From top: Spencer Tracy in 1961’s ‘Judgement At Nuremberg’; David Langwallner
“By the end of this Winter pretty much everyone in Germany will have been vaccinated, recovered or died”
Jan Spahn, German’s health Minister yesterday.
I am influenced by comments by recent readers about the dangers inherent in the recent Austrian decision to introduce compulsory vaccines and vaccine desegregation, and pen this accordingly.
I have written a piece hitherto for Broadsheet on a New Dark Age which captured some, but not all, of this. Any repetition is brought into primarily because you can only say something well enough once, and to not be self-reflexive is to disimprove it.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Stanley Kramer contributed a variety of films assessing in a critical way the key issues of that time.
One of the said films was “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961). Now the film is not as obvious as you might think as it deals with subsidiary issues, or one of the trials that followed the main trial, the trial of the judges. Yes, judges, if complicit, can be put on trial.
This is a sage point worth noting by the readership in an age where many judges in many jurisdictions are bought and sold or told what to do.
In the film, the case it deals with is the trial of an erstwhile honourable man Professor Ernst Janning played by Burt Lancaster and others in a fictional representation of the judges’ trial for certifying various forms of treatment for mental defects, the infirm and the not fit enough.
The Nazis of course practiced euthanasia against the mentally infirm and gypsies, leftists and all who did not fit in within the Spenglerian racist orthodoxy. Such racist and judgmental evaluations are now a feature of these times and historical remembrance dissipated.
We are a forgetful and careless age, particularly in terms of remembrance. Historical remembrance. Social Darwinism and racial purity are unfortunately back in fashion, to coin an ugly phrase. As well as population entropy and liquidation by the virus, ineffective vaccines, and a very defined sense that for whatever reason those double vaccinated or boosted are suffering very severe after-effects at the very least.
And now the Austrians are compelling – potentially – vaccines.
Compelling invasions of rights of liberty, privacy, possibly internment, quarantine. And by what mechanism force, brute force?
In terms of forgetfulness as one of the last European Humanists intellects left Kundera remarked:
‘The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody author new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long, that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.’
Or destroy, by Facebook consumerism and unregulated information or disinformation in our post-truth universe. Packaged mediocrity and quantity replacing quality.
The film also has the paradigm of middle American decency, Spencer Tracy, playing the guileless and inexperienced and indeed humble American judge trying to evaluate how an erstwhile good man Janning had turned so bad.
One of the alive victims is played by a woman of enormous genius but also a tragic victim in her personal life Judy Garland which was intentional. The emotionally damaged can always become victims. Something all defence lawyers are aware of. The protection of the vulnerable and it is the vulnerable adults and children now who need most protecting.
In fact, many of the American judges at the main trial itself where the Nazi high command were put on trial were simply unprepared for the level of awfulness they encountered, especially Justice Jackson which says something for that residue of decency that did exist in the American character and still to some extent does. They simply could not comprehend evil of this magnitude. The experiences of such horrors may have led to Jackson’s premature death a few years later.
The fictitious judge played by Spencer Tracy, the paradigm of the conservative but liberal American conscience, does not die and is polite to all in a courtly way and especially so to Marlene Dietrich, the wife of an executed general.
His fact-finding mission is, in effect, to understand how a nation turned so bad. It is a judgment on the individual as part of the collective. An attempt to remember and understand and to judge. And judging is important. The great Russian Marxist Medvedev called his book on Stalin Let History Judge.
The historic flickering video footage of the war crimes court at Nuremberg gives the impression the court is larger than it is. It is, in fact, quite small as I saw in a visit. Thus the distances between the judges and the gallery of infamies, that were people like Goering condescending to the last, is noticeably short of a matter of ten feet.
They must have gotten close to each other and evaluated each other respectively. One crucial thought was, of course, that the very citadels of European civilization, the human rights charters, were set up after 1945 so this might never happen again and to some extent this was also the impetus behind the EU. How quaint this all sounds now as we are in a new dark age.
Of course, genocide and ethnic cleansing, resurfaced in former Yugoslavia which I subsequently visited and wrote about in Village magazine.
But such arguments could be dismissed as peripheral to the European experiment now on the brink of total failure and indeed economic and social meltdown in worldwide virus land. But of course, not just the EU but the entire neo-liberal world order.
The defense lawyer played incandescently by the poster boy of German cinema though Austrian, it should be patriotically stressed, Maximillian Schell, in fact in the defence of Janning, shows how ideas of sterilisation of those that are defective or perceived as such was an idea of the time and, in defence of Janning, argued was most awfully expressed by the legendary US Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes where Schell accurately points out he upheld the sterilisation of a young woman Carrie Buck as “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Buck v Bell (1929).
So even the great intellect of the American Supreme Court and friend of Harold Laski was a proponent of Social Darwinism and eugenics.
