Nuremberg trials

India Must Learn From Mandela’s Idea of Peace Through Reconciliation

Though he founded the armed wing of the African Nationalist Congress, Mandela adopted a different ideal for tackling historical injustices at the time of his release. He realised that peace and reconciliation were essential preconditions of democracy.

“Each new morn,” says Macduff of war in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows Strike heaven in the fact, that It resounds.” Today in India, from all sides of the country, the latest being Manipur and Haryana, armed groups bludgeon ‘imagined enemies’ into oblivion. They care a damn that every morning new sorrows strike Indians in the face. We bear witness to bloodletting, to rapes, and to the terrible spectacle of mobs stripping women of their dignity and bodily integrity. We see in despair blood-spattered desolate regions of the country. How much blood is going to be spilt on the streets of the country? What has happened to us as a people: “Yeh kahan aa gaye hum, yuhi saath chalte chalte?”

This is not to suggest that India is a stranger to communal and caste violence. Ahmedabad (1969), Belchi (1978), Delhi (1984) Bombay (1993), Bathan Tola (1996), Laxman Bathe (1997), Gujarat (2002), Kherlainji (2000), Dharampuri (2012) and Muzzafarnagar (2013) are not only names on India’s maps, they tell stories of shameful incidents in our postcolonial history, of inhuman acts performed by one human being on another for reasons outside the latter’s control, birth into a religious or caste group that has been stereotyped as the enemy or as inferior.

Today, violence has become part of the political process. It plays itself out in tragic ways, sometimes as individual acts of cold-blooded murder, sometimes as despicable collective acts performed on the bodies of minorities, sometimes as hate speech that encourages listeners to kill, loot, and rape, sometimes as justification of harm done to our body politic, and almost always as silence by people who can make a difference. One statement by a charismatic political figure who says firmly, “Enough, no more bloodshed,” can end this terrible cycle of violence. After all, such statements have succeeded in ending violence in history, at least for long periods.

Several shanties have been vacated by Muslims in the Nuh region over the last week because of rioting. Photo: Tarushi Aswani

Mandela: Peace as reconciliation

The example of Nelson Mandela comes to mind. As the date of his release after 27 years in the inhuman prison system of Apartheid South Africa came nearer, Mandela was beset with considerable doubt. After he had been jailed in 1962, South Africa had been trapped in a whirlwind of violence. Mandela knew that the moment of his release would signify the readiness of the Apartheid regime to transfer power to the majority and that this would unleash another round of violence. The recognition changed his attitude towards politics. From a man who had founded the militant organisation uMkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the African Nationalist Congress (ANC), Mandela adopted the ideal of peace through reconciliation. He realised that peace and reconciliation were essential preconditions of democracy. Lesser men might have advocated that Black South Africans were now in a position to wreak vengeance on the White community for historical injustice. Not Mandela.

On February 11, 1990, Mandela walked out of prison. The road from his prison to his home was lined with a boundless sea of people, cheering, holding flags and banners, clapping, dancing and laughing. Addressing enthusiastic crowds, he said, “Friends, comrades and fellow South Africans, I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all!”

Freedom for all was to become his mantra for a democratic and inclusive country.

The statement was an indication of his path to an inclusive democracy. The question that occupied him was similar to the one India confronts. How do we live out our lives with those that ruled us, sometimes, unjustly in the past? Do we exact vengeance, and get caught up in an endless spiral of revenge? Or do we learn to accept history and focus on moving together towards an inclusive democracy?

At a press conference held after his release, Mandela gave us the answer to these questions. His formulation resonated with generosity, forethought and cool, sane politics. He did not want the White community to be driven away, this would devastate the country. Whites, he said, were fellow South Africans and anyone who abandoned Apartheid had a place in a democratic South Africa. Black Africans had to learn to live with their erstwhile oppressors. Whites had to give up the dream, espoused by many, that they are given a separate state. Mandela was prescient. Secession or partition of territory is a relatively easy option. What is more difficult is to encourage people to give up violence and learn to live together.

Towards this end, Mandela believed – as Frantz Fanon had theorised earlier – that violence destroys both the victim and the perpetrator. He knew that for democracy to succeed, both the oppressor and the oppressed had to be liberated from the chains that violence had bound them with. In 1994, he said:

“A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom…The oppressor and the oppressed alike are robbed of their humanity.”

His subsequent speeches also taught us that the problems of the human condition cannot be resolved in one go. These problems, as well as new ones, are bound to be produced and reproduced. Politics offers no resolutions. All it can do is resolve dilemmas – given imagination, generosity, patience, resourcefulness and courage. Violence, on the other hand, proliferates like the proverbial amoeba. It gives us nothing but death and destruction. Violence is barren; it can only produce arid landscapes of human suffering.

The second lesson Mandela taught us is that the human condition is frail and ambiguous. No one is perfect, all human beings are flawed. We are as flawed as the people we inflict violence on. That is why he forgave his jailors. He believed that people often act violently because they are unthinkingly imbricated in ideologies that are far removed from humanity. Though his jailors in the three jails he had been imprisoned in were Afrikaaners, Mandela recognised that their sensibilities of “other” human beings are shaped by ideologies of hatred that legitimise state power. He in effect reiterated a well-known axiom of political science. The state of politics in a society depends upon the politics of the state.

The only way in which these flaws can be remedied is by compassion. Leaders who set agendas have to transcend petty vindictiveness. They have to abandon the conviction that the past is so important that it has to shape our present or encourage people to do so. We have to come to terms with history, not replicate it. Mandela stood out among his contemporaries because he reversed the principle of justice established by the Nuremberg trials: that a just order is based on the principles of a “tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye”. He did not believe in victor’s justice, he believed that people can only come to terms with history through compassion, forgiveness and empathy inspired by leaders.

Also Read: Why India Needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The practice of reconciliation

In 1994, for the first time in the history of South Africa, all races voted in the general elections. The turnout was massive and the ANC won 62% of the seats. Mandela was elected president and he proceeded to establish a multi-cultural cabinet. The last head of state of the apartheid regime, Frederik Willem de Klerk, was appointed as one of the many deputy presidents. The new president of South Africa began to walk the path of reconciliation, from fashioning a new anthem as an amalgam of the old and the new to forging a multi-racial team for the Rugby World Cup finals held in the country in 1995.

F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela. Photo: World Economic Forum/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

This initiative was wonderfully captured by the movie Invictus directed by Clint Eastwood with Morgan Freeman playing Mandela, and Matt Damon as the white captain of the rugby team, Francois Pienaar. When the South African team won, people erupted in joy. The white singer P.J. Powers wrote lyrics that resounded with the official slogan:

‘One team, one country/ Gathering together/One mind, one heart/Every creed, every colour /Once joined, never apart.’

Mandela is remembered for three marvellous speeches that resonated with his conviction that reconciliation was the only route to peace. On his release, he promised all inhabitants equality of opportunity. The second speech was given when one of the most loved leaders of the ANC, Chris Hani, was murdered by a white Polish racist Janusz Waluś on April 10, 1995. The country could have been destroyed by racial violence. But when Mandela spoke on South Africa Broadcasting Corporation television, he changed the narrative. “A white man full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. A white woman of Afrikaner origin risked her life so that we may know and bring to justice, this assassin.”

