www.crisispapers.org
Ernest Partridge's Blog
March 24, 2005
"Judgment at Nuremberg" (1961) Demands a Judgment Today.
A couple of weeks ago, while laboring past midnight into the early morning hours, I quite accidentally noticed a listing on the satellite TV of the 1961 movie, "Judgment at Nuremberg," a film that I had not seen in over forty years. Intrigued, I popped a cassette into the VCR for later viewing, and went back to my work.
When I sat down to watch the movie the next day, I was stunned. The screenplay spoke to us today with an impact that producer/director Stanley Kramer, and writer Abby Mann, could not have imagined. The fictional trial takes place in 1948, as the cold war is emerging. The movie was released during the first year of John Kennedy's presidency and a year before the Cuban missile crisis. The disarming and deflation of Senator Joe McCarthy at the hands of Joseph Welch and Edward R. Murrow had occurred a mere six years earlier. (See the PostScript below). So "Judgment at Nuremberg" was timely when released. But unfortunately for all of us, it is much more relevant today.
The first of two dramatic "peaks" of the movie takes place when one of the defendants, the indicted judge Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster) asks to be heard by the court. The second is the verdict, delivered by the tribunal judge, Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy).
Here is a transcription that I made from the DVD of the movie. Read it and ask yourself: are the two judges -- the guilt-stricken German defendant, and the presiding American -- warning us today? If so, who is listening?
Ernst Janning addresses the tribunal:
There was a fever over the land. A fever of disgrace, of indignity, of hunger.
We had a democracy, yes. But it was torn by elements within. Above all, there was fear; fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, and fear of ourselves.
Only when you understand that, can you understand what Hitler meant to us. Because he said to us: "Lift your heads. Be proud to be Germans. There are devils among us: Communists, liberals, Jews, Gypsies. Once these devils will be destroyed, your misery will be destroyed."
It was the old old story of the sacrificial lamb.
What about those of us who knew better? We who knew the words were lies, and worse than lies?
Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country.
What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be discarded sooner or later. Hitler himself will be discarded sooner or later. The country is in danger. We will march out of the shadows. We will go forward. "Forward" is the great password.And history tells how well we succeeded, your Honor. We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. The very elements of hate and power about Hitler that mesmerized Germany, mesmerized the world.
We found ourselves with sudden, powerful allies. Things that had been denied to us as a democracy were open to us now.
The world said, "Go ahead, take it."
Take it! Take the Sudetenland, take the Rhineland, remilitarize it. Take all of Austria. Take it.!
And then one day, we looked around and found that we were in an even more terrible danger. The ritual that began in this courtroom swept over the land like a raging, roaring disease. What was going to be a passing phase, had become the way of life.
Your Honor, I was content to sit silent during this trial. I was content to tend my roses. I was even content to let counsel try to save my name. Until I realized, that in order to save it, he would have to raise the specter again. You have seen him do it. He has done it here in this courtroom. He has suggested that the Third Reich worked for the benefit of the people. He has suggested that we sterilized men for the welfare of the country...
Once more, it is being done, for love of country.
It is not easy to tell the truth. But if there is to be any salvation for Germany, we who know our guilt must admit it. Whatever the pain and humiliation...
My counsel would have you believe we were not aware of the concentration camps.
Not aware! Where were we?
Where were we when Hitler began shrieking his hate in the Reichstag?
Where were we when our neighbors were being dragged out in the middle of the night to Dachau?
Where were we when every village in Germany has a railroad terminal where cattle cars were filled with children being carried of to their extermination? Where were we when they cried out in the night to us? Were we deaf? Dumb? Blind? ...
My counsel says we were not aware of the extermination of the millions. He would give you the excuse, we were only aware of the extermination of the hundreds. Does that make us any the less guilty?
Maybe we didn't know the details. But if we didn't know, it was because we didn't want to know.
Judge Haywood delivers the verdict.The real complaining party at the bar in this courtroom is civilization...*
The principle of criminal law in every civilized society has this in common: any person who sways another to commit murder, any person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of the crime any, person who is an accessory to the crime, is guilty...
[The Defense Counsel asserts that] the defendant Janning was an extraordinary jurist and acted in what he thought was the best interest of his country.... Janning, to be sure, is a tragic figure. We believe he loathed the evil he did. But compassion for the present torture of his soul must not beget forgetfulness of the torture and the death of millions by the government of which he was a part.
Janning's record and his fate illuminate the most shattering truth that has emerged from this trial. If he and all of the other defendants had been degraded perverts, if all the leaders of the Third Reich had been sadistic monsters and maniacs, then these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake or any other natural catastrophe.
