Rebecca West's A Train of Powder; Janet Flanner's World ed. Irving Drutman; Karl Jaspers's The Question of German Guilt; Hannah Arendt's The Jew as Pariah; Harold Rosenberg's The Case of the Baffled Radical; Alain Finkielkraut's Remembering in Vain; War Crimes, ed. Belinda Cooper; and Gary Jonathan Bass's Stay the Hand of Vengeance
Linfield, Susie
"What is there to 'admit'?" —Adolf Eichmann, pretrial testimony REBECCA WEST thought they were boring. Karl Jaspers hoped they might lead the Germans to salvation. Janet Flanner...
...Of course they were...
...SOME CRITICISMS of the trials—voiced then, and more so now—are true, but odd...
...And against the wobbly brotherhood of feelings, we might posit the brotherhood of fact, which is dependent not on liking others but on the far less cozy—indeed somewhat terrifying— recognition that we share the world and the project of making it with them...
...Trials are shows in a less obvious but more fundamental sense, too...
...Ours is not yet the best of all possible worlds—but it will be soon...
...Revisiting Germany in 1954, Rebecca West wrote that the Germans regarded the Allied tribunal—not the deeds it had revealed—as "an ugly focus of infection" that "revolted" them...
...What, or who, was the alternative...
...Flanner observed Rudenko's "swift heartbeat of anger and anguish...
...f. total free distribution (sum of 15d and 15e): average no copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 289...
...Far more often, it stumbles and crawls— though not always or inevitably toward the wrong destinations...
...War crimes trials are not glorious...
...Extent and nature of circulation: a. total no...
...nevertheless, he went on to say, "it would be an equally false total judgment to say...
...Whatever one thinks of tragic marches, Rieff is right to aver that genocide and ethnic cleansing are not legal problems and, therefore, that the solutions to them will be found in no courtroom...
...Great legal proceedings carried out in planetary concert—this is the enchanted picture of universal sympathy that we hold up...
...History marches in many directions, not all tragic...
...The 1990s were an extraordinarily grim decade—as was the first year of the new century—and to believe that anything has or can or will change is a dangerous form of sentimentality...
...And this is so not because punishment can erase wrongs or vindicate the past, but because punishment enables a wounded collectivity to restore its ethical balance (or at least a portion of that balance) through re-establishing the link between actions and consequences...
...9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor...
...130 n DISSENT / Winter 2002...
...Ethical values don't rule out politics...
...The people feel no responsibility for the war, which they regard as an act of history...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 73: e. free distribution outside the mail (carriers or other means): average no copies each issue during preceding 12 months: none...
...War crimes trials try to convince us that courts are better than force...
...3) sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other non-USPS paid distribution: average no...
...With Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague, hundreds of alleged genocidaires on trial in Arusha and Kigali, and an International Criminal Court (ICC) tentatively on the agenda, the Nuremberg trials are being re-viewed—in a slew of books, plays, and even television films—with an interest sometimes verging on the urgent...
...The Nuremberg trials are a good example of how an event becomes an experience, of how a thing becomes a process, of how it lives on in our consciousness and our political culture, returned to again and again...
...2. Publication No.: 158-080...
...3. Filing date: October 1, 2001...
...Mumba's condemnation—indeed, Mumba herself—would have been impossible in 1946, for at Nuremberg there were no African judges, nor any women, nor a consideration of rape as a crime against humanity...
...This does not mean the current trials are illegitimate or should be disbanded...
...IT IS POSSIBLE, and perhaps necessary, to chart a path between the smug grandiosity of the human rights triumphalists and the insistently bleak minimalism of the realists...
...For this reason, writes legal scholar Diane F. Orentlicher in the recent anthology War Crimes, "the victors' justice of Nuremberg" now "takes on a new cast," for The Hague tribunal was founded "by states that stunningly failed . . . to arrest the behavior they now claim the authority to judge...
...International trials, for instance, don't necessarily rule out local ones...
...Many things never change, but some things sometimes do...
...What they were not—and could not be—was perpetrators' justice...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 11,500...
...4) other classes mailed through the USPS average no...
