Some brief book reviews

Some time ago, I began reading three books that I regard as being about human rights:

• the fourth edition of Geoffrey  Robertson's "Crimes Against Humanity" (The New Press, 2012, ISBN 978-1-59558-860-9, 4th ed.);
• "The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World", Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2017, ISBN 978-1-5011-0986-7, Amazon); and
• "Human Rights After Hitler: the Lost History of Prosecuting Axis War Crimes", Dan Plesch (Georgetown University Press, Washington, 2017, ISBN 978-1-62616-431-4, Amazon).

I'm going to add a fourth book to this review, which is about politics:

• "The Final Days" by Woodward and Bernstein (my copy Simon and Schuster, New York, 1976, ISBN 978-0-74325-7406-7).

I didn't get too far with the third book, which is about the work on the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) between 1943 and 1949 "with the aim of identifying, classifying, and assisting national governments with the trials of war criminals in the European and East Asian theatres". Operating in parallel to the more famous Nuremberg and Far East trial processes, the UNWCC gathered evidence leading to over 8,000 pre-trial dossiers and charges against 36,000 individuals - including Hitler (part of the face sheet of that dossier is at the http://www.unwcc.org/ website). In its scope it was a staggering project - and a heartening commitment to justice.

As an indication of what the UNWCC did (from page 7 of the introduction), it charged individual soldiers as well as leaders, and, in some cases, whole units - and secured convictions. Interestingly, at that time, the USA charged a number of people with torture because those people were using what we now know as water boarding. (Incidentally, I understand the UNWCC website has the actual archives - although, as the site warns, they're not easy to navigate.)  From the website: "Many of those involved in its creation went on to become key figures in the fields of human rights and international law."

Tragically, after World War Part Two, the irresponsible, short-sighted and downright bloody stupid USA shut down the UNWCC and had its records declared secret - so it could start using Germans in the Cold War against Russia, no matter that some were guilty of heinous crimes against humanity (see page 9 of the introduction).

From the website:

"Owing to its politicised closure, however, and the sealing of its archives, the UNWCC went largely unremarked upon for much of the twentieth century. Despite some academic study of its work, and increased awareness due to the role its records played during the 1985 Waldheim affair, the inaccessibility of the UNWCC’s sealed archives meant that modern scholars and lawyers were unable to use the work it did and the precedents it set. This was particularly relevant during the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, where lack of access and awareness of its work on rape as a war crime severely hindered prosecutorial efforts, which had to start from scratch.

After some academic attention – from writers such as Arieh Kochavi and Christopher Simpson – work to uncover the UNWCC’s history developed significantly in the 2010s. Following a campaign by a range of academic researchers and legal practitioners – led by Dr. Dan Plesch – the UN first allowed limited access to the Commission’s records, then, through its United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (UNARMS), disclosed the whole archive to a number of research and educational organisations across the world, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Wiener Library, and SOAS, University of London."

The conclusion of the book advocates for accessing and using the information in the UNWCC archives:

"The information exists. In deciding whether to explore it, we may ask ourselves who we are going to support. Will it be the narrow pragmatists who initially fought the creations of the UNWCC and the international military tribunals and who later succeeded at the end of the 1940s  in halting the pursuit of international criminal justice? Or will it be the pioneers who strove to lay the foundations for such as system, many of whom were exiled to London from their native lands and sometimes forced to meet while sheltering from Nazi bombs? ... the frightening lesson of the demise of the UNWCC and its documented work is how easily great successes can be lost."

In my case, I found discovering, in the first chapter, that an effective legal deterrent to the use of rape in war could have been demonstrated if it wasn't for some utterly moronic US men - on whose heads I hand responsibility for a significant portion of the MILLIONS of lives that have been destroyed by sexual assaults since 1949 - so heart rending that I was able to only skim the rest of the book. It makes no difference to me that this groundbreaking work was done during and just after that war: it was lost, and humanity has been unalterably diminished by that.

In fact, I consider the sealing of the UNWCC records to be a crime against humanity itself.

One day I may be able to go back and finish reading that book properly, but not for a while.

So let's move on to the second book - which I almost completed.

This book, "The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World", was, in many ways, the reverse of the book about the UNWCC: it was about a positive event (the Paris Pact against aggressive war), and started off being interesting (a section on the history of international law which, in my opinion, supplements what I read in Geoffrey Robertson's book) and quite inspiring - except for the appalling treatment of US citizen Salmon Levinson, who came up with the idea and was buried by the big egos who had their names appended to the final product.

After Mr Levinson started the ball rolling (which required perseverance over many years), the final treaty basically outlawed aggressive war. As the 63 signatories included both Germany and Japan, this treaty enabled prosecution after World War Part 2 for crimes against peace (I am reading some interesting remarks about Japan's flaunting of breaking treaties, and the paternalistic attitudes of the US as the Cold War got underway)., and key parts of the Pact were include in the Charter of the United Nations (UN).

To the simple-minded, the existence of war indicates that the Pact failed - which is similar in its superficiality to assuming the League of Nations did no good at all (the Permanent Court of International Justice did some good work, the ILO is still going, the League also acheived some resolutions of conflict, and the Minorities Treaties were underappreciated - and all despite the malicious backstabbing of the USA, which occurred despite US President Wilson's best [flawed - possibly as a result of illness] efforts) and the UN is ineffective (the work it does on development - particularly of health and the reduction of poverty (e.g., the MDGs and the SDGs] - is outstanding and unheralded against the backdrop of its political struggles against powerful nations and groups of nations).

The authors wrote a newspaper article which sums up their arguments fairly well: see here.

