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Those who fail to learn from history. . .
In her book,
Eichmann in Israel, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the "banality of evil." On wonders though, how banal was that evil?
Among the defendants at Nuremberg were eight jurists, one university professor and one dentist. All of them were very well educated. It is important to know who they were and their specific functions within the Nazi government. A brief sketch of the principals and the sentence each received is presented below:
Hermann Goering
Goering was perhaps the most influential person, next to Hitler, in the Nazi organization. He was one of only 12 Nazis elected to the Reichstag in 1928. He orchestrated the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933 and, with Goebbel's assistance, used the fire as a propaganda tool against the communists. In the mid-1930's Goering was in charge of the Aryanization of Jewish property, a policy which extended to Jews throughout Europe following
Anschluss. After the events of
Kristallnacht, November 8 and 9, 1938, Goering (under instructions from Hitler) called a high-level meeting of the party, on November 12, to assess the damage done during the night and place responsibility for it. Present at the meeting were Goering, Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Walter Funk and other ranking Nazi officials. The intent of this meeting was two-fold: to make the Jews responsible for
Kristallnacht and to use the events of the preceding days as a rationale for promulgating a series of antisemitic laws which would, in effect, remove Jews from the German economy. (An interpretive transcript of this meeting is provided by Robert Conot,
Justice at Nuremberg, New York: Harper and Row, 1983:164-172):
Comment: Widely considered one of the foremost intellectuals of the 21st Century, Noam Chomsky is a textbook example of why it is never a good idea to get your information from only one source.
His view of U.S. and Israeli imperialism, historically and presently, is definitely a view that we at sott endorse. But Chomsky's belief in the official story of the 911 attack on America shows a major blind spot on his part.
Given his ability to gather information and accurately asses it, it is a very strange stance for him to take, and one which affects the people who trust his assessments in an ultimately negative way.
As always, the best disinformation is often 80% truth.