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The Gaggle Book Club: "Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg" By Francine Hirsch

Each week, the Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is "Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II" by Francine Hirsch. A groundbreaking, deeply researched reassessment of the Soviet Union’s role in the International Military Tribunal (IMT), Hirsch's book fills a void in the standard Nuremberg narratives, according to which the Anglo-Americans ran the show from start to finish, with the Soviets only showing up occasionally to quibble about such embarrassing issues as the Katyn massacre.

Hirsch, to the contrary, argues that Soviet jurists were indispensable to establishing the IMT. The Soviet Union pushed for a legal reckoning for the Nazis via a formal international court. Among Allied leaders, some, such as Churchill, preferred to dispense with the possibly embarrassing process of holding trials, opting instead for summary executions for Nazi leaders.

The Soviet Union, by contrast, from early on urged the establishment of a formal legal process. Soviet legal legal thinkers such as Aron Trainin had developed the concept “crimes against peace” in the 1930s. While the Western powers contributed concepts such as "crimes against humanity," it was the Soviets who were instrumental in elevating "aggression" to a crime, which formed Count 1 of the indictment at Nuremberg.

According to Hirsch, Soviet prosecutors brought to Nuremberg a very different legal culture, shaped by, first, civil law traditions, and, second, Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology. From the start, Soviet prosecutors sought to prove that the Nazi regime had been a criminal conspiracy from the start, that the Soviet Union had been the main victim of Nazi aggression, and that the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated on Soviet soil were uniquely horrific.

None of the Allied Powers believed that the IMT was administering impartial justice. The war crimes trials were seen as an extension of the war itself, a mechanism to adjudicate the vanquished as uniquely evil, and the victors as uniquely virtuous. The Soviet prosecutors were a little less hypocritical than their Western counterparts in that they made no pretense of believing that the trials would be solely concerned with determining individual responsibility for crimes. The Soviet prosecutors at the outset sought to put the Nazi regime as a whole on trial. Curiously enough, decades later, the Western public still believes that at Nuremberg defendants were tried as individuals, and not as representatives of a reviled regime. This soothing notion exists even though the IMT declared the following organizations “criminal”: the Nazi Party leadership corps, the SS, the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) and the Gestapo.

Of course, mention of any of the war crimes perpetrated by any of the Allied powers was strictly prohibited. No Katyn, no carpet bombing of cities, no Hiroshima, no fire-bombing of Tokyo, no executions of POWs (at least by the Allied powers).

Francine Hirsch's "Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg" provides a useful corrective to the stories presented by Telford Taylor and John Tusa that presented the Western powers all moral and high-minded, and the Soviets as curmudgeonly bit-players.

Francine_Hirsch_-_Soviet_Judgment_at_Nuremberg__A_New_History_of_the_International_Military_Tribunal_after_World_War_II_(2020,_Oxford_University_Press)_-_libgen.lc.pdf
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The Gaggle Music Club: Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 in C minor

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 in C minor. Completed in 1887, and revised in 1890 after initial rejection by conductor Hermann Levi, this work is widely considered to be the crowning achievement of Bruckner's symphonic output and one of the most remarkable symphonies in Western music history.

Anton Bruckner (1824–1896) was an Austrian composer known for his massive symphonic structures, deeply spiritual outlook and distinctive harmonic language. A devout Catholic and a church organist by training, Bruckner developed a symphonic style that fused Beethovenian form and Wagnerian harmony with a cathedral-like symphonic structures. Bruckner’s symphonies often unfold in massive, symmetrical blocks of sound that bring to mind the recesses of a Gothic cathedral.

His movements build slowly, often with long crescendos, as if the music were reaching upward toward the divine. Bruckner's symphonies often seem to embody prayer, awe and contemplation—not in a ...

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TG 1901: Poland Set To Commemorate Genocide Of Poles At The Hands Of Ukraine's Fascists

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss the decision of the Polish Sejm to make every July 11 the day for commemoration of the genocide of Poles at Volhinya at the hands of OUN (b), the very people that Poland's great ally and partner daily celebrates with statues and street-name honorifics.

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TG 1900: Can Musk Restore His Reputation After The Trump Debacle?

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss the aftermath of the fallout between President Trump and Elon Musk, and wonder whether the billionaire owner of Tesla and Space X can recover from the damage that he has inflicted on his reputation.

00:33:36
January 21, 2023
More Leftie Than Thou
"Jacobin" Magazine Celebrates A Strike Against Ol' Blue Eyes

Here at "The Gaggle" we have very little time for the "more Leftie than thou" school of thought--that's the approach to life according to which the only thing that matters is whether you take the right position on every issue under the sun from Abortion to Zelensky. No one in the world meets the exacting standards of this school of thought; any Leftie leader anywhere is always selling out to the bankers and the capitalists. The perfect exemplar of this is the unreadable Jacobin magazine. 

The other day I came across this article from 2021. It's a celebration of trade union power. And not simply trade union power, but the use of trade union power to secure political goals. Of course (and this is always the case with the "more Leftie than thou" crowd), this glorious, never-to-be-forgotten moment on the history of organized labor took place many years ago--in the summer of 1974 to be exact. Yes, almost half a century has gone by since that thrilling moment when the working-class movement of Australia mobilized and prepared to seize the means of production, distribution and exchange. 

Well, not quite. Organized labor went into action against...Ol' Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the Voice; yes, Frank Sinatra. Why? What had Sinatra done? Sinatra was certainly very rich, and he owned a variety of properties and businesses. But if the Australian trade union movement were, understandably, searching for the bright, incandescent spark that would finally awaken the working class from its slumber there were surely richer, greedier, more dishonest, more decadent, above all more Australian individuals it could have discovered. Australia was never short of them. Rupert Murdoch immediately springs to mind. Why Sinatra?

 

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