Judging Nuremberg, Judging Ourselves

The Nuremberg Trials closed the book. A book of horrors, a book of torture and killing and genocidal zealotry. A fitting end to those who set in motion the death of 40 million people. The end of World War II.

Filmmaker Steve Palackdharry has made a poignant and strangely trenchant documentary, Journey to Justice, about the story of a German Jew who, after fleeing his homeland, wound up participating in the Nuremberg Trials...in the prosecution of the men who forced him out of his home, his life...and took from him his family.

A German Jew. The irony is that German Jews were, up to the rise of the Nazis, very German. Very patriotic, supportive of their country in World War I...a wealth of talent and intellect and manpower that the Nazis squandered. That they drove into nations of their enemies. That they murdered.

Journey to Justice takes us back to Germany, and back through the events that lead to Nuremberg. The personal story is compelling. The history of Nazism through the eyes of a victim. Judgment at Nuremberg made personal.

Watching this unfold--all the warnings that turned into indignities, evolved into injustice and then mutated into torture, ethnic cleansing, war and Holocaust--is compelling. Yes, it's history...well-known history. But in watching the film one is struck by just how little we've learned from history. How little long-term success has come out of the Nuremberg Trials' attempt to put man's amazing capacity for inhumanity into a rational, law-based context. How little the precedents and laws on war crimes seem to matter just six decades later.

Because it was not war that was on trial. It was war crimes. Crimes that stretch the elastic boundaries of war itself into untold brutality, terrorism, torture and genocide. America spearheaded those trials. We were, at that one gleaming point in time, the beacon...the hero...the lawgiver.

But now we are the enemy of the laws we helped to create. We are exploiting every loophole, telling every lie...committing war crimes without remorse. You see, it's the remorse that really matters. The insanity of war causes men to do terrible things. But the lack of remorse, after the all the battles have been fought, cannot be explained within the insanity of war. It begins to look like evil.

So we torture. We found out last week that Rumsfeld was monitoring the torture of one man on the weekly basis. We bomb civilians. Tens of thousands of them. We put thousands of Iraqis in "detention centers"--a soft euphemism for concentration camps--and we torture them. We hold them without charges. We drive them from their homes.

We use chemical weapons. At least, that's what the Pentagon called White Phosphorus in the early 90s. But now it is an "incendiary weapon."

Not "chemical" according to the current euphemism.

And we are committing acts of genocide. Not the terribly efficient kind of Nazis camps, but a slower sort of genocide. Slower, but with even longer consequences. Depleted uranium has rained down on Iraq. First in the Gulf War, and now since our invasion and occupation. This depleted uranium disperses and contaminates. The air. The soil. The water. The body. Cancer has grown exponentially since the Gulf War. Birth defects are rampant throughout Southern Iraq. The pictures of deformed and stillborn Iraq babies are staggering. And now we've done it again. All across Iraq. Even in Baghdad.

This genocide will last for centuries. There is no liberation from the radiation. The Allies were too late to save millions upon millions of European Jews, various democrats, homosexuals, dissenters and gypsies. Will we ever be able to stop the poisoning of a land and a people? Poison that, by the way, floats on the air to far-flung places around the region. Poison that affects our own troops. That caused Gulf War Syndrome.

I am a historian of fascism. I've studied it. Written about it. Reviewed it over and over in my mind. Watching Journey to Justice reminded me why I looked into the abyss. It is there...it is real. It must be understood. It is a journey, too. Into the depths. And it has changed me. But it is history, right? It's over, right?

The journey Steve Palackdharry took, across sea and land and time, has not stopped. It did not stop in Nuremberg. As much as we'd like to think it did. As much as I'd like to think it did. To think that the last chapter of that book has been written, the tome placed upon a shelf to gather dust. Rather, we are merely writing the next chapter of that book. A book that has been filled with war crimes in Guatemala, Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, Angola, Rwanda and the Sudan.

Strangely, a close look at the history of the last sixty years finds us...the US...involved in many of the war crimes. In most of those countries...we did it, or trained and armed and advised those who did it. And here we are again. Like Vietnam. But worse. Because Americans are, unlike that war, not too concerned. Gas prices. American Idol. Distractions. Indifference. A lack of remorse.

In Journey to Justice, Hermann Goehring's lack of remorse is noted. Unabashed. Defiant.

Sound familiar?

But it is too much to expect our leaders to show remorse. Not these leaders. Not leaders who pulled the plug on US involvement in the International Criminal Court, who did legal gymnastics to find loopholes in the Geneva Conventions. To undermine the laws that flowed with retributive humanity out of Nuremberg...to protect themselves from prosecution.

Here we are. We can watch one man's Journey to Justice. We can learn. We can try. We can feel remorse.

