The Butcher's Company
Cohen, Mitchell
Did Klaus Barbie receive the defense he deserved? Before his trial in Lyon last summer for war crimes fades entirely into history, the question ought to be posed. One imagines that the cynical...
...it seems Gordji also paid for the publication of a neo-Nazi mail-order catalogue for a Paris book store...
...But note which innocents were absent from his list...
...Presumably this was to show that those devilish Zionists are as bad as the Nazis...
...It is difficult to discern if Verges himself is an extremist of the left, an extremist of the right, or both at the same time...
...As if the "Butcher of Lyon" should have been freed because P.W...
...Monsieur Jacques Verges...
...One imagines that this was to confront the West with Third World grievances in person...
...Those slaughtered in the Israeli village of Maalot by Palestinian terrorists, for example...
...Botha cannot (unfortunately) be brought to justice...
...Palestine...
...In August the French weekly Le Canard Enchainé linked Genoud to Wahid Gordji, an Iranian official who was holed up in his country's embassy in the French capital to avoid police questioning about bomb attacks there (and who returned to Tehran in November in a trade for French hostages in Lebanon...
...Would Barbie's defense team then bow heads in tribute to them along with the young WINTER 1988 25 victims of Soweto and Sabra and Shatila...
...He even declined attendance at the proceedings...
...At the Barbie trial Verges assembled an international "defense" team, including two Algerian and Congolese attorneys, respectively Nabil Bouaita and Jean-Marie M'Bemba...
...Discerning exactly who is or is not tied to whom or what or how is a rather foggy matter...
...But surely the ex-SS chief must have enjoyed the attempt by his lawyers to shift attention from his deeds to the violence of colonialism, and especially their strenuous effort to accuse Israel of crimes against humanity...
...This was the question M'Bemba asked of the jury after citing French colonial atrocities in the Congo and Madagascar...
...The very tactic was a crime against the Third World...
...And let us suppose them or their children killed some three decades later, say in a PLO attack on a civilian bus on the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway...
...That they chose spectacle instead, that they chose to present Third World grievances as Klaus Barbie's lawyers, delegitimizes any "J'accuse" they could utter...
...A judgment to be reached, surely, with bowed head...
...what right had French courts to try such a man as he...
...Can you judge Barbie with a clear conscience...
...It is, perhaps, no accident that such men chose to make their stand as Klaus Barbie's attorneys...
...And who emerged as a legal voice for Gordji...
...The blurb describing one Wilhelm Stäglish's The Myth of Auschwitz asks: "Did you know that the Jewish community of the town of Auschwitz was never deported...
...In him they had a client they deserve...
...The nature of this "defense" became particularly evident in the final week of the trial...
...It tells us much more about them than about imperialism, whose victims surely deserve better...
...Bouaita chose to grandstand in court by paying "tribute" to "the children of Izieu, Soweto, and Sabra and Shatila...
...Now, surely any decent person would pay tribute to these and all murdered children...
...These men might have taken their stand on the side of fascism's victims and, in a spirit of solidarity of the oppressed, called for unending struggle against all racism...
...Or would survivors of Izieu in Israel have become fair game as Zionists, that sinister species vilified by its foes only as neoconservatives revile communists...
...Need one minimize the brutality of imperialism by one whit to recognize such moral acrobatics for what they are...
...Jacques Verges's clients have now ranged from the "Butcher of Lyon," as Barbie is called, to ultraleftist fanatics and Arab terrorists...
...One imagines that the cynical old Nazi was aware that his acquittal was unlikely from the start...
...According to the International Herald Tribune, among the gems advertised are defenses of Marshal Pétain and books by "revisionist" historians who claim the Holocaust never happened, including Robert Faurisson (of Noam Chomsky fame...
...Indeed, let us imagine that some of the Izieu children escaped Barbie's clutches and made it to of all places...
...The architect of this immorality play was Barbie's chief counsel...
...Barbie, as is well known, was accused (among other things) of sending in 1944 forty-four Jewish children from the village of Izieu to their deaths in the extermination camps...
...According to an article on "Europe's New Fascists" by Martin A. Lee and Kevin Coogan in the May 1987 Mother Jones, Verges's role was a product of his collaboration with François Genoud, "a shadowy Swiss banker who loves Adolf Hitler," who is something of a godfather to European neofascists, and has had past links to the PLO to boot...
...But as the old pun goes, the plot seems to get ever sicker...
Vol. 35 • January 1988 • No. 1
