History at the University of Michigan, Ahmadinejad really said, in Farsi, that
‘the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,’[21] still an anti-Israel statement, which should surprise
no-one, but hardly as exciting as ‘wiping Israel off the map’ with its obvious
whiff of (nuclear?) obliteration. It clearly has occurred to few commentators
that if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel, they would also be killing
the Palestinian people there, whom they are seeking to defend. There is
therefore no logical basis for this belief, at all. Yet this faulty translation
has been repeated ad nauseam around the world and used by American neo-Conservatives
to justify the escalation of hostile rhetoric towards Iran. When it is borne in
mind that Iran has huge oil reserves, confirmed at 135 billion barrels and one
of the world’s largest supplies of natural gas,[22] this
antagonistic process takes on an eerily familiar air.
Based on this
misrepresentation of his public statements, the crowd at Columbia shouted
slogans and waved placards. One student handed out flyers of the Saudi Arabian
terrorist leader, Osama Bin Laden, with the caption ‘Too bad Bin Laden is not
available.’[23] In response to these protests, the
Columbia University President, Lee C. Bollinger decided to play to the gallery
by taking to the lectern just before Ahmadinejad and saying, ‘Mr President, you
exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,’ adding, to cheers from
the audience, ‘You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly
uneducated.’
Ahmadinejad
responded with considerable dignity, saying, ‘In Iran, tradition requires when
you invite a person to be a speaker, we actually respect our students enough to
allow them to make their own judgment, and don’t think it’s necessary before
the speech is even given, to come in with a series of complaints to provide
vaccination to the students and faculty…Nonetheless, I shall not begin by being
affected by this unfriendly treatment.’
This episode
has not been reported here as an attempt to offer support to Ahmadinejad or the
Iranian regime but to demonstrate how the Nuremberg-created culture of
political correctness and our childish reactions to what we regard as political
evil are stifling the breadth of discourse in western society. Another recent
example of this took place at Oxford University on November 27th 2007, when the
historian, David Irving and the leader of the British National Party, Nick
Griffin, were scheduled to appear in debate at the Union Building. The level of
protest at their appearance was such that the debate could not proceed as
planned and the two speakers had to be diverted into separate rooms to conduct
isolated ‘mini debates’.
In an article
in which Irving was nonsensically described as ‘a historian who denied the
Holocaust ever happened’[24], the BBC confirmed that
hundreds of protestors blocked the entrance to the Union building and at one
point fifty gained entry and prevented whatever debate was taking place from
continuing.[25] Comments from some of the protestors
indicated the reasons for their anger. They chanted ‘Go home Nazi scum!’ and
‘BNP – off our streets!’ ‘This has nothing to do with free speech,’ said one,
bizarrely, ‘it’s about giving credibility to fascists, making them appear to be
part of the mainstream.’ For such illogic to work, we would need to infer that
those responsible for organizing the chamber debates at the Oxford Union have
some kind of pro-fascist agenda.
When reading
about these occurrences, one has to force oneself to remember that this is not
starving mobs, rallying against oppressors in some desperate third world
dictatorship we are talking about, but crowds, mostly comprised of young
academics, at two of the foremost seats of learning in the world. Yet these
individuals, rather than investigating the people they are attacking, rather
than engaging them in discussion and countering their arguments with their own
views, would prefer to simply see them silenced. The irony, lost on most of
them, is that they feel able to do this in one breath and decry ‘fascism’ in
the next. What is silencing of political opponents and stifling of
controversial views if not fascistic?
What is even
more worrying is that these people, comprising what could be described as our
future intellectual elite, are happy to shout and scream and denounce from a
position of ignorance. They have simply bought into the image of the evil enemy
painted for them by the media.
Such knee-jerk
condemnation is also evidenced by the attitude of colleagues and students to
Arthur Butz, one of the world’s most notorious ‘Holocaust deniers,’ and author
of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination
of European Jewry (1974). Butz also happens to be a tenured Professor of
Electrical Engineering at Northwestern University in Illinois. As a result of
his published work, which obviously has nothing to do with his teaching
position, he has been subjected to a sustained campaign to have him sacked.
According to a letter printed in the Chicago Tribune, on February 17th 2006,
Sixty-one of Butz’s colleagues in the Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science published a petition in which they called for Butz to ‘leave
our Department and our University and stop trading on our reputation for
academic excellence.’ None of them however, were prepared to offer any details
regarding Butz’ book and where, precisely they felt he was in error or guilty
of falsification. Students at the University followed suit by starting the
‘Never Again’ campaign, which, on the 30th November 2007, had 10,032
signatures. The campaign described Butz as ‘offensive and historically
inaccurate’ and stated, ‘The goal of students, faculty, alumni, and others
offended by Arthur Butz’s denial of the Holocaust should not be to prove him
wrong. Debating Mr Butz in any type of forum would dignify his claims. Lending
credibility and dignity to Arthur Butz by engaging him in debate would be
equally offensive as his views are to begin with.’[26]
Obviously, in
the minds of his attackers, something about Butz’ work makes him worthy of this
sort of vilification. But by the kind of specious reasoning outlined above,
whereby Butz is claimed to be ‘historically inaccurate’, yet no specifics are
ever mentioned, the campaigners avoid ever having to address any particular
claim in the book, in any way. One wonders how many of them have even read it.
