Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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How a German trial relates to the #Nisman case

Roya Hakakian explains Germany’s commitment to justice:
Iran’s Assassins in Berlin
The determination of the prosecutor, the press, and the Iranian exile community made all the difference in Germany, where the courts ruled against Iran’s highest leaders.

[Investigator Bruno] Jost had a major advantage. He was investigating in the shadow of the World War II blunders and the fundamental transformations that the German justice system had undergone. By the time the trial was set to begin, Tehran was no longer the focus of popular attention. Now, it was Germany, herself, on trial, with something grand to prove about her own credibility and the authenticity of her reformation.

In contrast,

Whether the same spirit can cross over into another continent to move the course of the Argentines’ investigation is to be seen. But this much is for sure: The sum of the 1994 AMIA bombing, Iran’s lethal role, the misconduct of former President Carlos Menem, an alleged conspiracy to halt the nuclear negotiations, the mysterious murder of Alberto Nisman, and the alleged corruption of President Cristina Kirchner or the Argentine Intelligence all add up to something larger. It is about Argentina herself, the state of her republic, and whether the ghosts of its dirty past are truly buried or still lurking in the shadows.

This us a must-read.

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Eichmann’s true nature: 2 reviews of “Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer”

Bettina Stangneth shows that Adolf Eichmann acted out of genocidal anti-Semitism, and challenges Hannah Arendt’s claim that he was “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

Gerald Steinacher at the WSJ: Adolf Eichmann’s Extraordinary Evil
Hannah Arendt saw Adolf Eichmann as an unthinking bureaucrat. She never read the transcripts of his conversations after the war.

Ms. Stangneth, drawing on documents and research that Arendt never had access to, reaches a different conclusion: He was a master manipulator. “Whether he was in the Third Reich, Argentina, or Israel, Eichmann gave detailed and well-informed accounts of the murder of millions. He simply adjusted the account of his own role, and his attitude toward the murders, to his changing circumstances,” she writes.

Argentina was instrumental in his escape, and of others:

Ms. Stangneth, drawing on research by the Argentinian author Uki Goñi and others, also reminds us how openly the networks of former Nazis operated and how far they reached. Like thousands of other Nazis and collaborators, Eichmann escaped to Argentina with the help of Italian Catholic priests and Argentinian officials while carrying Red Cross travel papers. Ms. Stangneth emphasizes the lack of interest Allied authorities showed in bringing former Nazis to justice after the war. This is consistent with my own research, which shows that the Nazis’ escape networks were well-known by many governments and institutions, including the U.S. State Department, as early as 1947. But with the increasing tensions between the West and the Soviet Union, denazification efforts became less and less important. After the Korean War broke out in 1950, attention almost completely shifted to the new enemy: communism. It now appears that the German intelligence service was aware of Eichmann’s whereabouts as early as 1952 but showed little effort to apprehend him. Only Israel was willing to take justice into its own hands.

Richard Wolin at the Jewish Review of Books (emphasis added): Arendt, Banality, and Benhabib: A Final Rejoinder

Nor have I ever claimed that Eichmann was “demonic,” “perverted,” or diabolical. This is a willful misattribution and, more importantly, an attempt to avoid dealing with what Eichmann in fact was: a believer in genocidal anti-Semitism.

Thoughtlessness comes in a variety of guises. One of them is academic hero-worship: reverence for an intellectual icon in the face of a burgeoning mass of evidence indicating that she may have grievously erred. Perhaps Kant said it best in his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” when he observed that, “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another . . . Dogmas and formulas . . . are the ball and chain of his permanent immaturity.”

Available at Amazon in Kindle and hardcover editions.

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“72 is the new 30”? Only if you compare to cavemen

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany found that

Those primitive hunter gatherers, at age 30, had the same odds of dying as a modern Swedish or Japanese man would face at 72.

Which doesn’t mean that you’re as spry at 72 as you were at 30.

But you didn’t need me to point that out, did you?

I’ll now go back to nursing my cold. Beeehave while I’m away.

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Cuba: Fidel and the Nazis

Fidel Castro ‘recruited Nazi SS members to train troops during Cuban missile crisis’
Fidel Castro recruited former members of the Nazi SS Waffen to train his troops at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, declassified German intelligence files show.

Papers released this week by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) – the German foreign intelligence agency – show information gathered by German operatives 50 years ago during the tense days of the Cuban missile crisis.

They reveal that Castro personally approved a plan to hire former Nazi officers to instruct the Cuban revolutionary army, offering them wages that were four times the average salary in Germany at the time and the chance to start a new life in Havana.

They papers, dating from October 1962, show that four former officers from the elite Nazi death squads had been invited to the Cuban capital, although subsequent reports could only confirm that two had arrived.

It also showed how the Castro regime negotiated with two traffickers linked with Germany’s far Right to purchase Belgian made pistols to arm the Cuban forces.

The conclusion drawn by German secret service officials was that the Cuban regime wanted to free itself from total dependence on Soviet backed training and supplies.

Humberto Fontova asks So just what did the SS soldiers teach the Cubans, anyway?

First off, Castro’s troops are hapless draftees who probably detest the regime as much as anyone in Miami. They have no stake in its wars. But mainly, it’s the rampant megalomania and paranoia of their commander in chief that accounts for the Cuban military’s astounding stupidities and failures.

Communist armies in general and Castroite armies in particular promote officers not on battlefield merit but strictly on political reliability, which is to say on lackeyism, cowardice and donkeyheadedness.

Plus, Fidel needed Soviet money for all this grandstanding, just as he now needs Hugo’s oil.


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Nigel Farage goes to it

While the Crisis Ensnares [the European] Central Bank in Desperate Bid to Save Euro, the man who said, “If the EU ever had any intention to democratize itself it would have done so in the Constitutional Treaty,” has his say in the European Parliament:

Arrivederci, democrazia.

Countdown to failure.

UPDATE
Daniel Hannan; You can have the euro or you can have democracy – you can’t have both

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Does this sound like a man with Alzheimer’s?

President Ronald Reagan – June 12, 1987

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Moe Lane raises the question because,

It is my first instinct to treat this report of Ronald Reagan Jr’s… commentary… by simply letting it pass by without a response.  For those not wishing to click through, the boy (use of term deliberate) is indulging elderly liberal fetishists everywhere by making the claim that his father was suffering from Alzheimer’s as far back as the 1984 debates*, as well as ‘details’ regarding a supposed operation in 1989 that had even the US News & World Report doing some fancy footwork in order to avoid having to declare it a lie.  It’s the Left; it’s pornography; it’s Left-porn.  Outside of that particular niche market, its utility is… low.

As Moe says, a man “doesn’t need to defecate on the memory of his father in order to feel less of a failure.”

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The end result of the welfare state

I was going to write about the French riots, the British spending cuts and layoffs, and the German budget but Monty at Ace’s did it better than anything I can come up with:

This is our future

This is our future if we don’t change our ways.

Exhibit A: England faces the largest budget cuts since World War II.

Exhibit B: France is tearing itself apart over a move to bring state pensions under control.

This is the end result of the welfare-state. The Europeans (and Democrats here at home) want a utopia where all needs are met, all the hungry are fed, all the children warm and safe, all the sick made whole, all the evil punished and the innocent made free, a land where all is peace and all live in harmony. Instead, the welfare-state is waste and weakness and impoverishment and upheaval and ennui. It is generational warfare, class warfare, enormous debts, squalor, meanness, shortages, selfishness. It is, at base, the end of civil society. Communist economies fall faster because they take the poison pure; it takes the merely socialist ones more time to sicken and die.

Go read the whole thing.

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