...re-issued by Ivan R. Dee, 2000) Janet Flanner's World: Uncollected Writings, 1932-1975, edited by Irving Drutman (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979) The Question of German Guilt, by Karl Jaspers (Capricorn Books, 1947) The Jew as Pariah, by Hannah Arendt (Grove Press, 1978, out of print) The Case of the Baffled Radical, by Harold Rosenberg (University of Chicago Press, 1985) Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity, by Alain Finkielkraut (Columbia University Press, 1992) War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg, edited by Belinda Cooper (TV Books, 1999) Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals, by Gary Jonathan Bass (Princeton University Press, 2000) DISSENT / Winter 2002 • 125 BOOKS of how an ever-evolving experience is different from a finite event—indeed, of how the event and the experience sometimes flatly contradict each other...
...War crimes tribunals are what we construct "after": after the atrocity, the depravity, the cruelty, the grievous wounds that can never be healed or closed or forgotten or undone...
...In this symmetrical formulation, knowledge equals justice...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 10,000...
...The world has changed since 1945, when the individual was seen as needing, first and foremost, human rights protection from a powerful, tyrannical state...
...actual no...
...b. paid and/or requested circulation (1) paid/requested outside-county mail subscriptions stated on form 3541 (include advertisers' proof copies/exchange copies): average no...
...In the twilight of Christian charity," wrote the critic Harold Rosenberg in a 1977 essay on Nuremberg, "the true defender of civilization is not the practitioner of universal forbearance but the unswerving, single-minded angel of reprisal...
...Editor: Michael Walter, Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...the trials at The Hague herald a new global ethic...
...This Statement of Ownership will be printed in the Winter 2002 issue of this publication...
...This internationalism was predicated on the idea that we are connected to others because we are essentially the same as they—which is at root a negation of human diversity...
...In the popular imagination, for instance, Nuremberg is remembered as a crimes-against-humanity tribunal, yet this charge was given the shortest shrift by the Allied prosecutors, and defined in what we would now consider a radically truncated if not meaningless form...
...against moralism (as opposed to morality), he upheld the necessity of politics...
...Another realist, Michael Ignatieff, writes in the same magazine that the Milosevic trial will "simply establish . . . who did what to whom and when and how," adding, "And when we know, justice will be done...
...All trials are shows...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 4,070...
...The imperfections, disappointments, inconsistencies, and even hypocrisies of trials don't mean that justice is simply a mirage...
...sentences ranged from ten years in prison to death...
...For the simple fact is that all justice comes too late...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: none...
...Yet if that were so, a truth commission that offered amnesty, a fact-finding inquiry, even a series of investigative reports by journalists would be justice too...
...6. Annual subscription price: $22 individual...
...actual no...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 1,039...
...In fact the rights-pessimists, as I would call them, are a necessary corrective, and if we err on any side it should probably be theirs...
...h. copies not distributed: average no copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 2,351...
...copies net press run): average no...
...Take, for instance, the charge that the trials were a form of victors' justice...
...And a depressive personality disorder has overtaken the human rights discourse...
...actual no...
...Oddly, this very negation is precisely what underlies genocide...
...It is true, as Jaspers observed, that "the sun shines alike upon the just and the unjust...
...2) in-county as stated on form 3541: average no...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 8,514...
...And this is the center that must hold, at least if we hope to speak of justice...
...Despite their many flaws, I would suggest that the Nuremberg trials represent a good moment for humanity—and precisely at a time when humanity was desperately straining to reassert a recognizably "human" form...
...The arrest of Augusto Pinochet, we are told, signals the end of impunity...
...And though the trials were and are endlessly criticized (too limited, too lax, too harsh, too biased), there is something awe-inspiring, and lastingly important too, in the Allies' hard-won decision to overcome the will to vengeance and replace it with the far less satisfying rule of law...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 10,000...
...And the trials certainly failed in their goal of changing German attitudes toward Hitler, much less leading (or forcing) the Germans to grapple with their guilt...
...g. total distribution (sum of 15c and 15f): average no...
...3) other classes mailed through the USPS: average no...
...They represented a strange new breed of justice— an attempt to fit, if not squeeze, incomprehensible atrocities and a new kind of crime into the more-orless traditional canon of Western law...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 8,961...
...Heartening because it a step in the direction of a world that is simultaneously more open and more restrained, a world in which nations can and do hold each other accountable for how they treat each other and their own citizens too...