Intellectuals can often flirt dangerously to the edge and indeed and especially scientists. The present grip of social Darwinism and Malthusian ideas in the English intellectual John Gray, however ambivalently expressed, is in my view, a case in point. A dangerous extension of ideas that may make transhuman coffee table sense but not humane real-world sense.
We are experiencing a race to the bottom and the gradual insidious destruction of the quality of life of many world citizens, longer working hours, short-term contracts, the quick replacement of the elderly, the diminution of health care, homelessness. Mass evictions and repossessions under the false paradigm and economic model of austerity. Particularly in countries without the remnants of the welfare state.
In effect, it is the infliction of poverty on the defenceless to facilitate the interest of those who caused the collapse. It need not be stressed that the fascist enclaves in Hungary, Poland and Italy are a by-product of this and thus Judgment at Nuremberg is an important reminder.
The concept of universal authority which the film is about attaches to a breach of an obligation erga omnes and that is an obligation owed to humanity. What is called Crimes Against Humanity. Initially, the list was such matters as genocide which ethnic cleansing broadly falls within, slavery and human trafficking were later added, and recent jurisprudence suggests rape also.
But such concepts should be extended in my view to economicide and ecocide, as the new crimes against humanity are the destruction of health care and housing rights by increments by the ruling corporatocracy hand in glove with the over broad extension of emergency powers and hyper-inflated virus that may, or in fact, has sleepwalked us into a new form of corporate fascism and or at least unemployment or underemployment.
As well as docile consumerist compliance in an increasingly accepting and non-critical age of, well, human destruction or consented to self-destruction. Be careful what you consent to or agree to but that is if you have a choice and from late February many Austrians may not.
To force someone to undergo any procedure, as I wrote hitherto for Broadsheet, is at the very least the breach of a liberty or privacy interest but depends on how invasive the procedure. To violate someone without their consent is inhuman and degrading treatment and perhaps, very frankly, torture which is a well recognised crime against humanity.
The voice of what Zizek calls, rightly, late end of days or dark capitalism and the pond scum, as is represented in The Gates Foundation, as it restricts the supply through Oxford of the vaccine to those who most need it, as India and Brazil and others die in droves.
And Gates is, it should be noted, obsessed with Malthusian population control, thinks in numbers and hygiene. I dislike intensely clean-cut bland Palo Alto consumerism. A meaningless mumbo jumbo of nonsense. Dangerous cult nonsense taken far too seriously as David Eggers novel The Circle demonstrates.
So, Judgement at Nuremberg ripples through the ages to get us to focus on when scientists, economists and indeed judges lose their individual and collective sense of humanity.
What they do not have is a Christian or secular moral compass and, in my view, are acting, as Habermas calls it, in a decisionist exclusively technical manner.
And who should be in the dock at Nuremberg? A list of candidates?
Perhaps we should start a game about this and the readers of Broadsheet can contribute. A counter game to the Hunger Games. The gallery of infamy?
But how do you indict a consensus of stupidity or indeed intentional or unintentional evil.
More likely we will be indicted, we the people. Or die in increments by their edicts. Berlin Alexanderplatz (1933) is the crucial Germanic novel of the Depression, dramatized by Fassbinder, in the peritectic chronicle of its everyman German Franz Bide Kopf convict, pimp, worker through the swathes of the Weimar republic is at one level a chronicle of our time.
Dubious associations, flirting with fascism and in passages most relevant and redolent in his panegyric against his erstwhile communist friends which shows how the everyman is seduced:
“We’ve got to have order, order, I’m telling you, order—and put that in your pipes and smoke it, order and nothing else . . . and if anybody comes and starts a revolution now and don’t leave us in peace, they ought to be strung up all along the street . . . then they’ll get theirs, when they swing, yes, sir. You might remember that whatever you do, you criminals”
The most important passages are the slaughterhouse and abattoir scenes, and they are most unsettling and relevant for our times. Equating in effect and dissecting the microscopic slaughter and costing of the slaughter of the animals with human slaughter. And the expiration of man and beast.
There is a famous book by The Portuguese novelist Saramago, recently deceased, called Blindness (1989) where a blindness epidemic takes sway and blindness becomes a communicable disease. The effect ever increasing is an escalated sense of panic. Individuals are quarantined and dehumanised.
Human nature descends to Hobbesian force and brutality. The concept of due process or fairness of legality or the rule of law or human rights goes out the window. Inept authorities make mistakes. Asylums are created for those quarantined and descend into murder and chaos. An armed clique gains control.
There is a window of time between now and February and the Austrians should use it well. The world is watching and this precedent should not be emulated.
David Langwallner is a barrister specialising in public law, immigration, housing and criminal defence including miscarriages of justice. He is emeritus director of the Irish Innocence project and was Irish lawyer of the year at the 2015 Irish law awards. Follow David on Twitter @DLangwallner
MGM
From top: Lord Birkenhead and his birthplace 42 Clifton Road, Liverpool; David Langwallner