The bottom
line, as it applies to all three situations described above, regardless of
where anybody may stand on the memory/denial continuum, is that University is
simply not meant to work on that level. It is supposed to be about
investigation, honest analysis, intellectual freedom and open debate. That’s
how we learn.
But political
correctness has put an end to that.
Probably the
most striking evidence of the hypocritical culture that Nuremberg created is
contained within the treatment of those still pursued for their guilt on its
charges. The chain of trials triggered by the IMT has continued into the very
recent past, with possibilities of more in the near future. Operation Last
Chance, a joint project of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Targum Shlishi
Foundation, was launched in July 2002 as ‘a campaign to bring remaining Nazi
war criminals to justice by offering financial rewards for information leading
to their arrest and conviction.’[27] They give an example
of the kind of individual they are targeting, by writing, on their home page,
in November 2007, ‘If he is still alive, former SS medical officer Aribert Heim
is 93 years old, but his age will not protect the alleged Nazi war criminal
from justice...’
It goes on to
relate that a bounty of nearly half a million dollars has been placed on Heim,
a Mauthausen doctor who was first indicted in 1962 and fled Germany for South
America. There are, obviously, question marks over the legitimacy of trying a
93 year old for alleged crimes committed more than sixty years ago. However,
under international law, there is no statute of limitations allowed by any
state on Crimes against Humanity.[28] Strictly speaking
then, although perhaps many might doubt the value of rounding up nonagenarians,
it would seem it does have a legal basis and therefore cannot be questioned.
The state of Israel has been something of a prime mover on the matter, as one
might expect, as shown by the farcical goings on surrounding John Demjanjuk, a
Ukrainian/American auto-worker from Cleveland, who was accused of being the sadistic
Treblinka guard ‘Ivan the Terrible’.
When evidence
came their way regarding Demjanjuk’s wartime activities, the Israeli government
argued forcibly for deportation and Demjanjuk was extradited and tried in
Israel, in 1993, where he was positively identified by five former Treblinka
inmates, who swore they had seen him in the vicinity of the camp’s gas chamber.
He was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. After spending five
years on Israel’s death row, he was eventually exonerated when it emerged that
the American Justice department had ‘fraudulently withheld evidence…to curry
favour with Jewish organizations.’[29] The judges
concluded that the Office for Special Investigation (a section of the Justice
department especially set up to investigate Nazi war criminals) and the
prosecutors had ‘acted with reckless disregard for the truth.’[30]
A Treblinka Nazi identity card, supposedly his, was, quite simply, a forgery.
Demjanjuk had never even been to Treblinka. What this says about the quality of
eyewitness testimony speaks for itself.
His ordeal
looks set to repeat itself however, as continued pressure has seen him indicted
again, in 2007, this time not for being ‘Ivan the Terrible’ but for being a
regular guard at several other Nazi camps. (He was actually captured while
fighting for the Red Army and conscripted by the Nazis as a camp guard. Perhaps
he is doubly evil therefore, having managed to be both a Commie and a Nazi.) At
the time this book was being written, Demjanjuk, now 87 and having already
served five years in Israel on false charges, was appealing extradition for
another trial in the Ukraine.
To gain a full
picture of the legal climate created by Nuremberg, however, we probably ought
to compare Demjanjuk’s case to one that is similar, to see if any conclusions
can be drawn.
Salomon Morel
was a Polish Jew who emigrated to Israel. During the expulsions that occurred
post-war, when twelve million Germans were forced from their homes, via camps,
to the newly diminished German state, Morel was the commandant of the Zgoda
concentration camp in Świętochłowice, Poland. While in charge there it is
alleged that Morel maintained an utterly brutal regime, in which food and
medical supplies were provided to him, but purposely withheld from the inmates
and conditions were contrived to be as unsanitary as possible. It is also
alleged that he personally tortured and murdered prisoners. Estimates vary, but
usually range from between one and a half to two thousand people killed by
Morel during his time in charge. Several thousand more suffered horribly under
his regime. The inmates were predominately civilians, including women and
children. Like Heim, Morel fled when it became clear that Polish authorities
intended to prosecute him, (to Israel in 1992) but at this point, his and the
other stories mentioned above diverge.
Astonishingly,
Israel refused to extradite Morel, despite repeated requests from Poland, the
last of which was made in 2005.[31] In a bizarre piece of
justification, their first refusals were based on a claim that the statute of
limitations on War Crimes had run out. Poland then tried again, having
redefined Morel’s charge as Crimes against Humanity. With complete disregard
for international law and the precedent set on many occasions by themselves,
Israel refused again, suggesting even that Morel’s prosecution was part of an
anti-Semitic conspiracy. The Polish Institute for National Remembrance then
issued a terse statement in which they reminded the Israeli government of the
pressure they and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre had applied to foreign
governments to extradite aged Nazis and promised to revisit the matter. The
whole affair recently drew to a close with Morel dying quietly in his bed in
Israel, safely cocooned from legal harassment. This can be contrasted with
recent developments in the Demjanjuk case,[32] in which
the decrepit Ukrainian lost his appeal against extradition to Germany in April
2009, amidst a barrage of negative publicity, meaning that he will shortly be
flown to Europe to stand trial once again.
