Hektor wrote:I think it's worthwhile to quote Bardeche verbatim on this. The analysis seems to be excellent.
Here it is...
Nuremberg Or The Promised Land (1948), by Maurice Bardèche:
The Judgment which appears in the first volume of the trial notes the existence of a “plot or concerted plan against peace.” This declaration requires many a gloss. But it is clear, in any case, that the plot starts with the existence of the party: it is the party itself which is the instrument of the plot, and, ultimately, it is the plot. This conclusion has some singular consequences. It is actually equivalent to prohibiting people from joining together for the purpose of making certain claims and from using certain other methods for this purpose. What the court means is this: you exposed yourselves to the risk, it says, of one day committing crimes against peace or crimes against humanity, and you cannot claim that you were unaware of this risk since one has written Mein Kampf for you. It is thus, ultimately, upon the party’s program that condemnation is brought, and accordingly this judgment will constitute in the future an encroachment upon the national sovereignty of every nation. Our jurists say: your government is bad, you are free to change it; but you have the right to change it only while following certain rules. You think that the organization of the world is not perfect: you can try to modify it, but you are forbidden to make recourse to certain principles. However, it may be that the rules that they impose on us are those which perpetuate our impotence or that the principles of which we are prohibited even to think are those which would eliminate the disorder.
This accusation of joining a plot is an excellent invention. The world is from now on democratic for perpetuity. It is democratic by judicial decision. From now on a legal precedent weighs down on every sort of national rebirth. This is infinitely serious, for actually every party is by definition a plot or concerted plan, since every party is an association of men who propose to seize power and to apply their plan which they call a program, or at least to apply most of this plan. The decision of Nuremberg thus consists in making a preliminary selection between the parties. One is legitimate, and the other suspect. Those in the one are in line with the democratic spirit and have the right consequently to seize power and to have a concerted plan because it is certain that their concerted plan will never threaten democracy and peace. Those in the other party, on the contrary, are not entitled to have power, and consequently it is useless that they exist: it is understood that they contain in themselves the seeds of all kinds of crimes against peace and humanity.
[...]
When they condemn nationalism, they know well what they are doing. It is the foundation of their Law. They condemn your truth, they declare it radically wrong. They condemn our feeling, our roots even, our most profound ways of seeing and feeling. They explain to us why our brain is not made as it should be: we have the brain of barbarians. [...] The condemnation of the National-Socialist Party goes much further than it seems to. In reality, it reaches all the solid forms, all the geological forms of political life. Every nation, every party which urges us to remember our soil, our tradition, our trade, our race is suspect. Whoever claims right of the first occupant and calls to witness things as obvious as the ownership of the city offends against a universal morality which denies the right of the people to write their laws. This applies not just to the Germans, it is all of us who are dispossessed. No one has any more the right to sit down in his field and say: “This ground belongs to me.” No one has any more the right to stand up in the city and say: “We are the old ones, we built the houses of this city, anyone who does not want to obey our laws should get out.” It is written now that a council of impalpable beings has the capacity to know what occurs in our houses and our cities. Crimes against humanity: this law is good, this one is not good. Civilization has the right to veto.
We lived up to now in a solid universe whose generations had deposited stratifications, one after the other. All was clear: the father was the father, the law was the law, the foreigner was the foreigner. One had the right to say that the law was hard, but it was the law. Today these sure bases of political life are anathema: for these truths constitute the program of a racist party condemned at the court of humanity. In exchange, the foreigner recommends to us a universe according to his dreams. There are no more borders, there are no more cities. From one end to the other of the continent the laws are the same, and also the passports, and also the judges, and also the currencies. Only one police force and only one brain. [...] This universe which they polish up and try to make look good to us is similar to some palace in Atlantis. There are everywhere small glasswares, columns of false marble, inscriptions, magic fruits. By entering this palace you abdicate your power, in exchange you have the right to touch the golden apples and to read the inscriptions. You are nothing any more, you do not feel any more the weight of your body, you have ceased being a man: you are one of the faithful of the religion of Humanity. At the bottom of the sanctuary there sits a Negro god. You have all the rights, except to speak evil of the god.
https://archive.org/details/nuremberg-o ... 1/mode/2upHektor wrote:But I guess, while many people did still agree with Bardeche at the time, he mostly got ad hominems and frowned upon. Even the sublime disagreement with the Nuremberg Trials and also the outcome of the war, were diminishing afterwards. People just tried to fit into the 'New Societies" and 'New Economies' that were emerging during the period.
And those that could follow Bardeche at the time were a small percentage of younger people, a little ore of the middle-aged and older, though. But those didn't become younger afterwards neither. Those with first hand experience of WW2 would be rather isolated 20 or 30 years later. Those born post WW2 would only know what schools and media told them as well as what they heard from people with essentially the same sources. A single old man or woman that could tell them first hand what happened would simply be dismissed as an outlier or a 'darn Nazi'. They'd rationalize such statements away quickly. Those elderly that talked were probably ridiculed and rebuked for it as well. So many simply remained silent, if nobody asked. Although it took decades to establish the present narrative into people's minds. Which is a clear indication that it was simply false... And not affirmed by actual experience.
Yes, he was even jailed for a while as a punishment for his crime against insanity. 2 or 3 years earlier, he would have been shot by "epurators" for such a book.