...It is childish—an infantile disorder, some might even suggest—to insist that anything short of infinite justice couldn't possibly be justice at all...
...The Hague is a long way—not just geographically, but politically and historically and psychologically too—from Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, and East Timor...
...In this light, what Arendt—responding to criticisms of Eichmann in Jerusalem—said about her relationship to the Jews might be what all of us must say about our relationship to the human race: "I do not `love' the Jews, nor do I 'believe' in them...
...IT Is AN ODD fact that the post–cold war isolationism of the last decade—exemplified by, though not confined to, the West's aversion to action in Yugoslavia and Rwanda—was preceded by the saccharine internationalism of the 1980s, the "we-are-the-world" era of the anti-famine and anti-apartheid campaigns...
...that there is no justice...
...today, it is often where states are failing or imploding that human rights abuses, and the risk of genocide, are greatest...
...Such uncertainty, though infuriating, is apt...
...Ironically, one of the problems with the current United Nations-sponsored courts at The Hague (which is trying crimes committed during the Balkan wars) and in Arusha (where alleged perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda are on trial) is precisely that they do not represent victors' justice...
...THE INTERNATIONAL nature of The Hague trials—and of the proposed ICC—is both heartening and discouraging...
...Publisher: Mitchell Cohen, Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...Yet 126 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 that is their least important aspect...
...DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 127 BOOKS "Justice is a parent of peace," Madeleine Albright confidently declared in Pristina in July 1999...
...There is a vast difference between the rejection of collective guilt and the denial of collective responsibility...
...Political theorist Gary Jonathan Bass makes a similar charge in Stay the Hand of Vengeance: "For Clinton—and for the American public legalist words have often been a substitute for real political actions . . . The Hague and Arusha stand largely as testaments to the failure of America and the West...
...We are all brothers, nextofkin, buddies...
...Today, as the so-called "human rights culture" continues to develop—or at least to be debated, if not exactly triumph— the Nuremberg trials are the source of renewed interest (and sometimes puzzlement still...
...actual no...
...At the same time, internationalism is in some sense a defeat...
...In time of peace as much as in time of war," the judge correctly noted, "men of substance do not abuse women...
...Ironically, it is ourselves we are trying to convince, for many of us, I suspect, harbor a skeptic who wonders whether just shooting the bastards might not be the best solution...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 44...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: none...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: none...
...It was the Nuremberg trials, rather than the Nuremberg Laws, that had proved so troubling...
...5. No...
...The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal tax purposes has not changed during the preceding twelve months...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 4,381...
...The Nuremberg trials are also an example BOOKS REFERRED TO IN THIS ESSAY A Train of Powder, by Rebecca West (Viking, 1955...
...that "our" way is better than "theirs...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 240...
...All the above claims, we are told, are self-aggrandizing delusions designed by activists, academics, and politicians in the developed world to make them feel good about themselves (and, not incidentally, secure their jobs...
...to believe that the Germans could or would have held themselves accountable is a political fairy tale...
...ANARCISSISTIC personality disorder has overtaken the human rights discourse...
...d. free distribution by mail (samples, complimentary, and other free) (I) outside-county as stated on form 3541: average no...
...Neither trial reneged on what the political theorist Otto Kirchheimer called the element of "irreducible risk"—the unpredictable, unknown verdict—at the center of every real trial...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 3,985...
...This does not mean, however, that all trials— and those at Nuremberg and of Eichmann in particular—are show trials in the nefarious, commonly understood meaning of that term...
...Far better for Foday Sankoh to be tried in Freetown than at The Hague...
...7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...4. Issue frequency: quarterly...
...Some good things have happened at The Hague...
...the trial is premised on the idea not that bad acts should be exposed, but that those who are guilty of them should be punished...
...The Nuremberg trials were imposed on the Germans, but it was fitting, indeed necessary, that they took place in Germany, in the "wreckage" of a "ruined" Nuremberg, as Flanner wrote...
...Today, the opposite problem has emerged: The charges of hypocrisy and selectivity, leveled against The Hague in particular, result from the blunt fact that these trials have not resulted from war—or, rather, have not resulted from wars into which the judges' nations chose to intervene, with their troops, on the ground, and risk death...
...actual no...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: none...
...Last February, a Zambian judge, Florence Mumba, convicted three Bosnian Serbs of rape and sexual enslavement...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: none...
