My wonderful Grandad was with the British Army as they liberated the camp, he stood guard over the commandant of that terrible camp. He was executed that same day. He never forgot Belson, It’s so good to hear that you have a good life and a family too. Thank you for the article.
David Allsopp
3 years ago
The most chilling aspect for me is the cold, calculated organisation of mass murder. Not a trace of emotion. It surely is the darkest of deeds.
It is a logical consequence of adopting Darwin’s theory.
If you believe the in survival of the fittest and there is no God, then Master Race theories are to be expected and indeed celebrated.
After all, ( as they claimed themselves) they were only giving nature a helping hand…..
With all due respect, this is nonsense.
Darwin’s theory is an explanation of the mechanisms of evolution, subsequently elaborated and demonstrated in various ways over many studies and many experiments. Your trite and ill-informed conception of it makes me feel a smidgeon of embarrassment on your behalf.
It is not hard to learn a little more about Darwinism and the science thereof. Google can be your friend.
It is, and will ever remain, a theory precisely bc there is nothing in any science-ism to show something coming from nothing; life from non-life; bacteria becoming botanists ad nauseum. Evolution is predicated on mutations over eons changing one species into another which has never been shown in any scientific process – mutations generally produce loss of information therefore a degradation/loss of species fitness. The rest is pure speculation and story telling. The bait and switch of evolution conflates observable process of natural selection – ie finches beaks adapting to environmental pressures (clue – they remain finches!). Explain the blood clotting cascade in evolutionary terms. Impossible. Explain the photons on a butterfly’s wings in evolutionary terms. Impossible. Explain the myriad of ‘living fossils’ unchanged in 80/90/100m+ years yet humans are suposed to have evolved from apes in less than an evolutionary twinkling of an eye! It’s evolution. Except when it’s not. Explain the DNA coding for several proteins within its gene structure in evolutionary terms. Impossible. Fairy stories. Get real.
Or try explaining a crysallis. The properties of water. The cell. ………….etc etc etc
Back to eichmann…truly evolved from pond scum.
Clearly you know nothing about Darwinism. There is no struggle between races or species in Darwin’s theory but between individuals or even, as per Dawkins, ultimately genes. A male robin’s biggest rival, for example, on a day to day basis, is another robin.
We haven’t ‘adopted’ Darwinism, as if this is some kind of arbitrary choice, any more than we have quantum mechanics or General Relativity. These theories (in the scientific sense) are supported by overwhelming evidence, although all are approximations.
As many have said, you can’t get to an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ in any case. However it is always useful to be aware of our undoubted evolutionary past and its legacies in human behaviour, rather than denying there are any such.
You have to laugh at the logical inconsistancy of the darwinian myth believers that downtick exposure of their fallacy. Sad but inevitable result of them never actually having read the book they are supposed to believe.
Vijay Kant
3 years ago
This is exactly the kind of pedantic and bureaucratic thinking that allows evil to leak through the gaps of ambiguities in laws. Godel: No axiomatic system is free of ambiguities. Human laws are one such axiomatic system. Justice, therefore, should not suffer from imperfect and ambiguous laws.
Last edited 3 years ago by Vijay Kant
greg waggett
3 years ago
Anti-semitism is a light sleeper. Be ever-vigilant.
But you as a German should put all that behind you now, and remember your German culture which has produced so many great thinkers, philosophers, poets, musicians and artists. Brahms ? Beethoven ? Kant ? so many others. I would be very proud to be German because your country has done more than any other single country to define and enrich Western culture.
You are not responsible for the sins of your parents’ generation. Just be glad you did not have to try and survive under a vicious totalitarian government – and teach those who come after you to be vigilant in ensuring it never happens again.
It’s easy enough to say it may have been illegal to kidnap Eichmann and bring him to trial in Israel for his crimes against the Jewish people. But it’s much harder to argue that it was unjust to hold him to account in a court of law for what he did.
I’m not sure whether the Israeli state was right in what they did. But sometimes Justice and Law are not exactly the same thing. Though even Justice may not always be the supreme good.