The double
standard here is clear to any but the most blinkered of observers and is
illustrative of Nuremberg’s influence on the post war world. The gilded,
pseudo-moralistic rhetoric employed by the prosecution, referring time and time
again to the defendants’ wickedness and depravity in order to justify the
actions of their own states, has spawned a culture in which America and its
close allies call the shots and are the ethical arbiters.
Good guys and
bad guys. White hats and black. And those who have cast themselves as the
heroes (or victims) believe they can do no wrong, provided they do so under the
guise of ‘fighting evil’
Notes:
Mark Turley is
a writer from London, UK. In 2008 he published his second full length work, 'From
Nuremberg to Nineveh' from which this article is drawn. He is
currently working on another project, about
Anglo-American imperialism, to be published by the Progressive
Press. Extracts from his books and other writings can be found at www.markturley.com
[1] G. Gilbert, p.
278
[2] Gustav Krupp
von Bohlen und Halbach, Martin Bormann and Robert Ley did not appear because of
ill health, disappearance (or death) and suicide, respectively.
[3] Bormann was
also sentenced to death in absentia.
[4] United Nations
Charter http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/index.html
[5] The Political
Economist, Guido Giacomo Preperata described a possible union between Russia
and Germany, either by alliance or conquest as the ‘Eurasian Embrace’. From the
19th century it had been a priority of Anglo-America to prevent this from
happening as such as an alliance would have carte blanche to rule the world.
Preperata, Guido Giacomo Conjuring Hitler, How Britain and America Made the
Third Reich (Pluto Press 2005) p. 8-15
[6] This is the
title of a movie made in 1949.
[7] Finkelstein, Norman,
Beyond Chutzpah, On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History,
(Verso, 2005), p. 24
[8] It is worth
remembering that oil rich Saudi Arabia is an American ally.
[9] Halinan, Colin,
The Casualties of Iraq, Foreign Policy in Focus, October 17th 2007
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4649
[10] Medact,
Collateral Damage http://www.ippnw.org/ResourceLibrary/CollateralDamage.pdf
[11] Pilger, John, Iraq,
paying the Price http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=11
[12] Selected
details of US military action since 1945 taken from Blum, William, Killing
Hope, Military and CIA interventions since World War Two (Zed books, 2003)
and Allman, TD, Rogue State, America at war with the World, (Nation
books, 2004)
[13] British White
Paper of June 1922 on Palestine
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/brwh1922.htm
[14] Finkelstein, Beyond
Chutzpah, p. 3
[15] Benjamin
Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace (University of Chicago Press 1993) p. 1
[16] US Census
Bureau News, August 26th 2004
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/income_wealth/002484.html
[17] US Department
of Justice Prison Statistics, December 31st 2006
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm
[18] The importance
of the word ‘Axis’ here should not be downplayed. Remember that the ‘Axis’
powers of World War Two were Japan, Italy and of course, Nazi Germany.
[19] Ahmadinejad:
Holocaust a Myth, Al Jazeera, English section, Dec. 15th 2005,
http://english.aljazeera.net/English/archive/archive?ArchiveId=17019
[20] Spiegel
Interview with President Ahmadinejad, Der Spiegel, May 30th 2006
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,418660,00.html
[21] Cole, Juan (May
03, 2006). Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist And, ‘We don’t
Want Your Stinking War!.
http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html
[22] Ancient Soul of
Iran, the Glories of Persia inspire the modern nation, Marguerite del Giudice
(National Geographic, August 2008), p. 64
[23] Ahmadinejad at
Columbia Parries and Puzzles, Helene Cooper, New York Times, 25th September 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/world/middleeast/25iran.html?ex=1348372800&en=1855db4aa3b90a29&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
[24] The statement
is either ignorantly or deliberately misleading. Irving denied the existence of
gas chambers at Auschwitz, nothing else. He even accepts the existence of other
gas chambers at Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek. He is therefore, in no way, a
‘denier’. Such repeated inaccuracy of reporting is symptomatic of the sheer
tonnage of misinformation that surrounds this subject.
[25] ‘Angry Scenes
Greet Oxford Debate’ BBC News, 27th November 2007
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/7114343.stm
[26] http://www.neveragaincampaign.org
[27] http://www.operationlastchance.org
[28] Baasiouni,
Cherif ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ in ‘Crimes of War’ edited by Roy
Gutman, David Rieff and Antony Dworkin, (W.W Norton, 1999)
[29] Judges Assail
US handling of Demjanjuk, Stephen Labaton, New York Times, 18th November 1993
[30] Ibid
[31] War Crime
Suspect Stays in Israel, BBC News, 7th July 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4659985.stm