Human nature, Mandela taught us, cannot be essentialised in terms of race. All races grieved when Hani was murdered. It is this unifying sentiment that constitutes a common humanity and common ends, particularly the end to unite against the forces of hatred. This, he said in his speech, is a watershed moment for us, and our decisions and actions will determine whether we can move together to elect a democratic government. “We must not let the men who worship war, and who lust after blood, precipitate actions that will plunge our country into another Angola.”

Mandela was committed to the project of unearthing not differences but commonalities between people, and to the project of inspiring them to accept history and move forward. When he won the 1995 election, he made another inspiring speech: “I stand before you filled with deep pride and joy…It is not the individuals that matter, but the collective… This is the time to heal new wounds and build a new South Africa.” The notion of peace through reconciliation was institutionalised in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It may not have achieved much in the way of remedial justice, but it did manage to make people come to terms with the history of oppression.

Also Read: Remembering Nelson Mandela, Who Honoured the Power of Reconciliation

Coming to terms with the past

What does it mean, asks Michael Ignatieff, for a nation to come to terms with its past? “Can a nation’s past make people ill as we know repressed memories sometimes make individuals ill. Conversely, can a nation or contending parts of it be reconciled to its past as individuals can, by replacing myth with fact and lies with truth?” Can nations ‘come awake’ from the nightmare of the past?

From Plato to John Rawls, political theory has been concerned with creating a perfectly just society. Today, the agenda of political theorists has been curtailed by another, more urgent, question. How do societies come to terms with their history of conflict? How do people learn to live together? As a start, the past, howsoever harrowing it may be, cannot be forgotten or set aside. We must know which valley we have walked through, which mountains we have climbed, which thicket we have cleared, which paths have we traversed, and what confronted us on the way. Forgetting is not an option if we have to make sense of our present. We have to recognise that traumas that have been suppressed will re-emerge in destructive ways. Societies that cannot come to terms with the past are fragile. They can burst asunder at the slightest pretext. A mere spark is enough to set off a conflagration.

But we must learn from history – not replicate historical injustice. Witness the tragedy of India’s political life. If past rulers of India broke temples, today we bring down mosques. What have we learned from history? History is our guide to the past and to the future, but we cannot be held captive to its ruthless dynamics. Historical memories have to teach us wisdom not inspire us to loot, burn, and kill. We have to come to terms with history, with the realisation that terrible things were done by people to other people, and pledge that we will not reproduce historical harm.

Therefore, we cannot hold our own people responsible for what rulers, who happened to belong to their religion, did in the past. We, taking inspiration from leaders who were larger than others, as Mandela was, have to learn compassion, we must approach collective life with a spirit of generosity and kindness. In turn, leaders who rule must recognise their obligation to inspire societies to come to terms with a troubled past not play it up. They have to set an example. It is precisely here that reconciliation makes its appearance. It may not be the perfect solution but it might just change our attitude to the past.

Finally, we have to learn from Mandela that peace is not the containment of conflict alone. It comes through reconciliation, through abjuring the notion of victor’s justice, and through compassion. This is important because no society is free of violence. The beast lurks on the sidelines, waiting for a chance to enter and wreck the lives of our people. Statesmen know how to contain the beast and keep it at the boundaries of society. Will politicians learn?

Neera Chandhoke was a professor of political science at Delhi University.

How to Indict Perpetrators – Nuremberg’s History Lessons

The Nuremberg indictments show that a history of hate speech and disenfranchisement preceded the violence against Jews in Nazi Germany. They offer us a way of thinking through the consequences of hate speech for our time.

That the Nuremberg speeches, notably by Robert Jackson and Hartley Shawcross, made much of the ‘iconophilia’ built up around Adolf Hitler is now a truism. Jackson, as is well known, even implied that the culture of Nazi Germany and its political manoeuvres are object lessons for human civilisation.

But beyond this ‘iconophilia’, the actual Nuremberg indictments offer us such lessons. Although Hannah Arendt and others have already examined the nature and style of totalitarianism, several features of the indictments should arrest us not only for their analysis of Nazi Germany but for their implicit prognosis for humanity and the future.

The indictments of the war criminals are important documents for the history they trace: a genealogy of hate, the transformation of politics into demagoguery, the mutation of state machinery and processes into an apparatus of witch-hunting and murder, and the toxification of culture, speech and mindsets through propaganda and cultural nationalism.

The indictments appear in the form of four ‘counts’, as the trial documents term it. Count one is “the common plan or conspiracy”, count two is “crimes against peace”, count three is devoted to “war crimes” and count four deals with “crimes against humanity”. While each of these are important, two stand out: the first and the fourth.

The conspiracy of the state

Under count one (conspiracy), the prosecutors noted that the Nazi ‘conspirators’, as Goering, Speer and the defendants being tried are called throughout proceedings, reduced the Reichstag (the parliament) to “a body of their own nominees”. But this was not enough, for they sought nothing less than total control of the German life and mind.

Under count one, the indictment read: “to instil fear in the hearts of the German people”, the [Nazi] conspirators “established and extended a system of terror against opponents and supposed or suspected opponents of the regime”. They did so by imprisoning all suspect people and “subjected them to persecution, degradation, despoilment, enslavement, torture and murder”.

Also Read: From Culture Wars to the Culture of Wars

As the indictments record it: the conspirators went after the trade unions, the priestly and monastic orders and pacifist groups – in short, any civil society organisation or group that even remotely resembled opposition, ideological, intellectual or political.

But instilling fear, the prosecutors noted, was not possible through reprisals alone: it requires the identification of an internal enemy. To this end, says the indictment, the state encouraged hate speech targeting the so-called enemy.

Nuremberg’s prosecutors placed considerable importance on the rhetoric of hate, the enunciations of anti-Semitism, on the actual speeches calling for war against the Jews. They treated Nazi speech acts as preliminaries to extermination-acts. A language of genocide was beginning to appear by the early 1930s, the prosecutors noted, citing examples from Rosenberg, Ley, Goering, Ley and Streicher who “openly avowed their purpose”:

Anti-Semitism is the unifying element of the reconstruction of Germany … Germany will regard the Jewish question as solved only after the very last Jew has left the greater German living space … Europe will have its Jewish question solved only after the very last Jew has left the Continent.

We swear we are not going to abandon the struggle until the last Jew in Europe has been exterminated and is actually dead. It is not enough to isolate the Jewish enemy of mankind – the Jew has got to be exterminated.

The second German secret weapon is anti-Semitism, because if it is consistently pursued by Germany, it will become a universal problem which all nations will be forced to consider.

The sun will not shine on the nations of the earth until the last Jew is dead.

By citing actual recorded quotes from speeches and rallies, the prosecutors were placing words with the power to injure and actions designed to injure in a linear sequence.

Nazi campaigns in the 1930s, noted the Nuremberg prosecutors, were infused with an ideology of the ‘master race’, and this ideology “reshaped the educational system and particularly the education and training of the German youth”.

Also Read: Curricular Wars and Averting Auschwitz

In addition, they “placed a considerable number of their dominated organisations on a progressively militarised footing”, indicating organisations like Hitler Youth but also noting the militarism that slowly crept into Nazi vigilantism – based on the idea that the Germans must arm themselves against the usurping Jews – through the 1930s.

