British Gas idiocy leaves
me boiling with rage
Matthew Parris
Page 28
does not matter, just that it cannot
be the last word in any argument.
The future belongs, as Blinken has
argued, to those who would build
bridges rather than walls.
Second, while all of us wish to
apply common sense, if mistakes are
unavoidable, the Nuremberg view
prefers naivety over cynicism.
Nuremberg was not a pure trial of
the evil by the good. The Russianssaw to that, even trying to convict
the Nazis for the Katyn massacre
that they committed themselves. But
even in compromised circumstances,
Nuremberg showed good can be
advanced. This is the right way of
viewing the necessary compromises
involving realism, the national
interest and strategic alliances.
And the Nuremberg view prefers
sins of commission to sins of
omission. That certainly was the
Blinken position on Syria and Libya,
where America left others to do the
fighting and, in doing so, contributed
to making a bad situation worse.
To this international outlook,
Blinken adds a further, almost
romantic view of the need forAmerican leadership and its special
destiny. How else to interpret his
favourite Pisar story, which he told
upon accepting Biden’s nomination
for secretary of state.
In the final days of the war, Pisar
was forced on a death march, when
prisoners were ordered to travel to a
new camp and faced being shot if
they were too slow. Pisar escaped
and made his way into a wood.
He ran and ran and then heard the
rumble of a tank. As he got close he
saw it had the US star on its side.
The head of an African-American
soldier appeared from inside and
Pisar fell to his knees. Then he
uttered the only three words of
English he knew. “God bless
America.”What makes Biden’s right-hand man tick?
Tony Blinken, the next secretary of state, will use family experience of the Holocaust to reshape America’s role in the world
violations of Saudi Arabia, and the
way he accompanies his support for
Israel with pressure on it to advance
a two-state solution.
Not everybody who is attracted tothe Nuremberg view approaches
every issue in the same way. The
lawyer Philippe Sands, who lost 80
relatives in the Holocaust and is an
historian of Nuremberg, became one
of the most prominent opponents of
the Iraq war that Blinken supported,
because he thought it against the
rule of law. And how to deal with
Iran shows there can be a tension
between establishing an
international coalition for realistic
action and taking a robust position
centred on human rights.
Yet for all these differences there
are some things that unite us (for it is
my view too and for the same
reason). First, a belief in
international law and not just
sovereignty. It is not that sovereigntyJoe Biden and Tony Blinken, who
believes in liberal interventionismrelease. Footage of death camps at
their liberation and a forensic speech
by Labour’s attorney-general Sir
Hartley Shawcross stunned the
defendants and silenced the court.
More important still was that
Nuremberg took the first step
towards a rules-based international
order, in which sovereignty was not a
defence against conviction for
grotesque crime and in which liberaldemocratic countries took
responsibility for trying to prevent
oppression even in places they did
not govern.
This is why, near the trial’s end, the
author Rebecca West, who had
attended, said its judgment “may be
one of the most important events in
the history of civilisation”.
Tony Blinken’s career, working for
Democratic presidents and for Joe
Biden, has been dedicated to
promoting these ideals. He was an
important player in Bill Clinton’s
interventions over Bosnia and
Kosovo. He continued to support
liberal interventionism even when,
after the Iraq war, which he backed,
such a position was unpopularamong Democrats. And he is a
strong supporter of international
institutions and rules. It is not just
his French childhood that leads him
to support the EU, but Pisar’s lifelong
fear of European collapse.
In the Obama White House he
was one of a small group that urged
tougher action to prevent Colonel
Gaddafi from murdering his own
people in Libya. He also took a
relatively hawkish position on Syria,
telling everyone who would listen
that “superpowers don’t bluff”. He
was also an early enthusiast for the
Arab Spring, emphasising the human
rights infringements of Hosni
Mubarak’s Egyptian government.
The Nuremberg view is apparent
in his concern at the human rightsI
f you want to understand
American foreign policy in the
Biden era, a good place to start is
with Samuel Pisar. By the time
Pisar was 13 years old, he was
totally alone. His father had been
caught by the Nazis while trying to
smuggle children to safety from the
Bialystok ghetto in Poland. He had
been tortured and executed. His
mother and younger sister had been
sent to the gas chambers while Pisar
himself had been forced into slavery.
Having survived the war thanks to
extraordinary luck and
resourcefulness, Pisar rose to become
a distinguished lawyer, Holocaust
educator and even an intermediary
between presidents (among otherthings, sent by François Mitterrand
to assure Ronald Reagan that the
Frenchman was not a communist).
And in 1971 he became stepfather
to the nine-year-old son of Judith
Blinken. This month Tony Blinken
was nominated by Joe Biden as his
secretary of state, subject to
confirmation by the Senate. Pisar’s
experiences have left a deep
impression on the man who will
shape the Biden administration’s
international outlook.
There have been lots of comments
that Blinken lived in Paris between
the ages of 9 and 18. This is indeed
significant, but more significant still
is that he lived in Paris with Samuel
Pisar. Not every Holocaust survivor
or every child of a survivor sharesthe same political views. But I think
many of us, in our different ways, are
drawn to what one might call the
Nuremberg view of world affairs.
Tony Blinken certainly is. When he
worked for Barack Obama I believe
this Nuremberg view marked him
out from others in the administration.
After the Second World War there
was a dilemma about what to do
with leading Nazis. Just allow peopleto lynch them as they had with
Mussolini? Organise a drumhead
court martial and simply shoot them
all? Or let them go free and only
punish the junior officers?
A more elaborate process,
involving a criminal trial of the top
two dozen German leaders, seemed a
lot of bother. One GI, looking at all
the security and organisation,
exclaimed that he couldn’t see the
point of involving 600 men in the
killing of 24.
But what was initially a small
group of visionaries, including the
US war secretary Henry Stimsonand the British legal academic and
refugee Hersch Lauterpacht, saw the
value of a criminal trial.
It would help establish the
principle of leaders’ personal
responsibility for mounting
aggressive wars, breaking
international treaties and
committing war crimes. It would also
make the case — through the new
offence of crimes against humanity
and the first mention of a new term,
genocide — that human rights do
not stop at national borders.
For survivors, the first exposure of
Nazi crime was a great emotionalHe was a key player in
Clinton’s interventions
in Bosnia and Kosovo
Daniel
Finkelstein
@dannythefink
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the times | Wednesday December 2 2020 1GM 27