Sometimes? You need to attend more court proceedings even in the “enlightened” world. The Law in sane countries has never pretended to be justice, just the most reasonable facsimile we can come up with. Sometimes grotesque crimes call out for justice no matter what the law says.
William Blake
3 years ago
When discussing monstrous evil one should start from the point that unless judged from the perspective of Christianity anything is permissable no matter how horrible and inhumane, provided one can get away with it.
Added to this is the fact that the nature of the first man – Adam, changed after his disobedience and eviction from the Garden of Eden. He was no longer perfect and capable of any sort of dishonesty and worse.
Also the angel (Satan) who persuaded Adam and Eve to disobey their Creator God and who was thrown out of Heaven after attempting to usurp God his maker, ended up on this earth of which the Bible tells us he is still Lord, until Jesus returns to remove and end his reign of oppression for which the correct description is EVIL.
So in this context what Eichmann did was to him and his compatriots perfectly reasonable and quite normal behaviour. Unoriginal banality perhaps. Although one can quite sure that he was manipulated by Satan who still does whatever he can to frustrate God’s intentions by persuading unwitting human beings to carry out the most horrible acts. Hence the activities of ISIS and other depraved sects.
But of course it is not quite the done thing to mention all this because the Church of England all but denies the existence of Satan, not wishing to upset Liberal Theologians, who insist on choosing what passages in the Holy Bible they will accept. Satan must be hugely delighted.
I think your comment misrepresents what William says. If you look at it logically, materialist have no basis to judge good or evil which are immaterial therefore cannot exist in a material world — if you believe we are simply the products of time and chance, there are no moral absolutes therefore there is no foundation for good or evil/right or wrong; if each thought is simply a random collision of chemicals and electrical impulses, dancing to DNA’s careless music according to Dawkins – a real evolutionary masterpiece – then there can be no ultimate truth. Everyone doing what they think is right in their own eyes. Attila, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Fred West, Shipman all thought they had every right to manage their own behaviour in their own way.
Whereas there is an ultimate Judge, according to Christianity.
Christianity or any other religion can be helpful in teaching children and adults to behave morally but even atheists are naturally moral people when you consider the restraints imposed by society. Plus the fact that only Christians, not atheists, can confess their sins and be forgiven, which seems plausible to some people.
Peter Dunn
3 years ago
Yeh like international police were scouring the world for Eichman..
Simon Melville
3 years ago
Sam – I really like your blog on Romania (which I stumbled over while googling why Romanians don’t have a word to distinguish “foot” from “leg” – thanks for the info!) but I can see why the legality of what happened to Eichmann would be a topic for another post (maybe Unherd can commission that). This seems more of a personal reaction to the phenomenon of “Eichmann” for post-Holocaust Israelis although it could have been touched on at least.
Giles Chance
3 years ago
Uighurs, Kurds, Jews, American Indians…the list is long.
Giles Chance
3 years ago
Totally agree. The “eye for an eye” approach unilaterally pursued against its enemies by the state of Israel is not justice.
Ah, we’re back to ‘turn the other cheek’. There is not a human being on earth who does not instinctively react to an attack with a counter-attack (whether that emotional reaction is converted to action or not). An ‘eye for an eye’ is not only justice, it’s the only real form of justice. What the doctrine, as espoused by ancient humans, meant was ‘not 27 eyes (or ‘whole village’) for an eye’, which would have been considered normal by some men of violence at the time (as it was for Hitler). Every modern legal system in the West is based on the principle (it underlay, quite correctly, the death penalty in the UK for murder, till it was abolished by sentimentalists). You can argy-bargy about whether, philosophically, ‘levelling the scales’ is ‘just’ or not, but most people naturally think of it as being so. What denying this implies is a lop-sided argument for ‘natural entitlement’, that is ‘freedom from just vengeance’ on the principle of a self-declared ‘natural’ superiority of some individuals (on what grounds exactly? – all the usual reasons are founded in some kind of supernaturalist myth e.g. ‘we are descended directly from Gods and thus have higher levels of privilege as a result’).
(it underlay, quite correctly, the death penalty in the UK for murder, till it was abolished by sentimentalists).
