Everyone acknowledges Nazi Germany as the most evil regime in human history. (A few do not, but including them in ‘everyone’ is an insult to actual members of our species.) The Nuremberg Tribunals were, in light of that, a particularly grave undertaking, and America’s central role in their arrangement and execution is probably the high-water mark of American foreign relations. It was a brilliant and complete compromise; an international trial under color of universal standards of criminality, it avoided both of the victor’s-justice proposals of the US’s principal allies – that is, trials under presumption of guilt for Stalin and summary execution as unlawful combatants (sorry, outlaws) for Churchill – and produced something, if not indisputably just, then at least sufficient to see some justice done in a situation where injustice had been the norm for the whole of human history.

In general, there are four distinct modes of defense at Nuremberg. One is uninteresting, as it’s part of any trial – disputations of fact (although that was largely from the later trials, as the initial, international trials handled indictments pretty much exclusively on the basis of overt actions by field plenipotentiaries.); then we get into the three that are more interesting.

Jurisdiction. The accused at Nuremberg, while often unable to deny the factual basis of the prosecution’s case, denied that the international court had any standing to try crimes committed in Germany. While the other proposals for trials did address this to some extent – the Soviet show trials would likely have used at least some German partisan personnel, maybe even to the extent of Nazi-exiled judges and lawyers [NB: by the time the War came, the little resistance by the fairly conservative judiciary that had ever existed to Hitler had been removed quite easily.]; the proposal the French favored involved localized trials for atrocities. But the Nuremberg trials rested on a crucial pillar: The law of any country is obligated to the core human principles of justice. It doesn’t matter if Nazi Germany, in the end, had effectively decriminalized murder of Jews; this was in direct defiance of the principles of civilization. To whatever extent any universally desirable values can be said to exist, they are or at least spring from the equality of all human beings in the eyes of power. Anyone who deliberately sets out to slay a human being in cold blood is a murderer, whether or not the state or a perversion of human understanding have justified her action.

While the US-orchestrated trial of Saddam Hussein owed its legitimacy to this basic principle, we continue to flout the jurisdiction of the ICJ, and to hear people celebrate it is shameful.

Equal depravity. This is the argument, sometimes simplistic and sometimes complex and at least partially justified, that the depraved behavior of the defendants was acquitted by similar behavior by their opponents in wartime. Equal depravity should never form a coherent defense; the only reason it was allowed to lead to a shifting of prosecutorial priorities (for instance, the decision to charge Donitz under the London Naval Treaty instead of the convention against unrestricted submarine warfare) was the shameful position of finding themselves in a league with fascists, not any retroactive justification of their evil acts.

This one is one to think about when the dead-enders start comparing Daddy’s behavior to that of various scum (al Qaeda, the Islamist factions among the Iraqi insurgents, Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad). It is to no one’s credit to just barely squeak by one of history’s monsters, and doing so generally lead the people making the case in Nuremberg to retire that prong of the case in shame.

And finally, the granddaddy of all defunct defense formulas:

Responsibility to orders. This defense, rejected in all cases at Nuremberg, states in essence that disobeying orders from higher-ups is unacceptable. The rejection itself was two-tiered; the Nuremberg Standard states that soldiers have a clear obligation to disobey illegal orders, and the Command Responsibility Principle (or the Yamashita Standard, or – more unfortunately – the Medina Standard, after the principle which the trials for My Lai refused to acknowledge for ranking officer Medina) states that officers must bear responsibility for crimes of commission or omission under their watch. Responsibility to orders is a lawless defense. It goes beyond ‘illegal’; it presumes that there is some fundamental quality about obeisance that causes it to trump the continuously reinforced compact we make with society and the law.

