The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

Rating:
Summary: Very Disappointing
Review: A small part of my disappointment springs from the fact that the book's subtitle "Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century", promises far more than the book delivers. The book covers the Nazi genocide against the Jews, with some background information on the Turkish genocide against the Armenians. So there is no coverage of Cambodia, Tibet, former Yugoslavia or other less well known genocides. Of course, to cover Cambodia, for example, would have ruined the book's title and central theme of western intellectual self-flagellation over everything bad that happens in the world.

But the bigger problem with the book is summed up by the review squib on the back cover: "A savage and eloquent attack on international law and its failure to stop mass murder." That it is, but if you think about it for a minute, law routinely fails to prevent murder, rape and other evil conduct on the part of people who choose not to obey it. Once you get past that realization all that is left in the book is a long exposition of "look at the terrible thing that happened". Which is not to say the genocide wasn't terrible, only that the book isn't anything new or ground breaking.

The "revelation" that bankers and lawyers did business with the Nazis should be no more shocking than the fact that people cut their hair, babysat their children and filled their cavities, but for some reason business people are held to a higher standard. The fact that Nazi companies used concentration camp slave labor is of course horrific, but again, the revelation that the systematic murder of 6 million people was NOT perpetrated secretly by a few "bad" Nazis is hardly a revelation at all.

The author clearly knows very little about international law - much of the international legal principles he seems to imply "failed" in the Nazi genocide, were in fact established at the Nuremburg and Tokyo trials in response to it. He has a big problem with the accepted legal norm at the time that "a nation state can do what it likes to its own people", but that doesn't change the fact that that it was an accepted norm at the time.

So much of the book's analysis is steeped in this sort of hindsight it is annoying. Furthermore, so wrapped up does he get in the minutiae of the politicking that takes place among US and British diplomats during WWII regarding how to treat suspected war criminals, that he seems to forget there is a war on. At one point he notes that during one period of infighting within the US state department "so many Jews were murdered". As if the doings of a bunch of diplomats and lawyers could have changed any of that in the middle of a world war. Similarly, he notes that in May of 1944 the Allies knew of the German round up of Hungarian Jews for the death camps yet failed to do anything about it. Again, what the allies could have done to help the citizens of an Axis country thousands of miles away in the month before D-day is never suggested. Failure to do "something" is enough of a crime. And, in fact the author equates words with conduct - in one place he equates the euphemistic characteristics used by US statements describing german business interests in the Holocaust with Stalin's statements regarding the liquidation of his own people.

And finally, the author dismisses many concerns of US diplomats out of hand without serious analysis. For example one of the things which kept the Western allies from announcing a hard line on punishing Nazi war crimes DURING the war, was the fact that the Nazi government widely held the Allied bombing campaign against its population centers as a war crime and could have held downed air crew to the same strict standard. But this doesn't seem to count for anything with Mr. Simpson if it resulted in a failure to persecute nazis. But surely the role of any government, particularly a democratic one, is to protect the interests of its own citizens first? People like Mr. Simpson forget that international law cuts both ways and may be claimed against your own country in ways you don't like.

Many other things about this book annoyed me greatly. In summary, though, it is a hindsighted, one-sided, polymic against western lawyers and businessmen. It goes into excrutiating detail over the way the US policy on war crimes developed during the war (hence the 2 star rating), but most of this is about diplomacy and politics, rather than law, and at a time when diplomacy and politics had already failed dismally to prevent war and other tragedies.

The conclusion is high minded balderdash, a bunch of conclusory statements unsupported by the rest of the work and steeped in intellectual judgments made 50 years after the fact. The final paragraph contains the most ridiculous statement in the whole book "The cycle of genocide can be broken through relatively simple - but politically difficult - reform in the international legal system". This is like saying that more gun control laws will prevent murders, or that a manned mission to mars will be easy so long as some difficult technical issues are worked out. What utter nonsense.

Read AJP Taylor if you want an example of what proper historical writing is supposed to look like.

Rating:
Summary: Regretably necessary coverage of "profits before people"
Review: covers in depth the links between international law and business, military intelligence, and mass murder. anyone uncritical of NAFTA, GATT, multinational corporations unbound by morals (yet defined and protected as "individuals" in international law..), will, I hope, be disturbed by the "proud history" of many of our favorite corporate overlords. Explores the ultimate victory of methods and men responsible for the most heinous atrocities committed this century as they escape justice, mostly with the help of our government.