Or, we can wait and hope...that someone will stop us and that someday, somehow...some tortured, displaced and exiled young Iraqi who lost his family will have his own journey. And that we will finally learn the lessons we once tried to teach.

Problem, Reaction, Solution

G.W.F. Hegel. Philosopher of everything, and everything else not contained in the known universe. Hegel's tough. Real tough. So much Hegel, so little time.

We've all had a bit of Hegel in our education. Maybe you had him in your high school world history/western civ class. Most draw a straight line from Hegel to Marx to communism. It can be argued, and I have...at great length, that he spawned fascism, too.

Maybe you had a taste of him in high school science. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. Remember that?

That simple formulation was Hegel's most famous contribution. It's scientific...but it's also philosophical...and political.

But the language is off. Not totally off, but off enough to cloud the impact ol' Heggie had on political thinkers and power elites.

Try this: Problem, Reaction, Solution. Notice the subtle difference? Not so antiseptic. A bit more ominous. A lot more enlightening.

It's simple. You, "Mr Power Player," want to get something done. But there is this new social reality...mass culture. Industrialization, the growth of cities, early democratic ideas and that damn bastard Guttenberg have changed the top heavy, aristocratic world into a new, mass-oriented world. A world that demands the active building of support from the governed. Consent of the governed, some dreamers called it.

But some of what you, Mr Power Player, want to do isn't necessarily in the interest of the governed. Their consent is not a given. Not anymore. Let's say...you want to invade another country...maybe to get their bananas. Maybe Bonzo is hungry. Whatever. You gotta feed the monkey.

What to do?

Turn to Hegel. He's got the formula. You need to create a Problem. A big Problem. If it ain't big? Well, make it dramatic enough to appear big, or ominous enough to sell it as big. Let's just say, for the sake of our example, that evil, Godless, atheist, anti-freedom and anti-apple pie Badguys are about to take away the right of peasants to work tirelessly on huge banana plantations owned by a small clique of elites. Plantations that, it just so happens, ship cheap bananas to Bonzo through the loving and gracious auspices of Bananas for Bonzo, Inc.--a wholly-owned subsidiary of Freedom Businesses Worldwide. The Badguys take power through an "election" and...gasp...nationalize the banana plantations, and...gasp deeper...redistribute the land to the peasants.

Now, the Badguys may have been elected. But, c'mon...elections are conditional events. The condition being the outcome and whether that outcome works in the interest of Power Players. If not? Well, Great Men in History...as Hegel called them...are like great chefs. They gotta break some eggs to make those tasty omelets.

So the Problem is that Banana Country is now Godless Pinko dynamite and the battle to protect Apple Pie and Mom requires stopping the Pinkos there, before we have to fight them here. Propaganda, fear, disinformation. Good ways to illustrate the problem. Maybe you try bombings, start up a band of Freedom Fighters, fund a future dictator. The bombings are good, though. You might even be able to blame them on the Pinkos. No one will ever figure it out. The terrorism is cladestine, so anyone can be blamed. Massacres of peasants can be blamed on regime, too. It's all about the blame game.

Then comes the Reaction. Some of the indigenous Banana people will react. But, mostly, you want the international community and folks on the home front to react. And react they will. Constant images and reports of Godlessness, of anti-Apple Pieism...of the de facto imprisonment of a people yearning for Freedom...will create support for the Freedom Fighters. For the need to intervene. For the need to stop them there before they come here.

Civil war will come. Death Squads, summary executions, torture. people will die. But the deaths will only show how desperately they need us to intervene. Yes, people will die. But remember those omelets...those tasty omelets that we eat when we consume. Omelets, with a side of ripe bananas.

You see, the Solution is already there...just waiting for enough of a Reaction to make it look organic. To get the consent of enough of the masses to make it all...well...democratic-esque.

After a bit of a civil war, Banana Land gets some intervention from the Marines, the regime is topple and a few bases are built. For "stabilization." A large Embassy will do fine in the long run. The new rulers...democrats in word, but not deed...will be trained in he fine arts of suppression, armed with the fine weapons of defense contractors and paid the fine dollars of American taxpayers they need to do it all. And Bananas for Bonzo, Inc. will get access to cheap plantations and cheaper labor. A sweetheart deal for the company that just wants to lead Banana Land to the sort of free market economy that makes for free people.

Now, this sarcastic little yarn might seem far-fetched. Wars are generated? Can it all be so Machiavellian?

