[lbo-talk] "Little Eichmanns" and the Nurenberg Principles

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Doug wrote:

>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>Notice, however, that Churchill did not call the "technocrats" of
>>the American empires "Eichmanns."  He called them "little
>>Eichmanns," so he recognizes the difference in magnitude between
>>Adolph Eichmann on one hand and M&A lawyers and bond traders on the
>>other hand as well as the difference between Eichmann's conscious
>>actions and American "technocrats'" unconscious actions.
>
>Gee, that's really something. Eichmann was present at the meeting 
>where the Nazi leadership planned the destruction of the Jews, then 
>worked at senior levels making that happen. What would a "little" 
>version of that be?  Designing weapons or picking bombing targets, 
>yes. Not going to work and devising litigation or trading bonds. 
>There's a world of difference there.

In criminal justice, we make distinctions between conscious and 
unconscious, planned and unplanned, individual and concerted actions. 
Such distinctions are to a certain extent inescapable in criminal 
justice, but that's the very logic that consigns the poor (who commit 
most "street crimes" on which criminal justice tends to focus most 
prosecutorial zeal) to prison while letting the corporate power elite 
literally get away with most murders -- of workers, consumers, and 
residents subject to pollution, for instance -- they commit.  Yes, 
lives and deaths of human beings are cooly weighed on the scales of 
cost-benefit calculations by managers, accountants, actuaries, and 
bureaucrats, but where is malice, an aggravating factor?  Or so the 
thinking goes.  More people, however, probably die prematurely of 
indirect consequences of rises in interest rates, sudden outflows of 
capital, declines in commodity prices, etc. than are killed by guns, 
bombs, and other weapons worldwide.  As a matter of fact, many 
violent deaths -- e.g., massacres in Rwanda 
<http://www.udayton.edu/~rwanda/articles/chossudovsky.html> -- are 
indirect consequences of such economic changes.  In contrast, very 
few people die of terrorism: "Ratio of Americans killed by lightning 
since January 2002 to those killed by terrorism: 3:2" (Harper's 
Index, November 2004, <http://www.harpers.org/Nature.html>). 
Whatever we think about Churchill's labeling, which is certainly 
politically inexpedient, surely such facts are matters worthy of 
moral, political, and philosophical consideration.  Based on such 
facts, what morality should we develop?

>It's interesting that Churchill forgot that most of the inhabitants 
>of the WTC were members of the working class. They're often 
>invisible, even when they're the majority - but especially so if 
>you've got a nationalistic view of the world, where American = 
>oppressor and Arab = oppressed, with no exception or contradiction 
>involved.

Ward Churchill isn't a Marxist -- he is an indigenist (cf. 
<http://www.cwis.org/fwj/22/falsep.htm>).  Remember, he justified the 
Miskitos and the Hmongs making alliances with the CIA (cf. 
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1998/1998-October/009552.html>).  I 
naturally disagree with Churchill in this respect, but a case has to 
be made -- rather than assumed -- that Marxism makes more sense than 
indigenism for American Indians and that it is worthwhile for 
American Indians to seek allies among working-class descendants of 
settler colonialists.
-- 
Yoshie

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