Fakhrizadeh

There is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that the chief Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated just days after the seventy-fifty anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials, the courtroom setting in which the most important members of the surviving Nazi leadership were finally brought to some version of justice.

The Trials have long since faded into history for most people, but at the time they not only garnered the attention of the entire world because it felt so important that at least some of the Nazi leadership—even absent the arch-fiend himself—be brought to justice, but also because the trials themselves were legally innovative: it was at Nuremberg that the concept of “crimes against humanity” was first used as an actual actionable offense for which individuals could be tried in a court of law. (The term itself was devised earlier on and was used during the First World War by the Allied Power to describe what it referenced as “new crimes of the Ottoman Empire against humanity and civilization.” But it was at Nuremberg that actual defendants were actual put on trial specifically for having committed offenses against humankind.)

I was eight years old when the movie Judgment at Nuremberg came out in 1961. I didn’t see it then (none of my friends’ parents would let them see it either) and it was actually about the so-called Judges’ Trial of 1947 rather than the “big” Nuremberg Trial of 1945 and 1946 in which twenty-four members of the Nazi leadership were put on trial in the city that just a decade earlier had proudly lent its name to some of the most barbaric, discriminatory, base legislation the world up until that point had ever seen. But the movie—a blockbuster in its day featuring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Maximilian Schell, and other Hollywood stars—was a landmark in its own right because it brought the war crimes of the Nazis front and center in the consciousness of the American people just when they might otherwise have begun to fade. And yet, even though it really was a huge hit and the concept of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice was more than resonant with audiences across the world, there was nonetheless something slightly pathetic about the whole scene as depicted on the screen. Just watch the movie and you’ll see what I mean.

In the defendants’ box were two dozen old men, one greyer and less terrifying-looking than the next. Together with those among the Nazi elite who had either escaped capture or committed suicide, they were collectively responsible for the deaths of scores of millions of people. (The war against the Jews was particularly savage. But the Nazi war machine cost scores of millions of others their lives as well, including an unbelievable twenty-five million Soviet civilians.) And yet these men on trial looked not only harmless but pathetic in their grey ordinariness. Years later, Hannah Arendt used the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Adolf Eichmann when he went on trial years later in Israel. But she could just as easily have applied it to the defendants at Nuremberg.

The pathetic part wasn’t how contemptible the defendants looked, however, but the simple fact that they were on trial ex post facto for crimes committed over the long years that featured the rise and the fall of the Third Reich. Even years before they came to power, the Nazis made no secrets of their plans or their program. The Führer’s loathing for Jews, his hatred of gay people, his disgust with mentally handicapped individuals, his plans to turn Europe’s Slavic peoples into the slaves of their Teutonic masters—none of this was sprung on the world in 1939 in the wake of the invasion of Poland. It was all there for all to read in Mein Kampf. Hitler expressed himself vocally and unequivocally on all the above topics in a thousand public speeches. The Nuremberg laws of 1935 were merely the migration of these ideas from the realm of theory into the domain of deeds. And yet the world looked on, as though paralyzed by the thought of taking action, of interfering in the right every nation claims to chart its own destiny forward.

If our country, or the U.K. or the Soviet Union, had used the full force of its military might to quash Nazism in the mid-1930s instead of appeasing Hitler and hoping he would go away with an entirely earned bellyache if only they gave him enough of the ice cream he was demanding be served to himself and his people, the history of the world would have unfolded dramatically differently. But the world preferred to stop up its ears and look the other way, justifying its inaction with reference to a dozen different fantasies. Eventually, that contemptible little man will be voted out of office. Eventually, the Nazis themselves will go away. Eventually, the Nazis will become a normal political party and abandon its own excesses. And as for their vocal, endlessly repeated threats to the Jews, to the Slavs, and to all the other sub-human races they perceived to be living in their midst—all that was dismissed as mere rhetoric, as the stuff of bombastic speechifying, as nothing more than turgid fustian. People preferred to laugh at the little man with his tiny moustache rather than to listen carefully to what he was saying and to imagine, and fully to take seriously, what would or could happen if he were to be successful in transforming his proposals into a new European reality. When the Jews of Germany had been made into pariahs in their own country and the invasion of Poland was fully underway, of course, no one was laughing. But then, of course, it was years too late to cancel Nazism and force the Germans to embrace their own better angels and elect a government formed of sane, patriotic citizens and not madmen.

And what did Nuremberg accomplish exactly? Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death and eleven were executed. (Martin Bormann was tried and sentenced in absentia.) Seven went to jail. Five were either acquitted formally or at least not found guilty. So that doesn’t sound like much…but what it really did do was to make it clear how important it is to listen carefully when people threaten to murder millions, when the governments of nations openly announce their plans for genocide. Nuremberg was the best we could do once the war was behind us. But the war itself could have been averted easily had the nations of Europe and our own nation been listening carefully and acted forcefully based on what we heard.

And that brings me to Iran. When the Iranian leaderships calls for a “final solution” to the Jewish presence in the Middle East, I listen carefully. When the mullahs use Nazi-style language to describe the Jewish people—referring to Israel as a kind of cancer on the face of the world or as the country-version of a rabid, predatory dog capable only of infecting those it comes into contact with, or when they use the vocabulary of virology to describe Israel as a source of infection, disease, and misery that the world should be eager to eradicate—I listen carefully to that too.  When I see footage of Iranian military parades featuring missiles that the government boasts will shortly be deployed against Israel’s cities, I take that seriously too. And when I read that the late Fakhrizadeh was working—no doubt among other thing—on a way to create nuclear bombs small enough to be attached to missiles capable of reaching Israel, you can be sure I was listening carefully to that too.

To label Fakhrizadeh as a man of science and thus to mourn his passing is almost fully to miss the point. For one thing, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was a brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and thus as much a military man as a scientist. There doesn’t seem to be any question about the fact that he was leading the Iranian effort to develop a nuclear arsenal. The avowed reason for acquiring that kind of weaponry, repeated countless times by the Iranian leadership, is to strike Israel and annihilate its citizenry. It’s a bit hard to imagine what the world today would be like if a roadside bomb had taken out the Nazi leadership in 1933 or 1934. Who would have become Germany’s new chancellor, what that person’s policies would have been, whether the ethnocentric expansionism that brought only misery and death to an entire continent would have retained its appeal with the German populace—none of those questions has a certain answer. But that the world would be a better, safe, saner place if the Second World War hadn’t happened? Does that question really need answering?