...actual no...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 11,500...
...actual no...
...actual no...
...But regardless of their effects (or lack of) on contemporaneous Germans, the trials changed us...
...even when they succeed, they are always a mark of the grotesque failures that have preceded them—the failure to act, in Finkielkraut's formulation, as the "guardians" of humanity...
...Surely this is movement toward what Hannah Arendt, writing in the wake of the concentration camps, called the transformation of our "elemental shame"—shame over the things human beings do to each other—into "adequate political expression...
...Which is why, in a weird way, Milosevic is right...
...we are all uplifted by the same feelings, our bodies move to the same rhythm...
...2001 STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP AND CIRCULATION (Required by 39 U. S. C. 3685) I. Publication title: Dissent...
...Publication name: Dissent...
...So though we need a world with more justice, we need, too, a world in which less justice is needed...
...Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Maxine Phillips, Managing Editor...
...Janet Flanner regarded them as an island of sanity in a sea of moral wreckage...
...made audible to the listening Court, as if his microphone were a sort of stethoscope...
...Trials eschew spontaneity for performed artifice—for rules, for restraint, for clearly marked if not stylized boundaries...
...actual no...
...In the New Republic, David Rieff charged that the ICC is "hubristic . . . . It is as if the advocates of the court have all concluded that history is at an end, or at least that they can interrupt history's tragic march and replace it with international legal norms and . . . moral convictions...
...against the dream of unanimity, he upheld the value of conflict...
...Still, it would be wise to approach thinkDISSENT / Winter 2002 n I29 BOOKS ing about war crimes trials with more than a touch of humility...
...Still, 128 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 Ignatieff is surely right to remind us of the severe limitations of war crimes trials, and to insist that without a truthful knowledge of the past only weary, ugly repetitions are possible...
...actual no...
...Date: September 29, 2001...
...the moral philanthropy of George Soros, Ted Turner, and Bill Gates bespeaks a noble internationalism...
...Three of the twenty-two Nuremberg defendants were acquitted (though not-guilty had no relation to innocence...
...Nuremberg and Eichmann were not shows—or plays—in the sense of having scripts (that is, verdicts and sentences) written in advance...
...Justice, like rights, must be local—rooted in the organic institutions through which people live their ordinary lives—to be either meaningful or lasting...
...Every trial—and especially those whose legitimacy is contested, as is virtually always the case with war crimes trials—is an attempt to demonstrate that the sober rule of law can trump the wild logic of vengeance, and that a society based on laws to which all must adhere is better than one ruled by despots...
...That's your problem," he shot back...
...Can I write this after September 11...
...Adolf Eichmann, pretrial testimony REBECCA WEST thought they were boring...
...actual no...
...Percent paid and/or requested circulation (15c/I5g x 100): average no...
...Jaspers's "essential point" was right...
...Against this "beatific smile of fraternity," Finkielkraut upheld a common humanity predicated not on sameness but on mutuality...
...But there is a vast difference morally, if nothing else— between the current Hague prosecutors and, BOOKS say, Roman Andreyevich Rudenko, the chief Russian prosecutor at Nuremberg, who represented twenty million dead compatriots...
...8. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business office of publisher: same as above...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 431...
...that violence should not be, can not be and will not be the final adjudicator...
...Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: None...
...The essential point," he wrote in The Question of German Guilt, "is whether the Nuremberg trial comes to be a link in a chain of meaningful, constructive political acts (however often these may be frustrated by error, unreason, heartlessness and hate...
...We sing, by the glimmer of cigarette lighters, the same hymn of hope and love across the entire face of the earth...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 95.02 percent...
...Choices must be made, but not every choice is an either-or...
...No doubt the suffering these prosecutors had experienced, and witnessed, ruled out impartiality in any sense of the word—though again, where would such prosecutors have been found...
...SUSIE LINFIELD teaches in the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University and is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times...
...In 1946, the Nuremberg trials were a puzzlement...
...c. total paid and/or requested circulation (sum of 1511(1), (2), (3), (4): average no copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 8,865...
...Issue date for circulation data below: Summer 2001...
...the proposed ICC hammers another nail into the coffin of the dastardly nation-state...
...I do...
...Of course the trials "failed...