Responsibility to orders, in its presentation at Nuremberg, took on two forms in the popular reporting. The first was the original German – that is, Befehl ist Befehl. Ordered is ordered; it portrays the kind of efficient, stiff-upper-lipped, and somewhat fatalist demeanor the fascist lackey imagines for himself. ‘Befehl ist Befehl’ is aggressive in its directness and direct in its aggressiveness; it brooks no disagreement, takes the form of a tautology and statement of fact, and presupposes the inherent rationality of following orders.

The English form, of course, displays the somewhat different attitude a democratic society takes towards such behavior. The established translation of the Nuremberg defense became, in short order, I was just following orders – reducing the tough-guy posturing of men who were willing to do anything to fulfill their standing orders (piss on the law, slaughter innocent people, crush a child’s testicles, you name it) to a pathetic sniveling. Where the fascist declaration emphasized the imperative of obedience, the language of democracy pointed and laughed at special pleading by willing pawns. The greatest justice of the Nuremberg Trials might just have lay in that particular transition – holding fascists out by the throat for all to see that the proud chest-puffing soldiers’ soldiers were basically spineless toadies. War crimes do not merit the dignity of ‘orders are orders’; agreeing to engage in them is either demonic or cowardly, and either one beyond the point of redemption.

The last time I had cause to think of the difference, it was in slight alarm that the respect for the dignity of these ‘career soldiers’ would creep back into historiography and society, that the modern conservative would begin, as his Neanderthal predecessors in Truman’s day did, to sympathize with the plight of the dickless wonders pretending to be so abject to the power of a short, fat man with a shitty moustache that they had no choice but to incinerate a million children. American society has stepped away from the abyss in many fundamental respects – and one of them is the increasing awareness of the hollowness of orders. The transparent fraudulence of the orders defense has been on public display as the telecom industry parades out the same gallery of lame excuses – and, without even the military conventions of obedience to acquit themselves with, have been shamed pretty heavily in the eyes of the public.

We’re not out of the woods yet, and won’t be until the instinctive consensus develops that, outside of an active disaster situation in which expert authority is the only hope anyone has, civilians are subject to the orders of no one. This proudest tradition of the American people has been regarded with instinctive suspicion since Nixon, and it’s harrowing indeed that private citizens (who would certainly take a far different tack if it came to orders about pollution or ignoring regulations) honestly felt they could acquit themselves in the court of public opinion by pretending that they were obliged by the orders of the President to satisfy some political voyeur’s illegal desire to keep tabs on American citizens. Authoritarian societies first and foremost rely on the breakdown of legal and technical restrictions on authority – and on the militarization of society. A society which on any level can accept Befehl ist Befehl und Gesetz ist Gesetz as a valid line of inquiry is in severe danger. We can only hope we’ll get out of that mindset before something else has everyone out there singing some parochial anthem of American authoritarianism.

Radical versus radical – the failure of American descriptive political language
I’ve recently noted that my main beef of contention with environmentalism is against radical environmentalism. This is not to say that my issue is with extremism; the issue is with radicalism in the dictionary sense of the word – going back to ‘radix’, or root – which is to say, a political praxis whose ultimate goal is the preservation or furtherance of the environment itself.

There are a few radixes I can get behind, and others I can at least sympathize with. So in the common sense of ‘radical’, I would perhaps disagree with the tactics and choice of priorities of an activist whose concern for economic, racial, and gender equality, or rad-liberalism, or for economic sustainability, lead them to firebomb a factory farm owner’s home – but I wouldn’t have anything to quarrel with them as far as their goals went. A radical environmentalist, no matter how moderate in terms of actions, would never have anything but superficial agreement with my own programme.

Ecology makes for poor politics; the recent upsurge in the normally muted political fortunes and visibility of the greens (especially among fairly ‘moderate’ politicians and voters) makes it essential to take a particularly careful eye towards picking out those whose concern for the environment relies on politics – or aesthetics.

