Today Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government.”Henry Kissinger speaking at the annual Bilderberger meeting, May 21, 1992 “Ever since the days of Henry Ford, the Economic Elite have needed a thriving US middle class to increase growth and profits, but now, in the global economy, they view the US middle class as obsolete. They increasingly look globally for profits and they would rather pay cheap labor in countries like China and India.”David DeGraw“People, governments and economies of all nations must serve the needs of multinational banks and corporations.”  Zbigniew Brzezinski “Some believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”   David Rockefeller in his “Memoirs”

The Splendid Blond Beast

excerpted from the book

The Splendid Blond Beast

by Christopher Simpson

Common Courage Press, 1995

 http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Genocide/SplendidBlondeBeast.html

Friedrich Nietzsche called the aristocratic predators who write society’s laws “the splendid blond beast” precisely because they so often behave as though they are beyond the reach of elementary morality. As he saw things, these elites have cut a path toward a certain sort of excellence consisting mainly of the exercise of power at the expense of others. When dealing with ordinary people, he said, they “revert to the innocence of wild animals…. We can imagine them returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity prank-convinced, moreover, that the poets for a long time to come will have something to sing about and to praise.” Their brutality was true courage, Nietzsche thought, and the foundation of social order.

Today genocide-the deliberate destruction of a racial, cultural, or political group-is the paramount example of the institutionalized and sanctioned violence of which Nietzsche spoke. Genocide has been a basic mechanism of empire and the national state since their inception and remains widely practiced in “advanced” and “civilized” areas. Most genocides in this century have been perpetrated by nation-states upon ethnic minorities living within the state’s own borders; most of the victims have been children. The people responsible for mass murder have by and large gotten away with what they have done. Most have succeeded in keeping wealth that they looted from their victims; most have never faced trial. Genocide is still difficult to eradicate because it is usually tolerated, at least by those who benefit from it.

The Splendid Blond Beast examines how the social mechanisms of genocide often encourage tacit international cooperation in the escape from justice of those who perpetrated the crime…

According to psychologist Ervin Staub, who has studied dozens of mass crimes, genocidal societies usually go through an evolution during which the different strata of society literally learn how to carry out group murder. In his book The Roots of Evil, Staub contends that genocidal atrocities most often take place in countries under great political, economic, and often military stress. They are usually led by authoritarian parties that wield great power yet are insecure in their rule, such as the Nazis in Germany or the Ittihad (Committee of Union and Progress) in Turkey. The ideologies of such parties can vary in important respects, but they are nonetheless often similar in that they create unity among “in-group” members through dehumanization of outsiders. Genocidal societies also show a marked tendency toward what psychologists call “justworld” thinking: Victims are believed to have brought their suffering upon themselves and, thus, to deserve what they get.

But the ideology of these authoritarian parties and even their seizure of state power are not necessarily enough to trigger a genocide. The leading perpetrators need mass mobilizations to actually implement their agenda. For example, the real spearheads of genocide in Germany-the Nazi party, SS, and similar groups- by themselves lacked the resources to disenfranchise and eventually murder millions of Jews. They succeeded in unleashing the Holocaust, however, by harnessing many of the otherwise ordinary elements of German life-of commerce, the courts, university scholarship, religious observance, routine government administration, and so on-to the specialized tasks necessary for mass murder. Not surprisingly, many of the leaders of these “ordinary” institutions were the existing notables in German society. The Nazi genocide probably would not have been possible without the active or tacit cooperation of many collaborators who did not consider themselves Nazis and, in some cases, even opposed aspects of Hitler’s policies, yet nonetheless cooperated in mass murder. Put bluntly, the Nazis succeeded in genocide in part through offering bystanders money, property, status, and other rewards for their active or tacit complicity in the crime.