I guess you might call me a sentimentalist then, but I’ve always been of the opinion that the possibility of convicting an innocent person is sufficient grounds for abolishing the death penalty. A wrongly imprisoned man has the chance to prove his innocence; a wrongly executed man does not.
In an ideal world inhibited by ideal people this would be true. But we live in an imperfect world compelled to follow the logic of natural selection: Eat or get eaten. In reality, humanity is condemned to live inside Plato’s cave.
Last edited 3 years ago by Vijay Kant
mac mahmood
3 years ago
Oh, I don’t know. Can’t see a lot of difference between Eichmann and a zionist. One talks of “freedom of my blood is my birth right” and the other says “the promised land is my birth right”. One does not see Jews as people, the other does not see Palestinians as people!
When Palestinian refugee camps are converted by Israelis into death camps, then you may have a point. In the meantime, you don’t. Israel is repressive (perhaps less so than its neighbours) but not genocidal like Eichmann and his ilk.
“Oppression” narrative is what Palestine has gifted the world. It has so far been a profitable endeavour. When Yasser Arafat died, he had more than $50m in his personal bank account! This “oppression” narrative works well in the Middle East because all the countries in that region are governed by one or the other form of dictatorship. The ordinary public in the region naturally identifies with oppression, as it were. The Middle Eastern dictators have cynically exploited this paranoia and pointed their accusing fingers at “outsiders”.
That is a wildly false equivalence – that’s routinely trotted out as a justification for tyranny. I’m sorry, but it’s indefensible.
Just because you have heard such talk among your confederates, don’t glibly accept it.
Please – sincerely – I urge you to stop, consider what you’re saying, put it into a more honest historical and moral context and then – hopefully – rethink it!
Can you please tell us where we can see evidence of the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians?
If you cannot, you should apologise and withdraw your poisonous and ignorant comment.
My wonderful Grandad was with the British Army as they liberated the camp, he stood guard over the commandant of that terrible camp. He was executed that same day. He never forgot Belson, It’s so good to hear that you have a good life and a family too. Thank you for the article.
The most chilling aspect for me is the cold, calculated organisation of mass murder. Not a trace of emotion. It surely is the darkest of deeds.
It is a logical consequence of adopting Darwin’s theory.
If you believe the in survival of the fittest and there is no God, then Master Race theories are to be expected and indeed celebrated.
After all, ( as they claimed themselves) they were only giving nature a helping hand…..
With all due respect, this is nonsense.
Darwin’s theory is an explanation of the mechanisms of evolution, subsequently elaborated and demonstrated in various ways over many studies and many experiments. Your trite and ill-informed conception of it makes me feel a smidgeon of embarrassment on your behalf.
It is not hard to learn a little more about Darwinism and the science thereof. Google can be your friend.
It is, and will ever remain, a theory precisely bc there is nothing in any science-ism to show something coming from nothing; life from non-life; bacteria becoming botanists ad nauseum. Evolution is predicated on mutations over eons changing one species into another which has never been shown in any scientific process – mutations generally produce loss of information therefore a degradation/loss of species fitness. The rest is pure speculation and story telling. The bait and switch of evolution conflates observable process of natural selection – ie finches beaks adapting to environmental pressures (clue – they remain finches!). Explain the blood clotting cascade in evolutionary terms. Impossible. Explain the photons on a butterfly’s wings in evolutionary terms. Impossible. Explain the myriad of ‘living fossils’ unchanged in 80/90/100m+ years yet humans are suposed to have evolved from apes in less than an evolutionary twinkling of an eye! It’s evolution. Except when it’s not. Explain the DNA coding for several proteins within its gene structure in evolutionary terms. Impossible. Fairy stories. Get real.
Or try explaining a crysallis. The properties of water. The cell. ………….etc etc etc
Back to eichmann…truly evolved from pond scum.
Clearly you know nothing about Darwinism. There is no struggle between races or species in Darwin’s theory but between individuals or even, as per Dawkins, ultimately genes. A male robin’s biggest rival, for example, on a day to day basis, is another robin.
