“The Magical Scent of the Savage”: Colonial Violence, the Crisis of Civilization, and the Origins of the Legalist Paradigm of War

Since the beginning of time, war has been accompanied by atrocity. While there were attempts to regulate such violence, for most of history the penchant toward deliberate atrocity was largely viewed as a political or military problem. During World War II, however, the Allies declared that wartime atrocity was not only morally reprehensible, but also legally actionable and this declaration represented the triumph of a new paradigm for how to think about the conduct of war, the “legalist paradigm.” This Article describes the emergence of the legalist paradigm and argues that the emergence of the legalist paradigm of war was a response to the breakdown of a long-standing civilizational consensus among European Elites

War Crimes Trials: Between Justice and Politics

Reviewing Allan A. Ryan, Yamashita\u27s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur\u27s Justice, and Command Accountability (2012), and Charles Anthony Smith, The Rise and Fall of War Crimes Trials: From Charles I to Bush II (2012)

War Crimes Trials: Between Justice and Politics

Reviewing Allan A. Ryan, Yamashita\u27s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur\u27s Justice, and Command Accountability (2012), and Charles Anthony Smith, The Rise and Fall of War Crimes Trials: From Charles I to Bush II (2012)

'Political Tyranny and Ideological Crime': Rereading 'Anatomy of the SS State'

Rereading a book is always an uncanny experience in multiple temporalities. If the linguistic turn has taught us anything, it is that the context of reading shapes the meaning of the text that is read. The historicist impulse to reconstruct the original context on the basis of the text itself is at best an asymptotic, at worst a quixotic, pursuit. Yet texts remain, some more so than others. Those texts which continue to be read and reread long after their original context has passed we call 'classics'. This is a term most frequently applied to literature, of course, but also to philosophy and other scholarly works animated by a generalising impulse. It pertains to works, in other words, which lay claim to a significance transcending their original context. It is rarely applied to works whose principle value is empirical or narrowly scholarly. These are presumed to be only temporarily useful interventions into an ongoing scholarly debate, in which later works draw on and ‘supersede’ the insights of earlier ones, rendering their predecessors superfluous. (Rather the reverse of Jove and his children.) Consequently, relatively few works of historical scholarship are considered classics in the full sense. History’s emphasis on the particular, its frequent skepticism of theoretical generalisations, and its embrace of archival empiricism have all tended to preclude the emergence of a broad canon of 'historical classics'. There have, however, been exceptions to this rule

I didn\u27t know what Auschwitz was : The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial and the German Press, 1963-1965

On December 20, 1963, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial opened before the State Court (Schwurgericht) at Frankfurt am Main. Ginther Leicher, covering the trial for the Allgemeine Zeitung/Neuer Mainzer Anzeiger, described the scene thus: A huge mass of journalists, photographers and camera people from all over the world and half-empty seats in the visitors\u27 gallery: these are the contradictory emblems of the public interest in the Auschwitz trial, which opened last Friday, four days before Christmas, in the Frankfurt City Council chambers. In this Article, I examine the seeming paradox that the Auschwitz trial could attract such considerable attention from the mass media while remaining a matter of indifference, if not open hostility, for much of the German public. In other words, I ask what the relationship is between the Auschwitz trial as a trial, as a media event, and as a moment in the West German public sphere