The actions of Nazi Germany’s business elite illustrate how this works. Prior to 1933, German business leaders did not show a marked impulse toward genocide. Anti-Semitism was present in German commercial life, of course, but was often less pronounced there than in other European cultures of the day.4 Among the Nazis’ first acts in power, however, was the introduction of incentives to encourage persecution of Jews. New Aryanization laws created a profitable business for banks, corporations, and merchants willing to enforce Nazi racial preferences. Tens of thousands of Germans seized businesses or real estate owned by Jews, paying a fraction of the property’s true value, or drove Jewish competitors out of business. Jewish wealth, and later Jewish blood, provided an essential lubricant that kept Germany’s ruling coalition intact throughout its first decade in power. By 1944 and 1945, leaders of major German companies such as automaker Daimler Benz, electrical manufacturers AEG and Siemens, and most of Germany’s large mining, steelmaking, chemical, and construction companies found themselves deeply compromised by their exploitation of concentration camp labor, theft, and in some cases complicity in mass murder. They committed these crimes not so much out of ideological conviction but more often as a means of preserving their influence within Germany’s economy and society. For much of the German economic elite, their cooperation in atrocities was offered to Hitler’s government in exchange for its aid in maintaining their status.

A somewhat similar pattern of rewards for those who cooperate in persecution can be seen in other genocides. During the Turkish genocide of Armenians, the Ittihad government extended economic incentives to Turks willing to participate in the deportation and murder of Armenians. During the nineteenth century, the U.S. government offered bounties for murdering Native Americans and, perhaps more fundamentally, provided free farmland and other business opportunities to settlers willing to encroach on Native American territories.9 A similar process continues today, particularly in Central and South America.

Thus, in genocidal situations, mass violence can become entwined with the very institutions that give a society coherency. This has important implications for how perpetrators and their collaborators are treated once most of the killing is over. By the time the genocide has ended, it is usually clear that the ordinary, integrative institutions of society remained centers of power during the killing and shared responsibility for it.

These institutions usually hold on to some measure of authority in the wake of any economic or political crisis of legitimacy created by their actions. Even if the regime is brought down by a military defeat, as was the case in Turkey and in Nazi Germany, the residual power of these institutions means that there are likely to be factions among the victors, and even among the victims, who perceive an interest in allying themselves with the old power centers. Such cliques will conceal the old guard’s complicity in crime and exploit their relationship with the old power centers for political or economic advantage.

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“War consists largely of acts that would be criminal if performed in time of peace-killing, wounding, kidnapping destroying or carrying off other people’s property,” said Telford Taylor, the chief U.S. prosecutor at the second round of the Nuremberg trials. Often such conduct is not regarded as criminal if it takes place in the course of war, Taylor continued, “because the state of war lays a blanket of immunity over the warriors.”

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The fact is that no clear international ban against crimes against humanity existed prior to 1945, due in large part to U.S. opposition. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity* are usually something a government does to its own people, such as genocide, slavery, or other forms of mass violence against civilians. Although such crimes were defined in detail at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and in later United Nations action, even today they remain a relatively new concept in international law and often run counter to more established legal custom. Crimes against humanity remain considerably harder to prosecute than war crimes, narrowly defined, in part because criminal nation-states are unlikely to prosecute themselves, and because international diplomatic practice-particularly by the United States-has blocked the creation of an international criminal court that would ave jurisdiction to try perpetrators of these atrocities. Even the most horrific cases of human rights abuses are often protected from international justice.

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Allied Control Council Law No. 10, promulgated at Berlin in December 1945.

War crimes – “atrocities and offenses . . . constituting violations of the laws or customs of war,” such as murder or ill treatment of prisoners of war, plunder, wanton destruction, or devastation that is “not justified by military necessity.”

Crimes against humanity – “atrocities and offenses including but not limited to murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, or other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population,” or “persecution on political, racial or religious grounds whether or not in violation of the domestic laws of the country where perpetrated.”

Crimes against peace – “initiation of invasions of other countries and wars of aggression in violation of international law and treaties,” including the planning of such wars.

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Budapest Jewish ghetto survivor

“Only by understanding the roots of evil do we gain the possibility of shaping the future so that it will not happen again.”

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Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany presented U.S. and German business groups with complex opportunities and challenges The Nazi-sponsored Aryanization campaigns, clandestine rearmament, industrial bailouts, and public-works programs created a gold rush for businesses favored by the Nazi government. The chauvinistic Nazis tended to view U.S.-based multinational companies with suspicion, but encouraged them to invest in Germany when it seemed to be in their interest to do so. Soon U.S. corporate investment was expanding more rapidly in Hitler’s Germany than in any other country in Europe despite the worldwide economic depression.