But this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary, even able and extraordinary men, can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat through the trial can ever forget them. Men sterilized because of political belief. A mockery made of friendship and faith. The murder of children. How easily it can happen.
There are those in our own country, too who today speak of the protection of country, of survival. A decision must be made in the life of every nation, at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient, to look the other way.
The answer to that is: survival as what?
A country isn't a rock. It's not an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult.
Before the people of the world, let it now be noted, that here in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.
Where are our political leaders willing to take a stand today against our country's descent into despotism? Very few come to mind: Russ Feingold, the only Senator to vote against the USA Patriot Act, Barbara Boxer, the only Senator to protest the Ohio election fiasco, Congressional Black Caucus members, John Conyers, Sheila Jackson Lee, Stephanie Tubbs-Jones.
As for the rest, the intimidated and silent Democrats, the moderate Republicans whose party has been stolen from them, the "journalists" who are reduced to service as stenographers to Karl Rove's "Ministry of Truth" -- are they all willing to be passive accomplices to the theft of our democracy?
Don't they know what is happening to our Republic? Or is it simply the case, as Ernst Janning warned, that they don't know because they don't want to know?
They know!They simply have to know. For the compelling facts are inescapably before them and before us all:
- American citizens are incarcerated indefinitely, without charge, without access to counsel, with no prospect of trial, all this in direct violation of five of the ten articles of the Bill of Rights.
- Most of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo are probably innocent, yet they are still held, some at Guantánamo for over three years, with no prospect of appeal or release.
- The Geneva conventions against torture are violated, and the Bush regime unilaterally withdraws the US from the International Court of Justice provisions on consular relations, so that US death sentences against foreign nationals can not be appealed.
- The original justifications for the Iraq War have all proven to be false.
- Over 1500 US soldiers have died in the Iraq war, and reportedly over 100,000 Iraqis, including women and children.
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing ." (Attr. to Edmund Burke).
This is a movie that you must see. The DVD of Judgment at Nuremberg is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or other online vendors for a mere ten dollars. Buy it. Show it. Lend it and urge others to buy it.
*This is a direct quote from Justice Robert Jackson's opening statement at the Nuremberg Tribunals, November, 1945.
PostScript: Edward R. Murrow's closing remarks from his CBS "See it Now" program on Senator Joseph McCarthy, March, 1954:
We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine; and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it -- and rather successfully. Cassius was right. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
March 8, 2005
The Indispensable "Big Gummint"
Right-wing regressives who demand endlessly that we “get government off our backs,” too easily forget how much they cling to the back of government – how much, that is to say, they benefit from the assistance of government services.
In a recent article, “Dearth of a Nation,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells makes the point supremely well:The pharmaceutical, financial, and airline industries blossomed thanks to the creation of the FDA, SEC, and FAA, which gave customers some assurance of safety when they popped pills, traded stocks, or boarded flights. The G.I. Bill provided a generation of veterans with the college educations they needed to build the post-war middle class. The creation of the federally-guaranteed 30-year mortgage proved the decisive tool in the growth of the post-war American suburb.
These investments and regulatory changes aren't merely tools of the past; it is impossible to imagine the '90s boom emerging without them. Early investment from the Pentagon helped nurture the internet. The algorithm that powered Google was developed when co-founder Larry Page, then a Stanford graduate student, won a federal grant to write a more efficient sorting and search engine for libraries. The innovative new medicines that have driven the expansion of the biotech and pharmaceutical industries arose from university research largely financed by the National Institutes of Health.
Of course, private initiative and enterprise are essential to a thriving industrial economy.As the fall of Soviet communism proves, government can’t do it all. Neither the computer with which I am writing this blog nor the internet through which you are reading it would ever have been developed entirely through government bureaucracies. Government is simply too risk-averse and too intolerant of maverick geniuses.
But that’s just half of the story. The regressive-right chooses to ignore the other half – the contribution of government agencies and investment to industrial innovation.
While it is true that the transistor was invented by Bardeen, Brittain and Shockley in1947 at the corporate Bell Laboratories, the development of microcircuitry was funded by NASA when the reduction of payload weight became a critical concern in the space program. And the internet had its origin in the government network, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
Our competitors in Europe, Japan, and Korea are well aware of the necessity of cooperation between government and private industry in the advancement of technology. The scientific and technological leadership of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century proves the necessity of this symbiosis.
However, that lesson apparently has not been learned by the Bush administration, which has cut funding for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. If the Bush budget cut is approved, NSF will be awarding 1,000 fewer research grants.
Private enterprise, they are convinced, can do it all. No need for help from the government – apart from tax relief, of course.
Once again, dogma triumphs over experience.