We haven’t ‘adopted’ Darwinism, as if this is some kind of arbitrary choice, any more than we have quantum mechanics or General Relativity. These theories (in the scientific sense) are supported by overwhelming evidence, although all are approximations.
As many have said, you can’t get to an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ in any case. However it is always useful to be aware of our undoubted evolutionary past and its legacies in human behaviour, rather than denying there are any such.
You have to laugh at the logical inconsistancy of the darwinian myth believers that downtick exposure of their fallacy. Sad but inevitable result of them never actually having read the book they are supposed to believe.
This is exactly the kind of pedantic and bureaucratic thinking that allows evil to leak through the gaps of ambiguities in laws. Godel: No axiomatic system is free of ambiguities. Human laws are one such axiomatic system. Justice, therefore, should not suffer from imperfect and ambiguous laws.
Anti-semitism is a light sleeper. Be ever-vigilant.
Or the next variant.
Which could be any group the Government needs to scapegoat
Do you agree with Hannah Arendt that Israel should have handed Eichmann over to the United Nations to be tried for crimes against humanity?
being german born in 1946 i am ashamed and deeply shocked by what my parents generation
But you as a German should put all that behind you now, and remember your German culture which has produced so many great thinkers, philosophers, poets, musicians and artists. Brahms ? Beethoven ? Kant ? so many others. I would be very proud to be German because your country has done more than any other single country to define and enrich Western culture.
You are not responsible for the sins of your parents’ generation. Just be glad you did not have to try and survive under a vicious totalitarian government – and teach those who come after you to be vigilant in ensuring it never happens again.
…and rejoice in being German.
It’s easy enough to say it may have been illegal to kidnap Eichmann and bring him to trial in Israel for his crimes against the Jewish people. But it’s much harder to argue that it was unjust to hold him to account in a court of law for what he did.
I’m not sure whether the Israeli state was right in what they did. But sometimes Justice and Law are not exactly the same thing. Though even Justice may not always be the supreme good.
Sometimes? You need to attend more court proceedings even in the “enlightened” world. The Law in sane countries has never pretended to be justice, just the most reasonable facsimile we can come up with. Sometimes grotesque crimes call out for justice no matter what the law says.
When discussing monstrous evil one should start from the point that unless judged from the perspective of Christianity anything is permissable no matter how horrible and inhumane, provided one can get away with it.
Added to this is the fact that the nature of the first man – Adam, changed after his disobedience and eviction from the Garden of Eden. He was no longer perfect and capable of any sort of dishonesty and worse.
Also the angel (Satan) who persuaded Adam and Eve to disobey their Creator God and who was thrown out of Heaven after attempting to usurp God his maker, ended up on this earth of which the Bible tells us he is still Lord, until Jesus returns to remove and end his reign of oppression for which the correct description is EVIL.
So in this context what Eichmann did was to him and his compatriots perfectly reasonable and quite normal behaviour. Unoriginal banality perhaps. Although one can quite sure that he was manipulated by Satan who still does whatever he can to frustrate God’s intentions by persuading unwitting human beings to carry out the most horrible acts. Hence the activities of ISIS and other depraved sects.
But of course it is not quite the done thing to mention all this because the Church of England all but denies the existence of Satan, not wishing to upset Liberal Theologians, who insist on choosing what passages in the Holy Bible they will accept. Satan must be hugely delighted.
How interesting to learn that only Christians are capable of judging what is good or evil.
I think your comment misrepresents what William says. If you look at it logically, materialist have no basis to judge good or evil which are immaterial therefore cannot exist in a material world — if you believe we are simply the products of time and chance, there are no moral absolutes therefore there is no foundation for good or evil/right or wrong; if each thought is simply a random collision of chemicals and electrical impulses, dancing to DNA’s careless music according to Dawkins – a real evolutionary masterpiece – then there can be no ultimate truth. Everyone doing what they think is right in their own eyes. Attila, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Fred West, Shipman all thought they had every right to manage their own behaviour in their own way.
Whereas there is an ultimate Judge, according to Christianity.
