Well, I wouldn't take a shot at him if there were innocent bystanders in the way.
--Anglosphere: What to do with killers?
Date: Saturday, December 15, 2001 5:17:55 PM EST
By JAMES C. BENNETT
It is clear from videotapes and other evidence retrieved from from Taliban and al Qaida strongholds that the only difference between al Qaida and the Nazis was the superior organizational abilities of the latter. If bin Laden could have killed 30,000 Americans, 300,000 Americans, or 3 million Americans, he would have been delighted to do so.
Yet the Europeans who were so quick to hang war criminals in 1945, even though they had had no death penalty on their books, now complain about handing over equally vicious, bloodthirsty, and fanatical war criminals to face the penalties that America has always carried in its law for such acts.
I have had my own sliver of secondhand insight into the question of Hitler. The mother of a friend of mine, an American woman I have known many years, lived in Germany for a while during the 1930s. She and her brother attended local schools. One day Hitler came to town, and, being a pretty blond, blue-eyed girl, she was chosen to be the child to give the inevitable bouquet of flowers to the Führer.
The scene stayed with her, and she recounted it to me: the big railway terminal, the crowd on the platform, the girl nervous at her important role in front of all these people. She recalled Hitler as a large, friendly man (Goering must not have been along) who took extra time to put her at ease. I asked her if she thought Hitler's warmth had been genuine, and she said it had seemed so. She is a realistic person with a good sense of people, and I tend to think that from her child's-eye view, she had perceived accurately.
Of course, this tells us almost nothing. Calming a child amid a crowd is, after all, one of the little tricks of the politician's trade, and Hitler was a consummate politician. This episode does fit in well with what we know of Hitler's mawkish sentimentality, easily engaged in a familiar formula, which he undoubtedly characterized as "postcard-perfect Aryan child expressing Volkische loyalty to the Führer."
To me it reinforces the perception that Hitler was not an abnormal monster to whom human experience was alien, but rather a human being who could express human warmth one minute and order unspeakable acts the next, knowing full well how horrible they would be. This is far more frightening.
The 20th century created quite a few such people. Europe turned out to be full of them, and in 1945, the countries that had suffered Nazi occupation were forced to face and judge them. What was clear then was that their previous generations had lost the ability to envision the depths of evil that events could elicit from their own countrymen.
Early in the previous century, the good burghers of much of Northern Europe were abolishing the death penalty, first in practice, and then in law. When they did so, it was clear that their moral imagination was not envisioning much greater evil than, say, a depressed farmer who might poison both his wife and his mother-in-law. Neither Norway nor Denmark had actually executed anybody since the 1890s.
After World War II, however, the shattered societies suddenly had to deal with thousands of their countrymen who had rounded up Jews and other "undesirables" for the Nazis, repressed their fellow-countrymen and volunteered for Hitler's pan-European army in its crusade against "Anglo-American gangsterism." These premature anti-globalists were beyond the pale of any crime their society had envisioned, and a wide consensus emerged that it would deny justice if such monstrous people were allowed to walk the Earth and await the fading of memories in hopes of eventual release.
Thus countries across Europe that had long before abolished the death penalty restored it, ex post facto. (In some cases, like Norway, the government-in-exile had restored it by decree from London, although they still sentenced people to death for crimes committed before that date.) Norway and Denmark alone executed 83 people, and it was freely admitted that there would have been many more had not so many collaborators been assassinated in the last few years of the war.
Europeanists have often sought wedge issues to split their nations from America. Although they have offered expressions of solidarity since Sept. 11, their and others' resistance to the extradition of suspected al Qaida members to America could cause substantial trans-Atlantic ill-will. Although Europeans will cite their legal codes as obstacles, in many cases the lessons of 1945 had created a means of dealing with the extraordinary circumstances such as we face today.
Britain would find it relatively easy to comply. Both British law and the European conventions, for example, contain exemptions for use of the death penalty wartime, exemptions which Blair could activate by executive action should he choose. Again, a declaration of war would be the simplest way of bringing law and reality in synch. Unlike continental nations, there is no public-opinion gap, as Britons and Americans both support the death penalty by about the same margin, two-thirds of the population.
There is a genuine debate over the routine use of the death penalty in ordinary criminal murder cases. The complete pacifist would have left Hitler or Goebbels alive if he had the chance; for such, there is no difference. However, for many others, the inability to distinguish between a wayward member of a civil society and a fanatical democide is more a failure of the moral imagination than an act of moral principle. Perhaps it is easier if the deaths are far away. Manhattan and Ground Zero are just TV images in the faculty lounges of Europe.
But for Americans, these dead cry out for justice just as the victims of Hitler cried out for justice in 1945. The Europeans were forced to face up to the failure of their moral imaginations then. Events are forcing a similar re-evaluation now. No doubt the accused al Qaida members will be presented as warm, kindly, children-loving humans by their apologists. We have already seen that it is not enough. |