The Nazi state was gearing up to the climax of 1939-1945: extermination. What count one of the indictments did was to show how the Nazis did so by systematically altering the state’s role, by creating and reinforcing its cultural and other apparatuses to control opposition, spread hatred and disenfranchise communities.

The state methodically prepared for war and ensured that the civil society lived in terror by employing networks of terror. And of course, it instituted racism – expanded to mean, simply, discrimination against a particular community – as a state policy.

Inhuman crimes, by humans

The prosecutors, under count four of the indictment, delineated the ‘crimes against humanity’ which had been earlier defined by Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter.

Count four was organised around two principles: (a) “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations before and during the war”, and (b) “the persecution on political, racial and religious grounds in execution of and in connection with the common plan mentioned in count one”.

Nazi Germany’s air force commander Herman Goering being tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Raymond D’Addario. Public domain.

Under (a), the prosecutors described how “the defendants adopted a policy of persecution, repression and extermination of all civilians in Germany who were, or who were believed to be, or who were believed likely to become, hostile to the Nazi Government”. The judicial process was ignored and people were incarcerated, “subjected to persecution, degradation, despoilment, enslavement, torture and murder”, says the indictment.

For this purpose, the “agencies of the state and Party were permitted to operate outside the range even of Nazified law and to crush all tendencies and elements which were considered “undesirable””.

The employment of state offices, bodies and agencies to demoralise and destroy any real or potential enemies became policy. The prosecutors noted the state’s transformation of its various agencies into tools of terror, employed to silence opposition and muzzle resistant voices.

That these voices were from within the country meant that the Nazi state turned against segments of its own population, and did not need to project a foreign enemy to ramp up its militarisation or terror tactics.

Also Read: How the Nazis First Burned Books, Then People

Under (b), the prosecutors noted how persecutions against the Jews were “also directed against persons whose political belief or spiritual aspirations were deemed to be in conflict with the aims of the Nazis”. The extermination followed, the prosecutors note, the systematic disenfranchisement and terrorising of Jewish citizenry.

This mode of preparing the indictment brief is important because Nuremberg’s prosecutors outline a stage-by-stage account of persecution that culminates in the camps. It is the run-up that is crucial, for it shows how, over the years, the Nazis had set about harassing, persecuting and disenfranchising Jews, resistant groups and those who didn’t toe the official (Party) line.

‘Planning’ the conspiracy against the Jews/humanity over more than a decade is central to the indictments, the prosecutors demonstrate. In the appendix to the indictments, the prosecutors listed against each of the 21 accused Nazis, their role in putting into operation the ‘planning’ described in counts one to six.

For higher officers like Goering and Ribbentrop, the prosecutors record how they “promoted the accession to power of the Nazi conspirators”, “participated in the planning and preparation of the Nazi conspirators for wars of aggression” and participated in the crimes against humanity.

Thus, the prosecutors made sure history recognises not the ones who pulled triggers to kill the Jews, but those like Karl Doenitz, Herman Goering, Albert Speer and others who plotted, planned and policed the policies that caused the lower-level Nazi functionaries to pull the triggers.

In other words, the responsibility of office was implicitly invoked to measure the intensity of their crimes: the higher the office they occupied, the greater their responsibility in the persecution of their citizens and culpability in crimes against peace and humanity.

Last Nuremberg Trials Prosecutor Ben Ferencz Dies Aged 103

Ferencz’s first case resulted in the conviction of 22 former Nazi commanders for war crimes. Later in life, the Jewish lawyer championed the idea of the International Criminal Court.

Benjamin Berell Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor who held Nazi war criminals accountable at the Nuremberg trials, has died. He was 103 years old.

Ferencz died peacefully in his sleep of natural causes on Friday night at an assisted living facility in Florida, his son Donald Ferencz said on Saturday.

The US Holocaust Museum said “the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes.”

Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes. We mourn the death of Ben Ferencz—the last Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor. At age 27, with no prior trial experience, he secured guilty verdicts against 22 Nazis.

— US Holocaust Museum (@HolocaustMuseum) April 8, 2023

Prosecuting Nazi war criminals

Ferencz was born to Orthodox Jewish parents in Transylvania in 1920. When he was just 10 months old, his family emigrated to the United States to escape rampant antisemitism.

After graduating from Harvard Law School, he enlisted in the American war effort and was present at the liberation of several concentration camps.

At the age of 27, with no previous trial experience, Ferencz became chief prosecutor for the 1947 Einsatzgruppen trial in which 22 former SS commanders were tried for the murder of over one million Jews in occupied eastern Europe during the Holocaust, as well as Romani people and other victims of the Nazi regime.

All of the defendants were convicted.

A legacy of justice

After the Nuremberg trials, Ferencz worked for a consortium of Jewish charities that helped Holocaust survivors regain properties, homes, businesses, artworks, Torah scrolls, and other Jewish religious items that had been stolen by the Nazis.

Throughout much of his life and especially in his later years, Ferencz championed the idea of an international court that could prosecute the leaders of any government for war crimes.

Ferencz’s dream was realised in 2002 with the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which he referred to as his “baby.”

“Ben’s unwavering pursuit of a more peaceful and just world spanned almost eight decades and forever shaped how we respond to humanity’s worst crimes,” said Sara Bloomfield, director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This article was originally published on DW.

COVID-19 and Crimes Against Humanity: What the Nuremberg-Hague Trials Can Teach Us

To let people die for want of food, and air now, is tantamount to the genocides that scarred forever the 20th century. The Allahabad high court was making exactly the same point.

A high court recently pronounced:

“The death of Covid patients just for non-supplying of oxygen to the hospitals is a criminal act and not less than a genocide…how can we let people die in this way?”

The honourable court added that it finds it “necessary to direct for immediate remedial measures to be taken by the government”.

This was a huge pronouncement, one that equates intentional massacres of civilian populations with “letting people die” of starvation, or from a lack of air. It redefines the production of death itself, beyond wars and natural disasters. By pointing to those in authority who had reneged on their responsibilities, the honourable court was also implicitly probing larger questions of leadership, political parties and the state, holding each of these accountable. The pronouncement recalls two historical trials that illuminate the larger questions our own honourable court has raised: that of “crimes against humanity” itself.

The start of the prosecution of Herman Goering, Albert Speer and other Nazi officials on November 21, 1945 at the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, Germany and the commencement of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia – the first head of state to be prosecuted in this fashion – on February 11, 2002 at The Hague, Netherlands prepared a checklist for humanity: what to look out for in dictators or political parties, their mobilisation of hatred, the organisation of ethnic cleansing, the naturalisation of torture and discrimination, among others.

Also read: An Indian Kristallnacht in the Making

The opening and closing remarks of the prosecution in both cases themselves, therefore, serve as manifestos. (The full trial archives, running to 150 volumes in just the Donovan Nuremberg collection and 1800 hours of video in the case of Milosevic’s, would of course be far more disturbingly instructive.) They teach us what to watch for in political leaders and parties, to be vigilant.

The party, the cult and iconophilia

At the trials, an attempt was made to distinguish between individual and collective guilt.