Problem, Reaction, Solution plays out more often that you'd think. Sometimes future enemies are supported...Noriegas, Saddams, Ho Chi Mihns and, yes, even Castro. Sometimes terrorists are organized and supported, through covert ops and allies...like Al Qaeda. It can be as banal as dressing up in your enemies' uniforms and attacking yourself, like the Nazis did in Poland or the Japanese did in Manchuria. Sometimes it's hard to pin down, like the bombing of the Maine...which gave us a nice little war with Spain and colonies in Cuba and the Philippines.

The banana story is real. Read Richard Barnet's Intervention and Revolution about the United Fruit Company. The Bush family was heavily invested in United Fruit, by the way. Something similar happened to Iran when Mossadeq wanted to nationalize Iran's oil fields.

Stephen Kinzer has revived some of Barnet in his new book, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. Kinzer exposes the sorry little truth about our American delusion...that we are not, and have not been, and imperial power. Even though he doesn't mention Hegel, take a look and see how we...or our Power Players...have used Hegel's formula to expand, expand, expand.

It happens. Problems are created. People React. Solutions are implemented. And we go on thinking that the hurly-burly of human events is organic. That wars just happen.

But they don't. Not as often as they are created.

Hegel set the tone for History. Yes, that's History with a capital H. The march of mankind. And he gave the Power Players their marching orders. Or gave them the formula for giving us our marching orders. Marching into other countries to take what the Power Players want, so they can feed us the omelets that keep us fat and happy. And Bonzo gets his bananas.

Zarqawi, We Hardly Know Ya

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The highly pixilated face of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The webmaster of terror. The symbol of Iraq as ground zero in the war on Islamic evildoers.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The PsyOp.

A "one-day" story appeared last week in Post. Unfortunately, one-day stories give a glossy finish to the veneer of journalism. This one-dayer referred to Pentagon documents and interviews with personnel. This story exposed the Pentagon's Psychological Operation...to exaggerate the role of Zarqawi in Iraq.

Let's just think about this. The Pentagon has been running a PsyOp to exaggerate the role of Zarqawi.

Now, Zarqawi's rise has been a stunning one. First, he rose from the dead. That's right, the Pentagon had him listed as dead after a battle in Afghanistan. And he grew back a leg. Media outlets reported he'd lost a leg along the way.

Then he appeared. Alive, with a leg and in a mask...decapitating Nick Berg. That infamous video. The beginning of the Al-Qaeda-ization of Iraq. Of course, it was interesting to consider Zarqawi's power of regeneration and ability to stand up and cut off Nick Berg's head. Stranger things have happened, right? Like the oddity that Nick Berg had, according to then Atty General Ashcroft, shared his laptop and email account with two of the 9/11 hijackers. Or that he was in Iraq, jamming around the country on his own with a well-worn copy of the Koran. And working on the radio transmitter at Abu Ghraib. Right after the torture photos hit the media.

Oh, the odds. The odds that Zarqawi would be alive, leggy and capture a man who cavorted with two hijackers.

Then came the Al-Qaeda phase of Iraq. Iraq as Al-Qaeda battleground, not as sovereign nation with no Al-Qaeda ties under a brutal US occupation. An imperialistic story gave way to a great story about the struggle against evil. Raw meat for fearful Americans. Grist for the propaganda mill we call the White House.

As the ignored article states:

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Oh. Okay.

Frankly, there is good reason to believe that Zarqawi has been dead all along. Too many things had to happen to make him the face of evil. What little video we've seen has been so pixilated and distorted...to the point that this television producer must question it's veracity. It would be damn easy to take digital images and make them move that poorly, with that much distortion.

And then there are the statements, often transmitted over the internet. Has it ever occurred to you that all of those Al-Qaeda statements posted on "militant websites" can be traced? You know...by IP address? To the server? Like the NSA and Pentagon is doing to us domestically? Why can't the spysters in the Pentagon shut down these websites?

Maybe they don't want to shut them down.

Perhaps it's related to the PsyOp. Could be related to the push to the generate an evil Al Qaeda doppelganger for Bin Laden. Remember him? Another PsyOp? Well, one has to consider the possibility. One has to consider anything...everything propagandistic is, apparently, on the table.


Obviously, someone in the Pentagon is trying to put the brakes on the spin, because it's spinning out of control. Spinning us into Iran. There are many good people at the Pentagon and they are trying to tell us. This PsyOp info is, to anyone willing to pay attention, stunning. A stunning admission that what we are told is often manufactured. That the US is a target audience for PsyOp info...to cajole, to enrage, to manipulate. To generate consent.

Zarqawi. The Max Headroom of terror?

We have been living one complicated, expansive, multifaceted PsyOp since the 2000 Election. But here is a peek past the curtain. A scary, troubling peek into the edit room where reality is cut and animated and spliced and produced.

Zarqawi has been a PsyOp. And it begs the question...where does it end?