However, their glib dismissal of the independence of my nation (Australia - the residual links were mostly cut in 1986) and Canada on the basis of the UK retaining some foreign affairs powers didn't endear them - or their critical faculties - to me, and then we got to their data analysis: the key to their argument that the Pact worked.

Before I go any further, I consider the topic of reduced acquisition of land a useful indicator of the Pact working, but I don't consider it the only nor the most compelling evidence of success. I am aware that changing peoples' mindsets takes time, and is not a simple, smooth progression - for instance, the struggle to abolish slavery has taken over two millenia so far, and there is still some residual slavery - but that does NOT mean abolitionism has been a failure.

Similarly, there has been reactionary events in the backwards-and-forwards history of gender equality following the passage of laws against gender discrimination half a century ago, and acheiving LGBT rights has also not been a smooth, constant improvement.

Those who like things as they are will fight against change - intelligently, using whatever skills and resources they can acquire, and thus one should never expect realisation of an ideal to be smooth.

Having made that qualification, I'm going to start with a quote from a review of this book published by the New Yorker here:

"Hathaway and Shapiro are lawyers, and, in making their case for the supreme explanatory power of Kellogg-Briand, they litigate themselves around some tricky historical corners. The claim about the return of conquered territories turns out to require some definitional parsing. They mean what they call “unrecognized transfers,” a category that does not include, for example, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, and East Germany, which became puppet states of the Soviet Union. Nor does their definition include the Baltic states, which were taken over by the Soviets in consequence of an agreement that Stalin made with Hitler. Hathaway and Shapiro argue that the United States refused to recognize this seizure, but this is not the reason those states were awarded independence in 1991. That happened because the Soviet Empire collapsed."

In my case, it was the glib dismissal of China's violent  military  invasion of the free and sovereign (perhaps self-declared, as was the case with, for instance, the USA - a declaration, incidentally, recognised by Mongolia [the failure to recognise this independence is as evil as the refusal of the USA and Spain to recognise the Independence of the Philippines after their successful Revolutionary War - which was similar to the Tibetans expelling China) nation of Tibet (which was followed by atrocities that some have described as genocide) that lost me completely, and I stopped reading.

I would still recommend buying and reading the book (particularly the pre-"analysis of data" sections), but subject to the caveats made above (i.e., wrong assumptions re what is required as proof, and selective analysis) kept in mind. 

Fortunately, this now brings me to Geoffrey Robertson's tome - which has been expanded, and is still mostly well-written (I have a few quibbles, but nothing strong enough to recall right now).

When I started writing this, I had just read Robertson's justification for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima (which doesn't apply to the second nuclear bombing). The argument, incidentally, was along the lines that USA was facing massive casualties (which would have been made apparent had Japan's war criminal emperor been put on trial); the argument that Russia's entry needs to be considered, but not from a perspective of hindsight, from the point of view of what was reasonably available at that time (in my view, the response of "of course they knew" just shows those people making it to be conspiracy nuts).

As stated, the second nuclear bombing was not justified, and led to the subsequent threat of annihilation that we have all been living with.

I'm treating Mr Robertson's book as a textbook this time, and am studying as I used to when I was at Uni (which is very slow, given my current limits on time and energy).

This book has lots of history, insight and accessibility, and context and background about some events that didn't make the media at the time.

I thoroughly recommend it.

Finally, "The Final Days" (pun not intended), about the events after the Watergate scandal was exposed, leading up to US President Nixon's resignation. I'm not quite half way through this book, and my overriding impression is of a group of arrogant, unethical, short-sighted people: the famous people, such as Nixon and Kissinger come off as particularly unpleasant personalities (I was a kid while all this was happening, saw the big headlines about Kissinger and peace in the newspapers [they were printed on paper then, kiddies] and wondered why my father was so dubious about Kissinger - I have subsequently found out, including through this book), whilst some of the others (particularly some of the lawyers) were trying to "do the right thing", but got lost in the imagine splendour of the tawdry - in this episode - US White House.

My overriding thought in response to what I have read is of the work allegedly identifying some people running companies as having higher than average tendencies towards psychopathy. Now, before I go further, I want to point out that:

(a) I know some exceptionally good people who are politicians and business leaders;
(b) most of the business leaders I know (and many of the politicians) are simply everyday people - neither exceptionally good or bad, but blessed/cursed with that mixture of characteristics that we all are;
(c) I have known a couple of business leaders (some time ago now) who I would put in the category of psychopath.

Having made those qualifications, I wonder how the key people in the events described would go if they were tested for psychopathy?

In fact, although it is unfair to the vast majority who aren't, I wonder if what we need is testing of all people in positions of power for psychopathic tendencies? Such testing would:

• require significant education of the broader population that, in the workplace, this is probably not just a bad-good binary (although it is quite binary in the psychological and criminal worlds: in fact, I personally would prefer to see people tested for right wing authoritarianism, which I consider would be a more useful indicator of potential workplace and political problems, but that reflects my political views), but a scale of tendencies, and that some people can work on those tendencies (e.g., by counselling, personal growth work, etc), although that tends to not work for full-blown psychopaths;
• probably initially be done by those brave, far-sighted company officers and politicians who would choose to volunteer for such testing, and to have the results made public, but I suspect public pressure would result in this becoming as expected as declaring pecuniary interests; 
• give shareholders some forewarning of potential problems;
• possibly start to restore trust in politicians that has been eroded by events such as those described in this book, and the pardon given to Nixon; 
• would best be done as part of the screening of candidates ...

Against that, it would act as a disincentive for some good people to take on such roles ...