The persons were tried, as both Robert H Jackson, the Chief United States Prosecutor at Nuremberg and the Milosevic prosecutor Carla Del Ponte emphasised, as individuals. Their respective nations, Germany and Serbia, were not on trial. Nor, they underscored, was their country’s population on trial. It was to be ‘personal responsibility’ in each case. Jackson stated (Jackson’s Remarks, Reports and other documents are collected in one volume, The Nürnberg Case, 1947):

The idea that a state, any more than a corporation, commits crimes, is a fiction. Crimes always are committed only by persons. While it is quite proper to employ the fiction of responsibility of a state or corporation for the purpose of imposing a collective liability, it is quite intolerable to let such a legalism become the basis of personal immunity.

Carla Del Ponte, Chief Prosecutor at the Milosevic trial, stated:

“No state organisation is on trial here today. The indictments do not accuse an entire people of being collectively guilty of the crimes… It may be tempting to generalise when dealing with the conduct of leaders at the highest level. But that is an error that must be avoided… Collective guilt forms no part of the prosecution case.”

The trials repeatedly teach us this: in totalitarian states, or those morphing into one, the leader reconstructs the party in a way that is iconophilic towards him or her.

German Reichsmarschall, Commander of the Luftwaffe Hermann Goering during cross examination at his trial for war crimes at the Palace of Justice during the International Military Tribunal (IMT), Nuremberg, Germany, 1946. Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Here is Jackson reading the Nazi Party:

“The Nazi Party … was bound by an iron discipline into a pyramid, with the Führer, Adolf Hitler, at the top and broadening into a numerous Leadership Corps… The membership took the Party oath which in effect amounted to an abdication of personal intelligence and moral responsibility… The membership in daily practice followed its leaders with an idolatry and self-surrender more Oriental than Western.”

Also read: A Report Card on the End Times Brought Upon Us by Hindutva

Thus, the Nazi Party as a party was subsumed under the leader, whose ‘iron discipline’ ensured no dissent:

“In discipline, structure, and method the Nazi Party was not adapted to the democratic process of persuasion. It was an instrument of conspiracy and of coercion.”

It was, in short, a cult rather than a party, and this is an important insight into how Parties are made to obey, irrationally, the Leader’s edicts (one notes in passing Jackson’s stereotyping of the “Oriental” penchant for idolatory!).

In the case of Milosevic, all ‘national’ ideals, notes Del Ponte, were made to serve one man’s aspirations:

“An excellent tactician, a mediocre strategist, Milosevic did nothing but pursue his ambition at the price of unspeakable suffering inflicted on those who opposed him or who represented a threat to his personal strategy for power.

Everything … everything, was an instrument in the service of his quest for power.

They were not his personal convictions, even less patriotism or honour, or even racism or xenophobia, which inspired the accused, but the quest for power, and personal power at that.”

In iconophilic political parties, national ideals are what the charismatic leader says they are, and only serve to consolidate the leader’s iron grip on the party.

The party’s organization of terror

Jackson offered a pithy account of the ‘stupendous work in organization’ of the Nazi party:

“Their … entire structure of offices and officials was dedicated to the criminal purposes and committed to the use of the criminal methods planned by these defendants and their co-conspirators… Some of its purposes would commend themselves to many good citizens, such as the demands for “profit-sharing in the great industries,” “generous development of provision for old age,” “creation and maintenance of a healthy middle class,” “a land reform suitable to our national requirements,” and “raising the standard of health.”

Jackson underscored that the entire party apparatus built on a certain appeal:

It also made a strong appeal to that sort of nationalism which in ourselves we call patriotism and in our rivals chauvinism.

Also read: COVID-19: Like in Dante’s ‘Inferno’, Indians Are Going Through Nine Circles of Hell

By pretending to serve a national cause, the party imposed limitations on freedoms:

The forecast of religious persecution was clothed in the language of religious liberty, for the Nazi program stated, “We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State.” But, it continues with the limitation, “so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race.”

The excuse of nationalism was trotted out to produce a war machine:

it started the work of making war less offensive to the masses of the people.

The party claims all its actions are in the national interest, where ‘national interest’ is defined by ignoring historical contexts of intercultural existence.

The Nazi Party had several organizational levels:

[It] had its own secret police, its security units, its intelligence and espionage division, its raiding forces, and its youth forces. It established elaborate administrative mechanisms to identify and liquidate spies and informers, to manage concentration camps, to operate death vans, and to finance the whole movement.

It is multi-layered, with specific tasks and focus-groups for each layer, and made possible the efficient brutality of the Nazi state:

They terrorized and silenced democratic opposition and were able at length to combine with political opportunists, militarists, industrialists, monarchists, and political reactionaries.

The various cadres undertook the implementation of the party’s ideological war against specific targets across the nation-state, whether this was the industrialist community or the youth. Jackson concluded his comments on the party’s role:

The Government, the Party formations indicted before you as criminal organizations, the Secret State Police, the Army, private and semi-public associations, and “spontaneous” mobs that were carefully inspired from official sources, were all agencies that were concerned in this persecution

It was not just the ‘central’ office, but its minions, even ‘private and semi-public associations’ down the hierarchy, that terrorized the country, carrying out the vision of the cult and its leader. The party unleashes an army of minions to do its bidding, the grassroot level organisation enables it, through coercive measures, including moral policing, to establish a reign of terror.

Also read: It’s Not Enough to Say the Govt Has Failed. We Are Witnessing a Crime Against Humanity.

The nature of the witness

Nuremberg relied extensively on documentary evidence to indict the captured Nazis. For instance, the handwritten diary of Alfred Jodl documented detailed plans by Germany against individual nations: Austria (titled ‘Case Otto’), Czechoslovakia (titled ‘Case Green’) and others.

This emphasis on documentation as material witness to the events was a radical shift in the way trials were to be held:

We will not ask you to convict these men on the testimony of their foes. There is no count in the Indictment that cannot be proved by books and records. The Germans were always meticulous record keepers… We will show you their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices as these defendants re-enact for you, from the screen, some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.

Del Ponte made the horrifying and yet simple point about Milosevic:

Many victims cannot come before you because they did not survive. Nor is it possible, in the proof of crimes on such a scale as involved in the indictment, to bring all the surviving witnesses to give evidence in court.

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic opens his defense case at the war crimes tribunal in the Hague, July 5, 2004. Photo: Reuters/Bas Czerwinski/pool

Rather than the perhaps emotional and subjective testimony of the survivors, Nuremberg’s Jackson unusually chose to trust the supposedly objective material record of Nazi planning and process.

Today, speeches, tweets, pamphlets, videos by citizen journalists of political gatherings, and social media enunciations by politicians : civil society would be wise to archive these because victims do not often live to tell the tale. Texts produced by demagogues and party leaders must be read closely, for they are not abstract ideals but action plans.

Trials and pedagogy

Jackson believed that the Nuremberg was for posterity:

“We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.”

Also read: Why India’s COVID-19 Catastrophe Is Indeed a ‘Crime Against Humanity’

And hence:

“the law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.”

For Del Ponte too, the Milosevic trial addressed questions for humanity itself:

“These crimes touch every one of us, wherever we live, because they offend against our deepest principle of human rights and human dignity.”

According to Jackson, the Nazis had dripped so much poison into the country that the forces they set in motion remain:

“these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust…They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making …They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names. Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.”