Belief in the obvious – framing and global warming denial
There’s a remarkable and irritating tendency by even people who deride denialists to concede the high ground to them by allowing them to make the issue about global warming one of ‘belief’ or ‘skepticism’. After all, no sane person would accept the idea of ‘believing in’ the Holocaust – the event is at the same time unbelievable but painfully clear in its historicity. Similarly, global warming is terrifying and all too real. The true believers are those who ignore a pants-pissing level of national and local, long-term and everyday evidence for climate change.

Levels of unanimity and plausibility

These are the approximate equivalents between different facets of climate change; they’re rough analogies but, I feel, good ones.

1. Global warming: Natural selection. The evidence pointing to global warming per se is absolutely irrefutable – the Earth is presently in a warming period.
2. Portentious global warming: Evolution. While it is sometimes argued that global warming isn’t necessarily too bad, the current warming period has resulted in a level and speed of climactic disruption which enjoys no parallel in history outside of massive eruptions and comet impacts.
3. Non-anthropic global warming: Punctuated equilibrium. Recent evidence has fairly powerfully established at least a correlative link between carbon levels and climate change; the idea that humanity plays no substantial role in global warming is very poorly received among climatologists, and its few adherents are usually experts in incidental fields. It’s worth noting that, per the relationship between p.u. and evolution, no non-anthropicists with axes to grind against the larger idea of global warming are taken seriously, or would have any reason to be, by mainstream scientists. Respectable people suspect that humans are not responsible for climate change; but their numbers are shrinking and they’ve got little support outside of the carbon spewers.
4. Reversibility: Single-origin hypothesis of man. A fair majority is on the side of humanity’s ability to undo or at least halt climate change, but there is still substantial evidence it’s out of our hands. On the other hand – if it is, we’re fucked either way, right?

Al Gore

People who suddenly started giving a shit about carbon footprints when it came to making fun of Al Gore are huge assholes and should be killed.

First World Versus Third World

It’s become dismayingly politically correct to pretend that the first world’s contribution to global warming and pollution is secondary to the pollution and population problems of the Third World. While the pollution level is generally higher there, we produce much more pollution and consume a great deal more resources simply by virtue of being richer. The green movement’s best interests are clearly ignored by the mean-spirited dicks who seriously believe that they can constructively blame the world’s victims for the world’s problems. Leave that shit in Texas, please.

There are a couple of things I’ve always been unable to be a good liberal about; to be fair, I’ve always been pretty firmly convinced they’re only associated with liberalism in the US because of their association with the counterculture; the anti-nuclear movement, for instance, has always seemed a little bit panicky and irrational when it comes to viable (if not quite optimal) alternatives to filthy, destructive use of coal and oil. But far more unsettling to me has always been the American liberal enthusiasm for the Dalai Lama.

Tenzin Gyatso is an interesting figure, as any theocrat tends to be; this is, in large part, because his political movement has made a deliberate effort to present itself in different ways to different people. To the Tibetan people, he’s always had a very firm public image: he promises a return to tradition, moral order, and the end of Chinese and Hui Muslim presence in Tibet. When one presents Mr. Gyatso to the typical left-winger this way, they’re much more leery about supporting him. After all, I doubt anyone you’d want to get trapped in an elevator with would willingly sign up to demonstrate for the Pope’s right to establish an isolationist theocracy in Sicily, expel the Tunisian and north Italian minority, and close off the Straits of Messina to interlopers.

But history was kind to Tenzin Gyatso, as it generally tends to be to the sort of person who powerful monks become convinced is a reincarnation of their god-king. His rule coincided neatly with two extremely useful phenomena: first, the rise of Maoism in China, and second, the rise of the New Age movement in the West. The former made Gyatso from a theocratic pretender in the middle of nowhere to an ideological martyr for those convinced the Communist Chinese were mentioned by John in the Apocalypse; the latter made him from an uninteresting old doctrinaire with little to offer the world any random prince-in-exile could not (besides an interesting accent) to a completely mystical guide to a people who were, all of a sudden, not really religious – but Spiritual.