Christianity or any other religion can be helpful in teaching children and adults to behave morally but even atheists are naturally moral people when you consider the restraints imposed by society. Plus the fact that only Christians, not atheists, can confess their sins and be forgiven, which seems plausible to some people.
Yeh like international police were scouring the world for Eichman..
Sam – I really like your blog on Romania (which I stumbled over while googling why Romanians don’t have a word to distinguish “foot” from “leg” – thanks for the info!) but I can see why the legality of what happened to Eichmann would be a topic for another post (maybe Unherd can commission that). This seems more of a personal reaction to the phenomenon of “Eichmann” for post-Holocaust Israelis although it could have been touched on at least.
Uighurs, Kurds, Jews, American Indians…the list is long.
Totally agree. The “eye for an eye” approach unilaterally pursued against its enemies by the state of Israel is not justice.
Ah, we’re back to ‘turn the other cheek’. There is not a human being on earth who does not instinctively react to an attack with a counter-attack (whether that emotional reaction is converted to action or not). An ‘eye for an eye’ is not only justice, it’s the only real form of justice. What the doctrine, as espoused by ancient humans, meant was ‘not 27 eyes (or ‘whole village’) for an eye’, which would have been considered normal by some men of violence at the time (as it was for Hitler). Every modern legal system in the West is based on the principle (it underlay, quite correctly, the death penalty in the UK for murder, till it was abolished by sentimentalists). You can argy-bargy about whether, philosophically, ‘levelling the scales’ is ‘just’ or not, but most people naturally think of it as being so. What denying this implies is a lop-sided argument for ‘natural entitlement’, that is ‘freedom from just vengeance’ on the principle of a self-declared ‘natural’ superiority of some individuals (on what grounds exactly? – all the usual reasons are founded in some kind of supernaturalist myth e.g. ‘we are descended directly from Gods and thus have higher levels of privilege as a result’).
I guess you might call me a sentimentalist then, but I’ve always been of the opinion that the possibility of convicting an innocent person is sufficient grounds for abolishing the death penalty. A wrongly imprisoned man has the chance to prove his innocence; a wrongly executed man does not.
For that reason, I will never support the death penalty.
It may not be justice, but it has enabled Israel to survive despite the countless attacks on it since 1948.
In an ideal world inhibited by ideal people this would be true. But we live in an imperfect world compelled to follow the logic of natural selection: Eat or get eaten. In reality, humanity is condemned to live inside Plato’s cave.
Oh, I don’t know. Can’t see a lot of difference between Eichmann and a zionist. One talks of “freedom of my blood is my birth right” and the other says “the promised land is my birth right”. One does not see Jews as people, the other does not see Palestinians as people!
When Palestinian refugee camps are converted by Israelis into death camps, then you may have a point. In the meantime, you don’t. Israel is repressive (perhaps less so than its neighbours) but not genocidal like Eichmann and his ilk.
“Oppression” narrative is what Palestine has gifted the world. It has so far been a profitable endeavour. When Yasser Arafat died, he had more than $50m in his personal bank account! This “oppression” narrative works well in the Middle East because all the countries in that region are governed by one or the other form of dictatorship. The ordinary public in the region naturally identifies with oppression, as it were. The Middle Eastern dictators have cynically exploited this paranoia and pointed their accusing fingers at “outsiders”.
That is a wildly false equivalence – that’s routinely trotted out as a justification for tyranny. I’m sorry, but it’s indefensible.
Just because you have heard such talk among your confederates, don’t glibly accept it.
Please – sincerely – I urge you to stop, consider what you’re saying, put it into a more honest historical and moral context and then – hopefully – rethink it!
No, I think Mahmood is right. The behaviour of Israel and the Jews towards the Palestinians is indefensible, and could be described as genocide.
Can you please tell us where we can see evidence of the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians?
If you cannot, you should apologise and withdraw your poisonous and ignorant comment.
Could be described as genocide..except that in reality,it’s not.
“Oh, I don’t know. Can’t see a lot of difference between Eichmann and a zionist.”
Then you are likely a fool who cannot be bothered to read much.