Harold Davidson, the "Prostitute's Padre", was killed by a lion. He did a great deal to help young women trapped in prostitution and otherwise isolated and poor, but was, let's say, eccentric, and not very good at "avoiding the appearance of evil." Retrospective analyses propose that he was actually well-meaning and not molesting anybody, but his superiors didn't think so at the time and he was defrocked.
To pay his resulting legal bills he went back into show business with gimmicks like "being roasted in a glass-fronted oven while a mechanised devil prodded him with a pitchfork". His "Daniel in a modern lion's den" went awry one evening.
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J.F.C. "Boney" Fuller was a British theorist of armored warfare: his "ideas on mechanised warfare continued to be influential in the lead-up to the Second World War, ironically less with his countrymen than with the Nazis". He had strong Nazi sympathies, but apparently was able to persuade the authorities that he was nevertheless a patriotic Brit--he wasn't imprisoned. "Fuller spent his last years believing that the wrong side had won the Second World War... he announced his belief that Hitler was the saviour of the West against the Soviet Union and denounced Churchill and Roosevelt for being too stupid to see so".
I could almost see somebody thinking that early on in WWII, before the Nazi mass murder machine got into high gear. After the war, though... Bottom line was that the Nazis attacked the West, so it's kind of hard to see what other choices the West had.
He was also heavily into the occult (that seems to go along with Nazis for some reason), and wikipedia says that his most useful military theories "originally derived from a convergence of Fuller's mystical and military interests".
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Maurice Hankey didn't think the Allies had the right to try German and Japanese leaders for war crimes. He believed this so strongly that he lobbied on behalf of the Wehrmacht generals, helping to create the myth that the army wasn't involved with (and by extension the German population was kept in the dark about) the crimes and exterminations.
Since the West faced an enemy almost as deadly as Hitler, higher-ups went along with it because we needed Germany to help resist the Soviets. Yes, it's a bit more complicated. But Hankey wasn't a Nazi sympathizer--more of a realpolitik type who seems to have really thought that soldiers shouldn't be blamed for political directions. Just following orders...
Sometimes history turns on, or is written by, some strange people.
There's a certain logic to not prosecuting soldiers for war crimes. The Westphalian system of nations makes each nation sovereign, so if it wasn't a crime under their sovereign system it wasn't a crime at all. Imposing a new system on them after the fact of a military defeat is a sort of ex post facto legislation, which is unconstitutional here because the Founders saw it as a tyrannical form. (So much so that Article I forbids it twice, once for the Federal government and again for states.)
ReplyDeleteIt's a kind of double jeopardy, too: refusing the order would have been a crime, perhaps even a form of treason or desertion punishable by death. Carrying out the order then later also becomes a crime, again perhaps punishable with capital force.
We may admire those who refuse evil orders out of assent to a higher morality than the law's, but as a legal standard it's a bit dubious to impose such penalties later. I can definitely see the argument.
We get our allies for mixed reasons and sometimes wonder if helping them was the best idea. Hitler did not attack the Soviets because the were communists, but because they were Slavs. They did the lion's share of the fighting against him. Two-thirds of the US war effort was against the Japanese. Perhaps we could have upped that to five-sixths and let Europe and Russia fight it out mostly on their own with the Nazis, with less American rescue, which led to arrogance for us and dependence for Western Europe. Sounds great, except that opens the door to even more Jews exterminated.
ReplyDeleteGrim, you're right about the crime aspects--but in service of that logic he pushed to misrepresent events.
ReplyDeleteAVI: I think the dependence for Western Europe would have been a problem in any event; their economies were wrecked, and if fighting went through an area the cities were wrecked too. Unless we didn't help at all after the war... in which case recovery would have taken longer, with a longer period of being the junior partners.