This is the problem with Gyatso. A lot of people are willing to abandon the faith of their family, and I’m all for that. The problem is that quite a few then decide the natural thing to do is to pick up some other, more foreign religion. It is the natural tendency of youth to rebel, and Gyatso just happened to be the divine leader of a religion in which the world’s wealthiest people all of a sudden had a depressingly condescending passing interest. So, since the 1960s, he has been a cause celebre for a mixture of liberal counterculture dilettantes and hawkish loons convinced any effort to blacken Joe Chinaman’s eye is a step towards freedom for all mankind.

And we have inherited from our parents’ generation a liberal movement with such a deep investment in the counterculture that it cannot tell when it is being taken for a ride. Tibet is a perfect example of this, and it’s worth pointing out, once I’ve described what exactly has been going on there recently, what other allies besides ourselves and Tibet’s answer to the Moral Majority Mr. Gyatso has attracted. In short, in March there were a series of demonstrations. (There is a holiday, amusingly enough, called Tibetan Uprising Day. The story of it coming to be called that is, admittedly, far less amusing – but then, few things involving Mao heartlessly shedding more or less innocent blood are.) This we have all heard about. And they got violent.

The problem is, they got a kind of violent that we’re all too familiar with: while there were substantial injuries to Chinese police, that’s to be expected in a protest situation. But the thing that particularly gives me pause is who else got injured or killed in the uprisings in Lhasa.

The thugs, who seem to be connected politically to the Dalai Lama but for all intents and purposes were simply acting in their own capacity as violently angry backwater assholes, got out any weapons they could find and started smashing in stores, beating up anyone who looked too Chinese, and – so far, most infamously – setting fire to people and buildings. They weren’t attacking the Chinese government, or instruments of Chinese oppression; they were assaulting individual Chinese civilians – including women, children, and the elderly – because they felt their presence in the region was an affront.

I would have no problem calling this behavior fascist if it were to involve white Arizonans, under color of Christian fervor, kicking the Hell out of random Latinos. I’m not sure if belonging to an ethnicity we’re supposed to condescendingly pity changes this.

As the spiteful uproar continued, the citizenry of Lhasa – who love their spiritual leader and would generally not pass up an opportunity to give the Chinese occupation one in the stones for him – kept home in a mixture of disgust and fear. The rioters proceeded to go on a tear against the Hui, members of a Muslim population who have shared the area of land identified as Tibet with the Tibetans since before either Buddhism or Islam existed. The capstone of this shameful orgy of xenophobic violence came with an attempt to burn down a long-standing mosque.

The Chinese decision to increase police presence – really the only thing that could be done – was, of course, met with considerable protest. The degree and kind of protest varied from place to place; Kevin Rudd, representing Australia’s governing Labour party, urged the Chinese to exercise restraint. (They’re not famous for doing so; it’s a reasonable request.)

Of course, many people went beyond that; they demonstrated for the oppressed Tibetans, angry at the oppressive Chinese strangling their quaint little culture and enraged that Beijing would begrudge them just a little innocent ethnic cleansing. So far, the majority of European conservative and folkist parties have come out to support the Tibetan rioters’ right to oppress a smaller, more Muslim minority. Angela Merkel swallowed her pride to support these oppressed Asians (a personal first on both counts) in their quest to free themselves from the tyranny of the Muslim family living down the street (not so much). With friends like these… you invade Iraq.

Tenzin Gyatso’s spent his entire career performing this delicate balancing act, and has been struggling bravely and vaguely since 1959 for Tibet’s right to choose its own destiny, or live under the watchful eye of the one true Church, or slaughter all of the Han and Hui mud people – depending on who’s going to bat for him at the moment.

We’ve been taken in too often by hucksters offering some kind of moral high ground, and we’ve always been suckers for a good oppression story. But we need to be more careful next time; if this is the kind of nonsense we’re going to tolerate trying to free Tibet from Beijing, God only knows what we’re going to have to overlook to free it from Lhasa.