Customer Reviews

The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

i have to agree with one of the other reviewers, simpson's title seems to offer much more than the book delivers. frankly, if he had fully covered money, law, and genocide in the 20th century, the book would have been an extra 20 thousand pages. it consists of 20 chapters that are representative of topics within the title. the chapters are well written and adequate referencing is provided. i also agree that a chapter discussing the relationships between sociopathy and genocide would have filled out the text. in quite a few chapters, i found that, while it discussed what it discussed quite well, there were many topics that were not even mentioned. overall, i think that this is a very good book. it is well worth the price, used, for those studying genocide. you know, another topic that merits attention, somewhat addressed in the book "unholy trinity" is the complicity of those in positions of moral or religious authority and the resolution. again, overall, very good, used.

Before considering this book one must read The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, by Martha Stout, ISBN: 076791581X. One in 25 of us has no conscience, can do anything without guilt or remorse -- that includes reviewers who shrug off mass murders.

Simpson takes on two events: the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Shoah, but he doesn't understand the underlying psychology of sociopaths creating all history. The history of governments is the history of sociopaths taking over. Thomas Paine in Common Sense (ISBN: 0486296024) explained it consisely: " This is supposing the present race of kings in the world to have had an honorable origin; whereas it is more than probable, that could we take off the dark covering of antiquity, and trace them to their first rise, that we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtility obtained him the title of chief among plunderers; and who by increasing in power, and extending his depredations, over-awed the quiet and defenceless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions.", and elsewhere said "Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices." Genocides are wickedness done by governments controlled by sociopaths.

Sociopaths resist laws restraining their wickedness. They reward sycophants who pile on praises for the brutal power to rule without restraints both from beneath and from neighboring powers. International rule of law is kept weak by the predatory nations.

However, Nuremburg created precedent out of thin air: said nazis cannot kill people under their control as a "right of government". The logic for this precedent derives from the principle that the people are the sovereign, that government belongs to the people, not people belong to the government. Intuitively Simpson understands, but intellectually he cannot apply the principle. This book gropes for answers which are in plain sight when sociopathy is considered.

On page 232 of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, by Ron Rosenbaum, ISBN: 0679431519, this quote is presented (in context):

"In his speech to a regional Nazi Party meeting, Hitler "addressed himself to the Jewish question [and] referred contemptuously to the insistent demands within the party for more action against the Jews." Dawidowicz writes. He assures them no one is more qualified to think about the disposition of the Jews -- he knows where he's going, but he must employ Machiavellian tactical considerations to make sure he gets there: "The final aim of our whole policy is quite clear for all of us" (emphasis added), Hitler says.

[HITLER:] Always I am concerned only that I do not take any step from which I will perhaps have to retreat, and not to take a step that will harm us. I tell you that I always go to the outermost limits of risk. but never beyond. For this you need to have a nose more or less to smell out: "What can I still do." . . . In a struggle against an enemy[,] I do not summon an enemy with force to fight. I don't say: "Fight!" because I want to fight. Instead I say. "I will destroy you! And now, Wisdom, help me to maneuver you into the corner that you cannot fight back. and then you get the blow right in the heart."

It's a passage in which Hitler seems to be confiding to his insiders exactly the exoteric-esoteric two-track strategy ... There is no doubt, no hesitation, no wavering around his final goal: the destruction of the enemy. But he discloses to his confidants his intention to conceal from outsiders, from the enemy, the ultimate goal in order to take, one after another, cautious, intermediate steps toward it. Steps that will appear hesitant only to those not in the know: caution that will seem like trepidation only to those it's designed to deceive."

The "Blow To The Heart", the corralling the weak into "divide-to-conquer" pieces, the concealed manipulations are the methods, eternal methods, of the sociopaths.

Christopher Simpson puts some facts on record: pages 230, 248, 249, 251, 265, 266, 267, 271, 273 (look them up) how American-Axis sociopaths undermined efforts for truth, justice and the American way, manipulating levers of power through infiltration of government. He fails to track the lifetime records exposing the symptoms of sociopathy of persons he names.

He never tracked John McCloy's lifetime record to sitting with Himmler and Goering in Hitler's box in the 1936 Berlin Olympics (with Charles A Lindbergh), connected to the same lawfirm as the chief American judge at the Nuremberg Industrialist's Trial. McCloy targetted bombings, refused to bomb Auschwitz which his partrons were invested in, refused to even bomb the railways serving Auschwitz, then pardoned the Industrials who received light sentences from his law partner.

Simpson never tracked The Dulles brothers completely: John Foster Dulles support for the American-Nazi Axis extended to financially underwriting neighbor eugenist Lindbergh's anti-semitic speech on the eve of Pearl Harbor, and Allen was instrumental in the escape from capture, trial or punishment of many high-ranking SS officers. This is slovenly scholarship which mars this book.