...In 1947, Karl Jaspers recognized that the real meaning and the real worth of the trials would be determined when they were over—would be determined, that is, by how the world subsequently understood and used them...
...Like all false ideas, this one could not survive in the real world, and once it bumped into political situations more complex than the outright racism of apartheid and the moral outrage of famine, it crumbled into "compassion fatigue," irritation, even disgust...
...actual no...
...It means that the nations in question—the nations where the human rights violations have been perpetrated—are incapable of regenerating themselves, of replacing impunity with responsible judgment, of calling either leaders or so-called "cogs" to account...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 4,098: (2) paid in-county subscriptions stated on form 3541 (include advertisers' proof copies/exchange copies): average no...
...And then there were the French jurists, who had survived Nazi prisons and whose "apprehensions had been realized through their own agony," in the words of Rebecca West...
...It is not clear how this quandary—whereby prosecutorial nations are viewed as either too partisan or too distant—can be resolved...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 96.90 percent...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 414, actual no...
...Nor does it mean that a trial is merely a contest of competing "narratives," each equally valid, whose purpose is to entertain an audience— and may the best story win...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 447...
...And it's true...
...Certainly it is not, and never has been, his...
...The Hague (neither wrecked nor ruined) and the proposed ICC are compartmentalized from the crimes they seek to judge...
...34 inst...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 374...
...it may be too easy for citizens of the ravaged countries whose leaders (and ordinary compatriots) will be tried there to simply dissociate themselves from the proceedings...
...Moreover, the trials never focused on the war against the Jews—that took the Eichmann trial, fifteen years later...
...Alain Finkielkraut scathingly summed up this worldview in his book on the Klaus Barbie trial, Remembering in Vain: The lesson of this century has not been heard: we continue to consider life in unison as the very apotheosis of being...
...Every postwar attempt to break the cycle of war crimes impunity, to establish an international juridical order, to subject tyranny to reason and lies to truth, to figure out what crimes against humanity might be and how to stop them--all operate, consciously or not, in the shadow and the history of Nuremberg...
...actual no...
...The Nuremberg trials put the spotlight on the brilliant, foul complexities of the big Nazis' master plans, but the average German can truthfully state that such remarkable ideas certainly never occurred to him," Janet Flanner, writing for the New Yorker, observed in 1947...
...Managing Editor: Maxine Phillips, 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...among other things, they were addressing crimes for which there is no conceivably just punishment...
...In the courtroom at The Hague in which he found himself—probably unexpectedly and surely unhappily—last July, Yugoslavia's former leader was asked whether he wanted the reading of the indictment against him, which ran fifty-four unpleasant pages, to be waived...
...Optimism doesn't rule out clarity—nor is pessimism always synonymous with intelligence...
...i. total (sum of 15g, 15h(1), and 15h(2): average no...
...The Western powers so eager to assess the atrocities committed by Yugoslays and Rwandans had been unwilling to stop those atrocities, when it was still probably possible, with their (which means our) soldiers...
...I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument...
...actual no...
...of issues published annually: four...
...At Nuremberg, only the Soviet prosecutor called witnesses who testified as Jews qua Jews...
...Thus, though there is no doubt that Milosevic is politically and morally guilty, it is far from certain that he is legally culpable— far from certain, that is, that the prosecution can prove, through documents or witnesses, that he is responsible for the specific crimes with which he is charged...
...There was no critical mass—indeed, no mass at all—of anti-fascist Germans who could, on their own, have formed a government and launched such trials...
...That kind of failure can't be forgiven, and the betrayal it represents is always "ours" and never simply "theirs...
...As human rights abuses, and even genocide, increasingly occur within civil rather BOOKS than international wars, the drawbacks of global justice will become more glaring...
...But what is often retrospectively overlooked is that the trials were victims' justice, too...
...Justice—what it means and how to make it—is "our" problem...
...But this isn't really so, for on trial at The Hague will be not just "the truth" but a man whose life, or at least whose liberty, is at stake...
...This basic link is the minimal foundation for any sane future...
...The world is big, there are many nations in it, people differ from each other, and history is long...
...Nor, I believe, was the Eichmann decision a foregone conclusion (it took the Israeli judges four months to write their lengthy opinion...
...Owner: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc., 310 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10025...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,149...
Vol. 49 • January 2002 • No. 1