Jackson is implying that we must learn from Nazi criminals and those like them, that we should watch the work of the parties, that we must exercise eternal vigilance against the loss of freedoms and the work of ‘spontaneous mobs’ and party cadres. For, there are early signs of how the party and ‘its’ state would operate, slowly normalising discrimination and oppression:

“The persecution policy against the Jews commenced with nonviolent measures, such as disfranchisement and discriminations against their religion, and the placing of impediments in the way of success in economic life. It moved rapidly to organized mass violence against them, physical isolation in ghettos, deportation, forced labor, mass starvation, and extermination.”

Early signs, if ignored, lead to increasingly violent actions against specific communities, as the Nazi record indicates.

Producing death

Nazi Germany was a state whose leader, under the pretext of national welfare, terrorised and exterminated people. German efficiency was devoted to mass murder and Nazi politics like that of Milosevic’s, blinded by devotion to the Great Leader, was a necropolitics.

Philosophers such as Achille Mbembe argue that modern politics is often a necropolitics, a ‘production’ of death. But the forms of production of death are innovative: let us not assume that all leaders set out to exterminate populations through the army. Genocides of large populations can also be ‘achieved’ differently.

Also read: COVID-19 and India’s New Viral Necropolitics

In the Ukraine during 1932-33, thanks to Josef Stalin’s policies in taking away all their grains and blockade of food movement into the region, 6 million died from starvation in the ‘Holodomor’ (‘killing by starvation’). Numerous calls have been issued since the late 1990s for the Holodomor to be termed a genocide.

Writes the philosopher in Philosophy in a Time of Terror:

“Can’t one terrorize without killing? And does killing necessarily mean putting to death? Isn’t it also “letting die,” “not wanting to know that one is letting others die” – hundreds of millions of human beings, from hunger, AIDS, lack of medical treatment, and so on – also be part of a “more or less” conscious and deliberate terrorist strategy?”

To let people die for want of food, and air now, is tantamount, says Jacques Derrida, to the genocides that scarred forever the 20th century. The Allahabad high court, while affixing responsibility for the deaths, like in the historical trials above, was making exactly the same point.

The two trials are manifestoes for our time. An attention to what was said and proved therein are salutary lessons in what to look for, and what to read, in the signs around us.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad.

It’s Time to Try Fossil-Fuel Executives for Crimes Against Humanity

It isn’t hyperbole to say that fossil-fuel executives are mass murderers. We should put them on trial for crimes against humanity.

The fossil-fuel industry is lawyering up.

To date, nine cities have sued the fossil industry for climate damages. California fisherman are going after oil companies for their role in warming the Pacific Ocean, a process that soaks the Dungeness crabs they harvest with a dangerous neurotoxin. Former acting New York state attorney general Barbara Underwood has opened an investigation into whether ExxonMobil has misled its shareholders about the risks it faces from climate change, a push current Attorney General Leticia James has said she is eager to keep up.

Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey opened an earlier investigation into whether Exxon defrauded the public by spreading disinformation about climate change, which various courts — including the Supreme Court – have refused to block despite the company’s pleas. And in Juliana vs. U.S., young people have filed suit against the government for violating their constitutional rights by pursuing policies that intensify global warming, hitting the dense ties between Big Oil and the state.

These are welcome attempts to hold the industry responsible for its role in warming our earth. It’s time, however, to take this series of legal proceedings to the next level: we should try fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity.

Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt

Just one hundred fossil fuel producers – including privately held and state-owned companies – have been responsible for 71% of the greenhouse gas emissions released since 1988, emissions that have already killed at least tens of thousands of people through climate-fuelled disasters worldwide.

Green New Deal advocates have been right to focus on the myriad ways that decarbonisation can improve the lives of working-class Americans. But an important complement to that is holding those most responsible for the crisis fully accountable. It’s the right thing to do, and it makes clear to fossil-fuel executives that they could face consequences beyond vanishing profits.

More immediately, a push to try fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity could channel some much-needed populist rage at the climate’s 1%, and render them persona non grata in respectable society – let alone Congress or the UN, where they today enjoy broad access. Making people like Exxon CEO Darren Woods or Shell CEO Ben van Beurden well known and widely reviled would put names and faces to a problem too often discussed in the abstract. The climate fight has clear villains. It’s long past time to name and shame them.

Also read: How the Climate Justice Movement in South Asia Took a Big Step Forward Last Week

Left unchecked, the death toll of climate change could easily creep up into the hundreds of millions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in turn unleashing chaos and suffering that’s simply impossible to project. An independent report commissioned by twenty governments in 2012 found that climate impacts are already causing an estimated four hundred thousand deaths per year.

Counting a wider range of casualties attributed to burning fossil fuels – air pollution, indoor smoke, occupational hazards, and skin cancer – that figure jumps to nearly 5 million a year. By 2030, annual climate and carbon-related deaths are expected to reach nearly 6 million. That’s the rough equivalent of one Holocaust every year, which in just a few short years could surpass the total number of people killed in World War II. All caused by the fossil-fuel industry.

Knowing full well the deadly consequences of continued drilling, the individuals at the helm of fossil-fuel companies each day choose to seek out new reserves to burn as quickly as possible to keep their shareholders happy. They use every possible tool – and they have many – to sabotage regulatory action.

That we need to instead strip fossil fuels from the global economy isn’t up for debate. Without the increasingly distant-seeming deployment of speculative, so-called negative emissions technologies, coal usage will have to decline by 97%, oil by 87%, and gas by 74% by 2050 for us to have a halfway decent shot at keeping warming below 1.5 degrees celsius. That’s what it will take to avert pervasive, catastrophic climate impacts that will destabilise the very foundations of society. (Keeping warming to a more dangerous 2.0 degrees celsius will require decarbonisation that’s almost as abrupt.)

A recent report by Oil Change International detailing the climate costs of continued drilling lays the problem out in simple terms: either we embark on a managed decline of the fossil-fuel industry, or we face economic and ecological ruin. Simply put, the business model of the fossil-fuel industry is incompatible with the continued existence of anything we might recognize as human civilization.

Barring a major course correction, that business model — and more specifically, the executives who have designed and executed it — will be responsible for untold suffering within many of our lifetimes, with the youngest and poorest among us bearing a disproportionate burden, along with people of color and residents of the Global South.

As recent research and reporting have documented, some of the world’s biggest polluters have known for decades about the deadly threat of global warming and the role their products play in fueling it. Some companies began research into climate change as early as the 1950s. These days, none can claim not to know the mortal danger posed by their ongoing extraction.

Literally a crime against humanity

Technically speaking, what fossil-fuel companies do isn’t genocide. Low-lying islands and communities around the world are and will continue to be the worst hit by climate impacts.

it is not necessary to prove that there is an overall specific intent. It suffices for there to be a simple intent to commit any of the acts listed…The perpetrator must also act with knowledge of the attack against the civilian population and that his/her action is part of that attack.

Fossil-fuel executives may not have intended to destroy the world as we know it. And climate change may not look like the kinds of attacks we’re used to. But they’ve known what their industry is doing to the planet for a long time, and the effects are likely to be still more brutal if the causes are allowed to continue.

