Thursday, October 29, 2009

A tale of two war criminals

While we might see "Mein Kampf" as a blueprint for what the historian, Friedrich Meinecke, called the "Geman Catastrophe", for a war of aggresson and for the holocaust, it might also have been viewed as the ramblings of some right wing nutter had it not been for the fact that the madness was not only "salonfähig'" in large sections of the German public but also it began to have its practical implications some ten years later and was to have its ultimate expression in  'Operation Barbarossa' and the search for "Lebensraum" in the east and, of course, in the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenhau, Treblinka, Sachsenhausen and elsewhere.

Of course, ideas themselves are not enough to make the person who expressed them a criminal and the ideas on there own would have provided very flimsy evidence at the Nürnberg trials in 1946. However, while there is also some dispute as to whether the "Hossbach-Niederschrift" from November 5, 1937 prove that Hitler actually planned a war of aggression, we might be certain that an abudance of evidence that might have been used by the prosecuation was available long before the Wannsee Conference, which coordinated the "Endlösung" (final solution), on the 20 January 1942.

Without this body of evidence, who knows, but, perhaps Adolf wouldn't have committed suicide and we can just imagine him turning up in Nürnberg and saying when confronted with his "masterpiece"; "come on everybody thought like that in those days" and then they pull out the "Hossbach Niedershrift", well, if Historians are actually arguing about that memorandum now, we can be sure that he would have had an appropriate defence. Nevertheless, it would have become difficult for Adolf, to avoid responsibiity for pursuing a war of aggression, for crimes against humanity and for ethnic cleansing, in the light of the real evidence that he would have been confronted with, namely that "German Catastrophe" that Meinecke talks about, the holocaust, and a second war that had left about a hundred million dead and millions misplaced. No sane person would argue today that Hitler wasn't a war criminal.

Well, one would have to suspect that in the climate created by the mass media after 9/11, a lot of Tony Blair's opinions were "salonfähig" and, if they hadn't have been he wouldn't have been able to take Britain into its illegal war. However, unlike Adolf, when he wrote "Mein Kampf", Tony is already culpable because of his stance. In 2003 he contributed to the machinery that manufactured and molded public opinion , unlike Hitler eighty years earlier who was writing at a time when the "Versailles Diktat" was resented by large sections of the German public and anti-Semitism was an essential component of a "völkische Weltanschuung" that had already taken root in many German households. While the millions who died and tracing documentation regarding responsibility for their deaths back to Hitler would have provided the evidence to convict Hitler,  building a case for the prosecution would have required at least a modicum of effort. Gathering enough documented evidence to convict Tony Blair could be done over a cup of coffee. Indeed, a close reading of the "Downing Street Memo", from the 23 March 2002, shows that Blair knew even then of Bush's intent to invade Iraq, his willingness to provoke Saddam into a war, that a war had already begun a year earlier with an air campaign although Congress had yet to approve this campaign, and, that there was already attempt to crush dissent and manipulate information. Blair also knew that there existed a fundamental lack of understanding of Iraqi society and that there was no planning for after the war. Indeed, the British had already taken part in the air campaign in 2002 and Blair's own grin and spin were part of the attempt to crush dissent and manipulate information.

If ever there was a case against a war criminal, there is one against this man. Nevertheless, with the grin and spin still on tour, in the service of the Zionists down Palestine way, with him threatening to become EU president, with him amassing a personal fortune on the backs of dead men, women and children and, indeed, because of him still sauntering around with his silly ingratiating grin, we might allow him to take Adolf's way out and put a bullet through his own head.

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