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In the wake of World War I, the Dulles brothers helped construct the international treaties and legal definitions that shut down efforts to bring mass murderers of that time to justice. Between the wars, both were active in U.S.-German trade and diplomatic relations, particularly in developing ornate corporate camouflage intended to frustrate efforts to increase public accountability of major companies. Like many other corporate leaders in the United States, the two brothers also disagreed for a time on how best to respond to the new war unfolding between Germany and Britain. They did agree, however, on what was to them the pivotal issue: the preservation of the influence of European business and diplomatic elites, including that of Germany, when the conflict was over.

Allen Dulles exploited his post in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to quash war crimes prosecutions of senior Nazi of ficials and German business leaders who cooperated with him in a series of clandestine schemes to secure U.S. advantage in Central Europe. He personally intervened to ensure the escape from prosecution of major German bankers and industrialists complicit in the Nazis’ extermination-through-labor program, according to archival records brought to light here for the first time. Dulles also protected SS Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Wolff, the highest-ranking SS officer to survive the war and one of the principal sponsors of the Treblinka extermination camp, as well as a number of Wolff’s senior aides, who were alleged to have been responsible for deportation of Jews to Auschwitz and massacres of Italian partisans.

Meanwhile, John Foster Dulles helped forge consensus on Wall Street and in the Republican party in favor of an “internationalist” U.S. foreign policy based on rebuilding the German economic elite into a renewed bulwark against revolution in Europe. As will be seen, a key element in his effort was the extension of a de facto amnesty to most of Germany’s business leadership, regardless of their activities during the Third Reich.

Herbert Pell’s UNWCC became one of the first targets for the Allied factions favoring clemency for Axis notables who had collaborated in Nazi crimes. State department legal chief Green Hackworth succeeded in engineering Pell’s dismissal in early 1945, then in shutting down the UNWCC altogether within thirty-six months after the end of the war. Then a U.S. intelligence agent named Ivan Kerno, who had worked with Allen Dulles since the 1920s and who served as senior legal counsel to the new United Nations Organization, sealed the UNWCC records, keeping them l off-limits to war-crimes investigators for more than forty years. It | took the scandal surrounding the wartime career of UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim to break these files open at last.

Money, Law, and Genocide

excerpted from the book

The Splendid Blond Beast

by Christopher Simpson

Common Courage Press, 1995

… the events of the Armenian Genocide and of the Holocaust … reveal a basic dynamic in the relationship of great powers to mass crimes. The problem is fundamentally structural; it is built into the system and not simply a product of a particularly evil or inept group of men. The terms of international law concerning war crimes were articulated at the turn of the century primarily by the countries then dominating international affairs: the major European powers, czarist Russia, and the United States. The big powers crafted the Hague and Geneva conventions to help manage the expensive arms race of the day and to set new, ostensibly more rational rules for wars and occupation of disputed territories. The conferees limited “legal” wars to those fought among regular, uniformed armies-a provision that greatly favored the larger and established powers, for they had the clear advantage in such conflicts. They asserted the absolute sovereignty of nationstates over their subjects; declared most revolutions, most forms of civilian resistance to occupying armies, and colonial rebellions to be war crimes; and strengthened the claims of heads of state to legal immunity for acts in office. They set out detailed rules for commerce during wartime that tended to insulate business and trade from the disruptions of war to the greatest degree possible. Nevertheless, these treaties did lead to some important humanitarian advances, particularly in improving treatment of prisoners of war.

This structure for international law was put to the test during World War I, and failed. Despite some amelioration of the conditions for soldiers on the battlefield, the new framework of law did not confront or contain one of the signal crimes of the day: the Turkish Ittihod government’s destruction of some one million Armenians. Nor did existing international law achieve justice for the Armenians when the killing was over, in part because Britain, France, and the United States saw greater advantage in cooperating with Turkey in a new division of Middle Eastern oil than they did in bringing Ittihad criminals to justice.

The failure to do justice in the Armenian Genocide can be traced in important part to the overlapping, interlocking dynamics of economics, international law, and mass murder. The more predatory aspects of international law dovetailed well with the destructive social patterns of the Turkish killing. The law proved to be incapable of prosecuting genocide without drawing more “conventional” aspects of colonialism, national development, and international trade into the dock as crimes as well.

