Just World News with Helena Cobban

A notable piece by freelancer Vivenne Walt led the WaPo‘s “Outlook section yesterday. In it, Walt made the interesting observation that–despite what many news accounts in the West would have us believe–Iraqis were not all glued to their television sets, eagerly following Saddam’s court hearing on Thursday.
Walt gives us many examples of this–I’ll come back to some of these, later. But her own opinion, expressed fairly well in the piece, is that the seeming reluctance of Iraqis to examine all the details of the atrocities of their recent past is a bad thing. Hence the title of her piece: “Not better forgotten”.
She asks,

What, after all, would German teenagers know these days about the Holocaust, if the gas ovens were not preserved and museums not built?”

I can understand her point. But from all the work that I’ve been doing on how societies can develop effective policies that enable them to escape from iterations of past atrocious violence, I would characterize her view of what “needs” to be done in the immediate aftermath of atrocities as a very “western” point of view.
And even in Germany, remember, it was not in the immediate post-Hitler years that Holocaust “remembrance” movement started, along with the whole series of explorations that Germans undertook regarding their own community and family members’ roles during the Hitler years. All that came much, much later than 1945. At the time, in 1945-46, in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Hitlerism, most of the German people were really not at all in the right “place” to start aggressively exploring their own society’s role in supporting the Nazis.
The Allied occupation forces in Germany did what they could, in their various ways, to “educate” or perhaps “re-educate” the Germans about the ghastliness of the Nazis’ deeds. Civilian work crews from various towns were forcibly taken out to nearby concentration/extermination camps to help in the cleanup, so that they could see firsthand what had been happening there. The Allies tried to disseminate the “latest news” of what was happening at the Nuremberg trials throughout Germany, in German, as speedily and effectively as possible. But by and large, most Germans–with some notable exceptions like Karl Jaspers (see this post from yesterday) really did not want to hear about it.
They had other concerns…

Continue reading “After atrocities: to seek remembrance or forgetting?”

The NYT‘s John F. Burns is a seasoned, very experienced foreign correspondent. I was just amazed, though, that in the piece he had in today’s “Week in review” section, in which he reflected on what he had witnessed directly during Saddam’s short judicial appearance Thursday, he never made a single explicit reference to the idea of the “banality of evil”.
It was the philosopher Karl Jaspers who first made the observation–this was at the time of the Nuremberg Trials–that a court procedure should indeed seek to banalize evil. In October 1946, he wrote in a letter to his former student Hannah Arendt:

It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what really characterizes them… I regard any hint of myth and legend with horror, and everything unspecific is just such a hint.

(Arendt later picked up on that observation and used “the banality of evil” as the subtitle to her 1963 classic, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”.)
Here was John Burns, in the lead to today’s piece:

It was only in the courtroom, at the American military base, that their physical insignificance, their sheer unremitting ordinariness, became so plain.
On television last Thursday, the images of the 12 former Iraqi leaders conveyed an altogether bigger impression, perhaps because the lens tightened until their faces filled the screen. But to a reporter sitting 25 feet away, for the five hours it took to complete preliminary hearings against Saddam Hussein and 11 others who terrorized Iraq, they seemed to have shrunk, pressing home the question: How could these utterly unremarkable men, forgettable in any other context, have so tyrannized their 25 million countrymen that they remained unchallenged for 35 years?

Interesting question…

Continue reading “Saddam: the ‘banality of evil’ revisited”

Alert users who use IE or AOL browsers have told me that the way our archived pages here on JWN have been redesigned, they couldn’t scroll down to the bottom of the post I put here last night. It was a long post. So with the aim that all of you could read the whole post, I’m re-posting the bottom half of that post in the ‘jump’ portion here.
Maybe it would make sense to have one Comments board, though. So if you could go back and add your comments to the board on the previous post, that should work??
Of course, if you are able to read JWN in Netscape, Firefox, etc., you’d be just fine.
Meantime, my technical person will work on correcting the underlying prob as soon as he can. If any of you has a great fix for this, could you email me? Thanks!

Continue reading “Saddam’s trial– Part 2”

So. Thursday, Saddam will be arraigned, which should mean that we hear what the charges against him are. At that point he will join two other men who were once powerful and extremely abusive national leaders but who are now on trial for their misdeeds: Slobodan Milosevic (who will begin the Defense phase of his own case next Monday), and Théoneste Bagosora, the alleged military mastermind of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.
The circumstances of Saddam’s trial will be very different from the public, UN-organized proceedings against Slobo and Bagosora. According to the AP, Saddam’s initial proceedings,

are taking place under a blanket of secrecy because of fears that insurgents, many of them Saddam supporters, might exact revenge on those taking part.
U.S. and Iraqi officials refused to say where Thursday’s hearing would take place or release the name of the presiding judge. No pictures will be allowed of any of the Iraqi participants – except for the defendants – to protect them from attack. Only a few journalists will be allowed to attend.

But evidently, the threats are not all coming from one side:

Issam Ghazawi, a member of Saddam’s defense team, said he received threats in a telephone call Wednesday from someone who claimed to be a minister of justice who promised that anyone who tried to defend Saddam would be “chopped to pieces.”

It does sound like chaotic circumstances in which to try to hold a proper trial. Not quite like the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46, though several aspects of the two trial proceedings are the same.
Primarily, at the political level, we are talking about a former leader who committed many grave rights abuses but who is beaten on the battlefield and then put on trial by the military victors–or, in this case, forces closely associated with the victors.
In the case of Slobo and Bagosora, by contrast, the political body that organized their respective tribunals is the UN, which has tried to do so in a very “fair”, due-process-y manner. (And indeed, ICTY, the former-Yugoslavia tribunal, has tried people from all of the major population groups involved in the various Balkan wars, not just the ethnic Serbs.)
At Nuremberg, of course, they didn’t “get” Hitler or Goebbels, both whom presumably shot themselves as the Allies closed in. The highest ranking Nazi they got was Goering. The Tribunal sentenced him to death–but he cheated the hangman by killing himself the night before execution with a cyanide pill.
Anyway, what I want to blog about a bit are some of the general lessons for the Saddam trial from those three earlier tribunals–but particularly perhaps, the “forgotten” lessons of Nuremberg.

Continue reading “Saddam’s trial: precedents from Nuremberg”