The evidence stacks up

In September 2015 InsideClimate News broke the story that Exxon scientists first started looking into climate change in the mid-1970s. It didn’t take them long to find out both that it was a real problem and that their bread and butter was a chief cause.When the rest of the United States learned of these dangers – thanks in part to James Hansen’s testimony before Congress in 1988 – Exxon and friends began pouring millions of dollars into elaborate disinformation campaigns casting doubt on findings their own scientists had validated.Dutch journalist Jelmer Mommers has unearthed many incriminating documents about similar actions taken by Shell, including a 1988 report showing that their executives were fully aware of the danger that climate change posed and the company’s own role in it.

The report’s authors found that their own products accounted for an estimated 4% of the world’s carbon emissions in 1984. “With very long time scales involved,” company scientists recommended, “it would be tempting for society to wait until then to begin doing anything. The potential implications for the world are, however, so large, that policy options need to be considered much earlier. And the energy industry needs to consider how it should play its part.”In response to the documents revealed in Mommers’s article, Friends of the Earth Netherlands has announced it will bring a suit against Shell to rapidly begin winding down its oil and gas production.

Industry-funded disinformation campaigns would shape the United States’ national conversation on climate politics for the decades after Hansen’s testimony, and still do. But sensing a change in the political weather, fossil-fuel companies have taken on a new double identity. With one hand — or maybe just a few fingers — they espouse their commitment to climate action and even documents like the Paris Agreement. With the other they continually hunt for new markets and planet-wrecking reserves, sending legions of lobbyists into Washington to beef up subsidies and tear up regulations, and fighting even modest policies to rein in their actions.

Also read: Will India Tame the Monsters of the Sea in IPCC’s New Report on the Oceans?

Despite clear culpability, the industry’s attempts to present itself as a good-faith actor in the climate fight are largely succeeding. Industry shills stalk the halls of the United Nations’ annual climate talks, appearing at side events alongside respected environmental NGOs and UNFCCC officials, and chatting freely with national delegations.At COP 24 last year in Poland, GasNaturally cohosted a cocktail hour with the European Union, and Shell bragged about its influence in grafting a whole section onto the Paris Agreement. The Polish coal sector was a main sponsor of the whole event.

Stateside, advocates of certain forms of carbon pricing – like one plan drafted up by former Bush and Reagan cabinet officials – have boasted of garnering support and funding from the likes of Exxon and BP, apparently a marker of their respectability. When one such policy actually came up for a vote in Washington State last year, though, BP and other oil producers spent tens of millions of dollars to crush it. We’ve let them get away with it for too long.

The Nuremberg precedent

In the US, that ban should include the congresspeople on both sides of the aisle that the industry deputises to act on their behalf with hefty campaign contributions. There were more than a few good reasons, after all, that the Allies didn’t invite Hitler to weigh in on their strategy for crushing the Nazis.

After the war, though, the ensuing Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals wrote an important precedent into international law, establishing that “crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.” At that point, there was no legal framework to understand violence on the scale of those that Hitler’s regime had just carried out, let alone to punish it. To remedy that the international community came together to create and implement one.

Also read: How Educators Can Contribute to Climate Protests

On climate, the precedent set in Nuremberg offers other lessons as well. It’s hard to think of a problem more widely attributed to “abstract entities” than global warming, allegedly the product of some unquenchable, ubiquitous human thirst for new stuff. That old Pogo cartoon still holds sway in the popular imagination: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

There’s some truth to that — we do all create demand for fossil fuels, after all. But supply creates demand. And while free market dogmatists may think otherwise, there’s no reason why the popularity of a product means it should exist in perpetuity when the risks are so colossal and there are alternatives at the ready.

One of the best parallels for trying corporate executives for crimes against humanity might be the so-called IG Farben Trials, in which executives of the IG Farben Company — which worked with the Nazis to produce Zyklon B gas, a pesticide used extensively to kill Jews in the Holocaust — were tried before US Military Courts in Nuremberg. The company also developed several processes that aided in the Nazi war effort, like synthesizing rubber and oil out of coal. They employed slave labor provided by the Nazis, even constructing a factory just outside of Auschwitz so they could put prisoners to work.

Farben executives and plant managers were tried on these and other charges. Just 13 of the 24 indicted were found guilty, and the longest sentence anyone of them served was eight years, including time served. After prison, several went on to lucrative consulting gigs and board positions for German chemicals companies, including former subsidiaries of the now-disbanded IG Farben, and companies like Dow Chemical. After serving his four-year prison term for the “plundering and spoliation of occupied territories,” IG Farben CEO Hermann Schmitz went on to take a senior post at Deutsche Bank.

The head of the company that would become the war’s largest distributor of Zyklon-B – Bruno Tesch – fared less well. He was tried separately before a British military tribunal and executed, alongside his second-in-command. Court documents detailed precisely how much money he and his main business partners had made from selling the agent to the Nazis.

Start with Tillerson

In the case of the climate crisis, it’s the industry itself that is driving crimes against humanity, and states that are complicit in issuing everything from drilling and infrastructure permits to generous subsidies — $20 billion per year in the United States alone. There are plenty of people in C-suites to hold responsible, with roles that more closely parallel those of Hermann Göring than Hermann Schmitz.

But to narrow the field of potential indictments, we might start with Rex Tillerson and other ExxonMobil executives — particularly good targets given that there’s been extensive documentation proving that the company’s top brass both knew about and then covered up the existence of climate change, even as they fortified their supply chains against climate impacts.

Of course, the legal hurdles to making such trials happen would be substantial. If the Nuremberg Trials were outside the box for international law at the time, trying fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity might well be in the stratosphere. For one, the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, so unless the UN Security Council were to grant a US court jurisdiction over the matter — which hardly seems likely – a case would have to happen in a country that is for anything to go before the ICC. And the legal doctrines that the ICC operates under were designed principally to go after states, not multinational corporations.

Also read: Civil Society Groups Ask Leonardo DiCaprio to Revoke Support for ‘Cauvery Calling’

But if we were able to overcome those considerable constraints, what might trying fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity actually look like? Royal Dutch Shell, for instance, is based in the Netherlands – in the Hague, in fact – and is a party to the Rome Statute. In order for their executives to be tried for crimes against humanity, the ICC prosecutor would need to open an investigation to determine whether domestic courts in the Netherlands had not done enough to hold the offending parties accountable. The prosecutor could then use their proprio motu power to bring an indictment before the ICC, which would then hear the case.

Alternately, the Dutch government could refer the case to the court itself. Plenty of countries have crimes against humanity statutes, however, so a trial wouldn’t necessarily have to happen under the auspices of the ICC. And because companies like Exxon have operations all over the world, they could theoretically be tried in any country that has such statutes on the books, or that is a party to the Rome Statute. Options abound.

But none of these lengthy bureaucratic processes will kick off without massive public pressure, which in itself could bear fruit beyond indictments. Exciting as these trials might be, the most pressing work ahead is to decarbonise the global economy.

One obvious implication of calling people like Tillerson mass murderers is that their ilk should probably not be in charge of the world’s most powerful corporations; every piece of evidence we have suggests they’ll just keep killing. If we are going to embark on the managed and just transition off of fossil fuels that science is telling us we need, fossil-fuel executives simply can’t be trusted to oversee it.

So if in the long run we hope to bring fossil-fuel executives to court, the road there should make sure that their destructive companies are taken out of private hands and run in the public interest – that is, wound down as quickly as possible, with the first priority being to ensure a dignified quality of life for those workers who stand to be most affected.