The legal and economic precedents set in the wake of World War I had considerable impact on the course of the Holocaust during World War II, just as the more widely understood political precedents did. Hitler himself repeatedly raised the international community’s failure to do justice in the wake of the Armenian Genocide to explain and justify his own racial theories, and the Germans’ pattern of “learning through doing” genocide was similar in important respects to that of the Turks. While the two crimes were different in important respects, they both were led by ideologically driven, authoritarian political parties that had come to power in the midst of a deep social crisis. Both the Ittihad and the Nazis-each originally a marginal political party-managed to perpetrate genocide by enlisting the established institutions of conventional life-the national courts, commercial structures, scholarly community, and so on-in the tasks of mass persecution and eventually mass murder. In both cases, the ruling party achieved its genocidal aims in part by offering economic incentives for persecution, the most basic of which were the opportunity to share in the spoils of deported people and the ability to transfer the costs of economic crisis onto the shoulders of the despised group.

… The U.S. State Department and its allies orchestrated an effort preserve and rebuild Germany’s economy as quickly as possible as an economic, political, and eventually military bulwark against new revolutions in Europe, even though much of the corporate and administrative leadership of German finance and industry that they wished to preserve had been instrumental in Hitler’s crimes. Many critics, not least of whom was the U.S. secretary of the treasury, accused this State Department faction of anti-Semitism, blocking rescue of refugee Jews, appeasement of Hitler, and protection of Nazi criminals in the wake of the war.

… The similarities between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust suggest that the “Nazi problem” in postwar Germany is only partially traceable to the pressures of the cold war. Throughout the twentieth century, regardless of the prevailing atmosphere in EastWest relations, most powerful states have attended to genocide only insofar as it has affected their own stability and short-term interests. Almost without exception, they have dealt with the aftermath of genocide primarily as a means to increase their power and i preserve their license to impose their version of order, regardless of the price to be paid in terms of elementary justice.

Several dozen new international treaties intended to defend human rights have been signed since the end of World War II, including conventions against slavery, torture, race and sex discrimination, apartheid, and genocide. Each new agreement suggests that there is broad popular support for fundamental change in this aspect of state behavior and international relations. This sentiment is embodied, albeit imperfectly, in the United Nations, the European Commission on Human Rights, the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, a similar intergovernmental organization in Africa, the private association Amnesty International, and many other groups that monitor human rights issues and publicize offenses. Today’s popular resistance to crimes against humanity is more sophisticated, better equipped, and better informed than ever before in human history.

But the actual implementation of these treaties and the legal framework supporting human rights efforts remains notoriously weak. The horror of the Nazi gas chambers was unambiguously condemned in the wake of the Holocaust, for example, but both sides’ practice of bombing civilians (and its tactical cousin, missile attacks on cities) has not only escaped criminal prosecution, it has become the centerpiece of the major powers’ postwar national security strategies. Usually there is little effective protest on behalf of the people living under the bombs.3 Similarly, after dragging its heels for four decades, the U.S. Senate in 1986 nnally approved a simple international convention declaring genocide to be a crime. At the same time, however, the senators wrote a restriction into their endorsement that effectively barred any U.S. court from actually enforcing the measure until the Congress passed new implementing legislation-which it has yet to do.4 Such loopholes are present in virtually all international agreements concerning crimes against humanity.

In each of these examples, the institutions purportedly regulated by international agreements have succeeded in creating a legal structure that permits abuses to thrive. For many senior policymakers in the U.S. and abroad, international law remains “a crock,” as former Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, when it imposes any limit on one’s own government.

The logical question, then, is, What should reasonable people make of the defects in international law on issues of war, peace, and mass murder? For some, there will be a temptation to conclude that humanity might be better off discarding the present body of international law altogether and somehow start again with a fresh slate.

But there is no such thing as a truly fresh slate, of course. The gutted and imperfect form of international law concerning war crimes and crimes against humanity that is presently embraced by the major powers is better than none at all, at least so long as those who seek the law’s protection have no illusions about its scope. Compassion and good sense demand that the best features of international law be preserved and extended, even when existing treaties provide for little more than moral suasion in defense of human rights.

