Weekend Reading: Corey Robin: When Conservatives Didn’t Get Tough on Crime: National Review on the Eichmann Trial
...though, about the initial reaction to Israel’s decision to try Adolf Eichmann. The response to that decision, as historians like Peter Novick and Deborah Lipstadt have shown, was rife with anti-Semitism. The Wall Street Journal warned darkly of ‘an atmosphere of Old Testament retribution.’ A Unitarian minister, according to Novick, claimed ‘he could see little ethical difference between ‘the Jew-pursuing Nazi and the Nazi-pursuing Jew.’ Those unitarian universalists.
The worst offender, though, was National Review. Combining all the elements of anticommunism, Christian homiletics, and ancient Jew-hatred, William F. Buckley’s magazine castigated the Israelis--really, the Jews, those Shylocks of vengeance and memory--for their inability to let bygones be bygones. In one editorial, the magazine wrote:
We are in for a great deal of Eichmann in the weeks ahead….We predict the country will tire of it all, and for perfectly healthy reasons. The Christian Church focuses hard on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ for only one week out of the year. Three months—that is the minimum estimate made by the Israeli Government for the duration of the trial—is too long…. Everyone knows the facts, and has known them for years. There is no more drama or suspense in store for us. …Beyond that there are the luridities…. The counting of corpses, and gas ovens, and kilos of gold wrenched out of dead men’s teeth…. There is under way a studied attempt to cast suspicion upon Germany…. It is all there: bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive, the advancement of Communist aims...
From the magazine that asks us to get tough on crime.
Update (2 pm):
On Twitter, Michael Moynihan....
It’s a terrible editorial. And Novick’s book is good. But those ellipses make it worse than it is... ‘advancement of communist aims’ is a response to something in the New Statesman, not trial in general....
At first, we parried over his ‘worse than it is.’ The implication being that restoring the context of the lengthy National Review quote, eliminating those ellipses, would make the editorial seem better than it is. Which I, focusing more on the anti-Semitism, found hard to believe.
Then Moynihan tweeted this:
What I meant: bowdlerized quote makes it sound like the idea of prosecuting Eichmann was a victory for communism.
and kindly sent me a pdf of the entire editorial.... In the editorial, National Review asks:
What are some of the political and legal ramifications of the Eichmann trial?
It proceeds to answer that:
there is under way a studied attempt to cast suspicion on Germany
and then offers a lengthy quote--also with many ellipses--from a letter to the New Statesman and Nation, a left-wing magazine in Britain. The letter that the National Review cites makes some rather unremarkable claims about the continuity in government personnel between Nazi and postwar Germany (a well known fact) but dresses that up with some overblown, albeit qualified, rhetoric about the Germans under Adenauer sharing the same aims as the Germans under Hitler. At the conclusion of the quote from that letter, the National Review editorial says this:
That--let us hope--is an extreme statement of the spirit that will be promoted by the trial. But it is all there: bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive, the advancement of Communist aims, the cultivation of pacifism...
So that’s the quote that Moynihan thinks, when read in context, is not as bad as the quote that Novick cites from his book.
I disagree. When read in context, it’s clear that the editorial is making two claims:
that the letter writer and the perpetrators of the Eichmann trial share the same spirit;
that the best one can hope for is that the letter writer is only exhibiting a more extreme version of the spirit that animates the perpetrators of the trial.
In other words, the anti-German spirit and anticommunist contribution of the trial may well wind up being as extreme as that of the letter writer.
Long story, short: National Review is in fact saying that the advancement of Communist aims is among the elements of the Eichmann trial.
But there’s a little bonus in that editorial, if you read through to the end:
And finally, who will undertake to give as much publicity to those wretched persons, Jews and non-Jews, who are alive today, but will be dead before this trial is over--the continuing victims of Communist persecution, in China and Russia and Laos and Indonesia and Tibet and Hungary?
Got that?
In response to Israel’s decision to capture and try Eichmann in a court of law, National Review replied, ‘What about Tibet?’ Sound familiar? Why are you singling out Eichmann?