While there are plenty of barriers to getting a conviction or even opening a case, the Nuremberg trials were themselves a kind of experimentation, wherein Allied forces effectively tested a new legal doctrine crafted to fit the specific atrocities committed by Axis forces, for which there wasn’t – to that point – an established legal framework for punishing. Confronting climate change – the greatest existential threat the world has ever known – demands thinking no less creative.

Kate Aronoff is a fellow at the Type Media Center and a contributing writer to the Intercept.

The article was published on Jacobin. Read the original here.

It’s Time to Try Fossil-Fuel Executives for Crimes Against Humanity

The death toll of climate change could easily creep up into the hundreds of millions, and confronting it demands a new legal doctrine similar to the Nuremberg trials.

The fossil-fuel industry is lawyering up.

To date, nine cities have sued the fossil industry for climate damages. California fisherman are going after oil companies for their role in warming the Pacific Ocean, a process that soaks the Dungeness crabs they harvest with a dangerous neurotoxin. Former acting New York state attorney general Barbara Underwood has opened an investigation into whether ExxonMobil has misled its shareholders about the risks it faces from climate change, a push current attorney general Leticia James has said she is eager to keep up.

And in Juliana vs. US, young people have filed a suit against the government for violating their constitutional rights by pursuing policies that intensify global warming, hitting the dense ties between big oil and the state.

Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt

The Green New Deal advocates have been right to focus on the myriad ways that decarbonisation can improve the lives of working-class Americans. But an important complement to that is holding those most responsible for the crisis fully accountable. It’s the right thing to do, and it makes clear to fossil-fuel executives that they could face consequences beyond vanishing profits.

Left unchecked, the death toll of climate change could easily creep up into the hundreds of millions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in turn unleashing chaos and suffering that’s simply impossible to project. An independent report commissioned by 20 governments in 2012 found that climate impacts are already causing an estimated 400,000 deaths per year.

Also Read: Moving Away From Fossil Fuels Isn’t Separate From Moving Towards Social Justice

Barring a major course correction, that business model – and more specifically, the executives who have designed and executed it – will be responsible for untold suffering within many of our lifetimes, with the youngest and poorest among us bearing a disproportionate burden, along with people of color and residents of the Global South.

The logo of Exxon Mobil Corporation is shown on a monitor above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, December 30, 2015. Credits: Reuters/Lucas Jackson/File Photo

Literally a crime against humanity

Technically speaking, what fossil-fuel companies do isn’t genocide. Low-lying islands and communities around the world are and will continue to be the worst hit by climate impacts.

Still, the case against the fossil-fuel industry is not that their executives are targeting specific “national, ethnical, racial, or religious” groups for annihilation, per the Rome Statute, which enumerates the various types of human rights abuses that can be heard before the International Criminal Court. Rather, the fossil industry’s behavior constitutes a Crime Against Humanity in the classical sense: “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack,” including murder and extermination. Unlike genocide, the UN clarifies, in the case of crimes against humanity, it is not necessary to prove that there is an overall specific intent. It suffices for there to be a simple intent to commit any of the acts listed. The perpetrator must also act with knowledge of the attack against the civilian population and that his/her action is part of that attack.

The evidence stacks up

Dutch journalist Jelmer Mommers has unearthed many incriminating documents about similar actions taken by Shell, including a 1988 report showing that their executives were fully aware of the danger that climate change posed and the company’s own role in it.

The report’s authors found that their own products accounted for an estimated 4% of the world’s carbon emissions in 1984. “With very long time scales involved,” company scientists recommended, “it would be tempting for society to wait until then to begin doing anything. The potential implications for the world are, however, so large, that policy options need to be considered much earlier. And the energy industry needs to consider how it should play its part.” In response to the documents revealed in Mommers’s article, Friends of the Earth Netherlands has announced it will bring a suit against Shell to rapidly begin winding down its oil and gas production.

Industry-funded disinformation campaigns would shape the US’s national conversation on climate politics for the decades after Hansen’s testimony, and still do. But sensing a change in the political weather, fossil-fuel companies have taken on a new double identity. With one hand – or maybe just a few fingers – they espouse their commitment to climate action and even documents like the Paris Agreement. With the other they continually hunt for new markets and planet-wrecking reserves, sending legions of lobbyists into Washington to beef up subsidies and tear up regulations, and fighting even modest policies to rein in their actions.

Despite clear culpability, the industry’s attempts to present itself as a good-faith actor in the climate fight are largely succeeding. Industry shills stalk the halls of the UN’s annual climate talks, appearing at side events alongside respected environmental NGOs and UNFCCC officials, and chatting freely with national delegations.

At COP 24 last year in Poland, GasNaturally co-hosted a cocktail hour with the European Union, and Shell bragged about its influence in grafting a whole section onto the Paris Agreement. The Polish coal sector was a main sponsor of the whole event.

Also Read: COP24 Summit Shows Global Warming Treaties Can Survive Anti-Climate ‘Strongmen’

The Nuremberg Precedent

Let’s call this what it is: an atmosphere of impunity for atrocity. At the very least, the fossil-fuel industry should be barred from international climate negotiations and any national-level climate policy making discussions, just like the tobacco industry and its emissaries are barred from World Health Organisation talks. In the US, that ban should include the congress people on both sides of the aisle that the industry deputises to act on their behalf with hefty campaign contributions. There were more than a few good reasons, after all, that the Allies didn’t invite Hitler to weigh in on their strategy for crushing the Nazis.

There’s some truth to that – we do all create demand for fossil fuels, after all. But supply creates demand. And while free market dogmatists may think otherwise, there’s no reason why the popularity of a product means it should exist in perpetuity when the risks are so colossal and there are alternatives at the ready.

One of the best parallels for trying corporate executives for crimes against humanity might be the so-called IG Farben Trials, in which executives of the IG Farben Company – which worked with the Nazis to produce Zyklon B gas, a pesticide used extensively to kill Jews in the Holocaust – were tried before US Military Courts in Nuremberg. The company also developed several processes that aided in the Nazi war effort, like synthesizing rubber and oil out of coal. They employed slave labour provided by the Nazis, even constructing a factory just outside of Auschwitz so they could put prisoners to work.

Farben executives and plant managers were tried on these and other charges. Just thirteen of the twenty-four indicted were found guilty, and the longest sentence anyone of them served was eight years, including time served. After prison, several went on to lucrative consulting gigs and board positions for German chemicals companies, including former subsidiaries of the now-disbanded IG Farben, and companies like Dow Chemical. After serving his four-year prison term for the “plundering and spoliation of occupied territories,” IG Farben CEO Hermann Schmitz went on to take a senior post at Deutsche Bank.

Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg trials. The main target of the prosecution was Hermann Göring (at the left edge on the first row of benches). Credit: Work of the United States Government, Public Domain

Start with Tillerson

In the case of the climate crisis, it’s the industry itself that is driving crimes against humanity, and states that are complicit in issuing everything from drilling and infrastructure permits to generous subsidies – $20 billion per year in the United States alone. There are plenty of people in C-suites to hold responsible, with roles that more closely parallel those of Hermann Göring than Hermann Schmitz.

But to narrow the field of potential indictments, we might start with Rex Tillerson and other ExxonMobil executives – particularly good targets given that there’s been extensive documentation proving that the company’s top brass both knew about and then covered up the existence of climate change, even as they fortified their supply chains against climate impacts.