International law has often been a kind of pact between strong and weak nations. Not surprisingly, the powerful have stipulated most of the terms. But the weaker nations and peoples are not powerless, and for manifold reasons they are today gathering force. This means that they can at times obtain the rights and responsibilities written into international laws and legal precedents such as the Nuremberg Charter. The same is true, though to a much lesser degree, for individuals facing brutality at the hands of their governments. International law has to that extent become a tool for human progress; it has sometimes ameliorated the suffering of prisoners, helped contain those who would resort to aggression, and provided some platform, however fragile, for the assertion of basic rights by indigenous peoples.

Perhaps some additional hope for the future can be derived from the way in which the frustrated ideals of an earlier era are sometimes taken quite seriously by later generations. True, many aspects of the Nuremberg principles have yet to be implemented by national and international courts. But millions of people have nonetheless accepted some sense of these principles as a reasonable standard of justice that they have a right to expect. Thus, Nuremberg’s impact has sometimes been felt in popular demands for human rights, justice, and humane treatment for the victims of war even in countries where the courts refuse to recognize the Nuremberg principles as legally binding.

For exactly that reason, some powerful nations today view international law and the Nuremberg precedents with greater suspicion than previously. The most powerful forces working against an evenhanded application of international law today are those that have up to now usually gained the most from its terms.

Major powers continue to cynically exploit international law to support propaganda claims against their rivals. They call for strict enforcement of international sanctions when it suits their purpose, but they ignore rulings by international courts when it is opportune to do so. In recent years U.S. administrations (and the media, “opinion leaders,” and so on) have consistently invoked international law to justify actions against Libya, Iran, Iraq, Grenada, Panama, and other enemies du jour. U.S. leaders usually present themselves as the only real defenders of international order in a world that would otherwise be cast into anarchy. Yet, they maintain an icy silence when the law is less to their liking, as when the International Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled that the U.S. mining of Nicaraguan harbors, shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner, and a list of similar acts constituted serious international crimes. The fact that such obvious deceits pass by largely without comment in most parliaments, newspapers, and journals vividly illustrates the extent to which double-think on genocide and human rights remains ingrained in the present world order.

Who then, or what, is the splendid blond beast? It is the destruction inherent in any system of order, the institutionalized brutality whose existence is denied by cheerleaders of the status quo at the very moment they feed its appetite for blood.

The present world order supplies stability and rationality of a sort for human society, while its day-to-day operations chew up the weak, the scapegoats, and almost anyone else in its way. This is not necessarily an evil conspiracy of insiders; it is a structural dilemma that generates itself more or less consistently from place to place and from generation to generation.

Much of modern society has been built upon genocide. This crime was integral to the emergence of the United States, of czarist Russia and later the USSR, of European empires, and of many other states. Today, modern governments continue extermination of indigenous peoples throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, mainly as a means of stealing land and natural resources. Equally pernicious, though often less obvious, the present world order has institutionalized persecution and deprivation of hundreds of millions of children, particularly in the Third World, and in this way kills countless innocents each year. These systemic atrocities are for the most part not even regarded as crimes, but instead are writ- | ten off by most of the world’s media and intellectual leadership as acts of God or of nature whose origin remains a mystery.

It is individual human beings who make the day-to-day decisions that create genocide, reward mass murder, and ease the escape of the guilty. But social systems usually protect these individuals from responsibility for “authorized” acts, in part by providing rationalizations that present systemic brutality as a necessary evil. Some observers may claim that men such as Allen Dulles, Robert Murphy, et al. were gripped by an ideal of a higher good when they preserved the power of the German business elite as a hedge against revolution in Europe. But in the long run, their intentions have little to do with the real issue, which is the character of social systems that permit decisions institutionalizing murder to take on the appearance of wisdom, reason, or even justice among the men and women who lead society.

Progress in the control of genocide depends in part on confronting those who would legitimize and legalize the act. The cycle of genocide can be broken through relatively simple-but politically difficult-reforms in the international legal system. It is essential to identify and condemn the deeds that contribute to genocide, particularly when such deeds have assumed a mantle of respectability, and to ensure just and evenhanded punishment for those responsible. But the temptation will be to accept the inducements and rationalizations society offers in exchange for keeping one’s mouth shut. The choice is in our hands.