200,000,000 people were murdered last century by sociopaths, villians whose whole life story cannot conceal the clear markers of identifiers which diagnose sociopathy. The sociopaths have names and there are records which escaped the shredders of people knowing full well they were engaged in supreme criminal activities. Simpson just failed to find enough facts before starting to write his thesis. His book helps, in a very imperfect manner, to throw light on a difficult subject.

Read the review for The Plot To Seize The White House, by Jules Archer, ASIN: B0006COVHA, to see some pieces of the puzzle Simpson just plain refused to look at.

covers in depth the links between international law and business, military intelligence, and mass murder. anyone uncritical of NAFTA, GATT, multinational corporations unbound by morals (yet defined and protected as "individuals" in international law..), will, I hope, be disturbed by the "proud history" of many of our favorite corporate overlords. Explores the ultimate victory of methods and men responsible for the most heinous atrocities committed this century as they escape justice, mostly with the help of our government.

A small part of my disappointment springs from the fact that the book's subtitle "Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century", promises far more than the book delivers. The book covers the Nazi genocide against the Jews, with some background information on the Turkish genocide against the Armenians. So there is no coverage of Cambodia, Tibet, former Yugoslavia or other less well known genocides. Of course, to cover Cambodia, for example, would have ruined the book's title and central theme of western intellectual self-flagellation over everything bad that happens in the world.

But the bigger problem with the book is summed up by the review squib on the back cover: "A savage and eloquent attack on international law and its failure to stop mass murder." That it is, but if you think about it for a minute, law routinely fails to prevent murder, rape and other evil conduct on the part of people who choose not to obey it. Once you get past that realization all that is left in the book is a long exposition of "look at the terrible thing that happened". Which is not to say the genocide wasn't terrible, only that the book isn't anything new or ground breaking.

The "revelation" that bankers and lawyers did business with the Nazis should be no more shocking than the fact that people cut their hair, babysat their children and filled their cavities, but for some reason business people are held to a higher standard. The fact that Nazi companies used concentration camp slave labor is of course horrific, but again, the revelation that the systematic murder of 6 million people was NOT perpetrated secretly by a few "bad" Nazis is hardly a revelation at all.

The author clearly knows very little about international law - much of the international legal principles he seems to imply "failed" in the Nazi genocide, were in fact established at the Nuremburg and Tokyo trials in response to it. He has a big problem with the accepted legal norm at the time that "a nation state can do what it likes to its own people", but that doesn't change the fact that that it was an accepted norm at the time.

So much of the book's analysis is steeped in this sort of hindsight it is annoying. Furthermore, so wrapped up does he get in the minutiae of the politicking that takes place among US and British diplomats during WWII regarding how to treat suspected war criminals, that he seems to forget there is a war on. At one point he notes that during one period of infighting within the US state department "so many Jews were murdered". As if the doings of a bunch of diplomats and lawyers could have changed any of that in the middle of a world war. Similarly, he notes that in May of 1944 the Allies knew of the German round up of Hungarian Jews for the death camps yet failed to do anything about it. Again, what the allies could have done to help the citizens of an Axis country thousands of miles away in the month before D-day is never suggested. Failure to do "something" is enough of a crime. And, in fact the author equates words with conduct - in one place he equates the euphemistic characteristics used by US statements describing german business interests in the Holocaust with Stalin's statements regarding the liquidation of his own people.

And finally, the author dismisses many concerns of US diplomats out of hand without serious analysis. For example one of the things which kept the Western allies from announcing a hard line on punishing Nazi war crimes DURING the war, was the fact that the Nazi government widely held the Allied bombing campaign against its population centers as a war crime and could have held downed air crew to the same strict standard. But this doesn't seem to count for anything with Mr. Simpson if it resulted in a failure to persecute nazis. But surely the role of any government, particularly a democratic one, is to protect the interests of its own citizens first? People like Mr. Simpson forget that international law cuts both ways and may be claimed against your own country in ways you don't like.

Many other things about this book annoyed me greatly. In summary, though, it is a hindsighted, one-sided, polymic against western lawyers and businessmen. It goes into excrutiating detail over the way the US policy on war crimes developed during the war (hence the 2 star rating), but most of this is about diplomacy and politics, rather than law, and at a time when diplomacy and politics had already failed dismally to prevent war and other tragedies.

The conclusion is high minded balderdash, a bunch of conclusory statements unsupported by the rest of the work and steeped in intellectual judgments made 50 years after the fact. The final paragraph contains the most ridiculous statement in the whole book "The cycle of genocide can be broken through relatively simple - but politically difficult - reform in the international legal system". This is like saying that more gun control laws will prevent murders, or that a manned mission to mars will be easy so long as some difficult technical issues are worked out. What utter nonsense.

Read AJP Taylor if you want an example of what proper historical writing is supposed to look like.

I'm glad this book remains in print, but disappointed by the price. I think I paid less than the current price when it first came out in hardbound (Grove Press??). Never heard of Common Courage Press and I know we should be grateful they've picked it up.

I did a lot of yellow highlighting when I first read this, because there were so many cogent phrases and paragraphs, something I normally don't do with a book.