Of course, the legal hurdles to making such trials happen would be substantial. If the Nuremberg Trials were outside the box for international law at the time, trying fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity might well be in the stratosphere. For one, the US is not a party to the Rome Statute, so unless the UN Security Council were to grant a US court jurisdiction over the matter – which hardly seems likely – a case would have to happen in a country that is for anything to go before the ICC. And the legal doctrines that the ICC operates under were designed principally to go after states, not multinational corporations.

Also Read: What Trump’s Decision to Pull the US Out of the Paris Climate Deal Means

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson takes part in a news conference with Canada’s Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland (not shown) on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, December 19, 2017. REUTERS/Blair Gable/File Photo

This article was originally published on Jacobin.

Revisiting the Curious History of Mein Kampf 70 Years After Hitler’s Death

With a much-anticipated critical edition of Hitler’s hateful screed in the pipeline, it’s worth revisiting how the French translation endured decades of dubious sales, editing and censorship.

With a much-anticipated critical edition in the pipeline, it’s worth remembering how the French translation endured decades of dubious sales, editing and censorship.

Adolf Hitler and his entourage take a stroll in Paris on June 23, 1940. Credit: German Federal Archives/Wikimedia Commons

Seventy years after the death of Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf is in the public domain and free to be republished.

The history of its English version is relatively well-known, thanks to historians James and Patience Barnes. Its history in French is not. While French journalist Antoine Vitkine wrote a 2009 global history of Mein Kampf and two French lawyers and a historian recently shed light on the French-language editions of Mein Kampf, neither book has been translated into English.

Beginning in 1934 – and into the 21st century – a tug-of-war over the French version of the text took place among an eccentric, right-wing publisher named Fernand Sorlot, Hitler’s lawyers, German censors and the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism.

With a much-anticipated critical edition of Hitler’s hateful screed in the pipeline, it’s worth revisiting how the French translation endured decades of dubious sales, editing and censorship.

From ‘My Struggle’ to ‘My Doctrine’

When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, people around the world were fascinated with the Nazi leader known for his fiery rhetoric. Many were curious to learn more about the man’s life and his true beliefs.

An obvious entry point into Hitler’s mind and political agenda was Mein Kampf, first published in Germany in two editions, the first in 1925 and the second in 1926. Referred to as the “Nazi Bible,” international publishing houses started translating it into different languages.

The Nouvelles Éditions Latines edition of ‘Mon Combat.’ Credit: Amazon.com

The first French edition of Mein Kampf – entitled Mein Kampf: Mon Combat (Mon Combat simply means My Struggle in French) – was published in 1934 by the Nouvelles Éditions Latines (New Latin Editions), a publishing house founded a few years earlier by Sorlot. Though Sorlot was sympathetic to anti-Semitism and fascism, he seemed motivated more by turning a profit than advancing any political agenda. Sorlot was also publishing the book illegally: He hadn’t even secured the rights to publish a French edition of Hitler’s tome.

When Adolf Hitler caught wind of the French version, he and his publisher brought Sorlot to court, demanding that he cease publication. Hitler knew that Germany was not ready for war and, on the international stage, he was doing his best to conceal his plans. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had called for the destruction of France, a country referred to, at various points, as the “irreconcilable mortal enemy,” “the most terrible enemy” and “the mortal enemy of our nation.” The last thing he wanted was to tip his hand by having a translated copy circulating among the French.

During his trial, Sorlot claimed that he was acting out of patriotism, that he wanted to warn the French public of the looming German threat. Even before the rise of Nazism, France was highly suspicious of its Eastern neighbor. In the late-19th century, following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, Germany had annexed the French Alsace and Moselle, two border regions disputed by the two countries for centuries. World War I, of course, did nothing to ease the tensions between France and Germany.

But, in 1934, Hitler had the law on his side, and Sorlot lost the trial, forcing him to withdraw the unauthorised French translation from the market. Whether it was out of patriotism or to earn a quick buck, Sorlot continued to covertly sell the translated version.

In 1938, Adolf Hitler authorised Fayard, a leading French publishing house, to print a French translation of Mein Kampf.

When the first translation into English was published in the US by Houghton Mifflin in 1933, it softened Hitler’s rhetoric and visions of expansion. Similarly, Hitler ensured that the French version was also significantly edited. The numerous anti-French passages that the original edition contained were toned down or cut altogether.

Sorlot’s 1934 unabridged translation was 687 pages. Fayard’s 1938 edition, published under the much gentler title Ma Doctrine (My Doctrine), would only be 347 pages.

Blacklisted

In 1940, Hitler invaded Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.

In the wake of the invasion, the German authorities wanted to exploit the countries’ natural and industrial resources while also being able to devote as many troops to the front lines. The best way to do both was a mollified public, so they sought to blacklist any texts – Mein Kampf included – that could fuel existing anti-German feelings. In all occupied countries, the German authorities created ‘indexes’ of prohibited books or authors.

In France, since Sorlot’s original translation, two additional unauthorised translations of Mein Kampf had been published, as well as a few other book-length commentaries that quoted extensive excerpts from Hitler’s book. All were placed on the list of “books withdrawn from sale by the publishers or forbidden by the Germans,” often referred to as “Otto’s List” after Otto Abetz, the German ambassador to France during the war.

The portion of ‘Otto’s List’ featuring ‘Mon Combat.’ Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Postwar angst over racism and anti-Semitism

After the war, Sorlot resumed publishing, which included printing and selling Mein Kampf. He initially did so discreetly, but with time, encouraged by the absence of backlash from the French authorities and the public, he started selling Hitler’s book more openly.

This ended in 1978. The 1970s had seen a sharp rise in racism and anti-Semitism in France, and Holocaust deniers were becoming increasingly vocal. An 1881 French law against defamation and insults was reinforced in 1972 by an anti-racism law (known as “Pleven Law”), which criminalised racist insults and the incitement of racial hatred.

For obvious reasons, Mein Kampf didn’t comply. The fact that Hitler’s book was still being sold by Sorlot’s Nouvelles Éditions Latines – by then considered a right-wing publishing house – garnered the attention of the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism. By the late 1970s, Sorlot could hardly argue that he was selling a translation of Mein Kampf out of patriotism. This time, he played the ‘historical document’ card. It didn’t work, and Sorlot was given a hefty fine of 80,000 francs (the equivalent of approximately $250,000 today).

Surprisingly, he was allowed to continue publishing Mein Kampf as long as it contained a reminder of the 1972 French anti-racism law, as well as a summary of Nazi atrocities and the Nuremberg trials. After much legal wrangling between the two sides, an eight-page text was finally written by a historian and included in all subsequent editions of Mein Kampf.

Today, in France – as in most democratic countries – there’s a general consensus that Mein Kampf should be republished because it’s an important historical document and to demystify it. It’s also already widely available on the web, often on dubious sites that don’t offer context.

A critical edition in French is in the works and will almost certainly be published by the end of the year by Fayard, the original publisher of the radically edited “My Doctrine.” This time, the publishing house will set the record straight: rather than massage the language and condense the text, it will take pains to explain and contextualise much of the “Nazi Bible’s” racist, anti-Semitic ideology – and its devastating consequences.

Manu Braganca is a research fellow at Queen’s University Belfast.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.