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The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie
| Article
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15762 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1989 |
2,666 Words |
| Author
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George Szamuely
George Szamuely writes for Commentary and The Wall Street
Journal. He is a former editor of the Times Literary
Supplement. |
Few doubted the correctness of the Allies' decision to put on trial the principal participants in the much-abbreviated Thousand-Year Reich at first. To be sure, Germans were heard to mutter in their beer about the unfairness of prosecuting the war crimes of the vanquished but not those of the victors. But who cared what they thought?
In the late 1960s, this complaint was to resurface, only this time coming from people whose every previous utterance had hitherto enjoyed a respected, not to say an awed, hearing. In the wake of Bertrand Russell's International War Crimes Tribunal--set up with the exclusive brief of condemning in absentia American politicians and servicemen for their actions in Vietnam--it turned out that crimes against humanity were what the former prosecutors at Nuremberg visited daily on the enslaved masses of the Third World. One of the chief exponents of this school of thought was the French documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, whose 1976 film The Memory of Justice successfully blurs the distinction between the French war against the FLN, the Holocaust, and American napalm bombing in Vietnam.
Question of Guilt
So are we all equally guilty? Not quite. There are differences. For instance, though the massacre at Katyn had been dubbed a war crime at Nuremberg, and though by now few could still entertain doubts as to the identity of the true culprits, neither this nor any of Stalin's other crimes against humanity appeared to Ophuls as yet another example of Allied hypocrisy. Since the making of that film, however, the communist world itself has raised issues Ophuls and others seemed loath to. The Vietnamese exposed the "killing fields" of Cambodia to the eyes of the world. The Chinese have admitted that millions were killed as a result of Mao's collectivization drive. And now even the Soviets plan to erect a monument to the millions of victims of the Gulag. In other words, communist regimes have admitted to having had--at least in the past--some affinities with nazism. Should we not then demand that just as we still hunt down suspected octogenarian Nazi war criminals, the Soviet regime bring to justice some of the individuals who carried out Stalin's genocidal policies.
Suppose that the Russians were to place on trial some frail old man who, as a callow youth in the NKVD during the collectivization drive, had helped to liquidate kulaks, had then gone on to do his bit in decimating the party during the 1930s, and had then not shrunk from deporting whole nations from one end of the USSR to the other
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