Arthur Silber: The Descent Into Hell

THE DESCENT INTO HELL, AND “WHAT CANNOT BE BORNE AT ALL”

August 19th, 2005

From an entry in early January of this year:

The fact that Gonzales will be confirmed is altogether deplorable, and it is a measure of the vast distance we have traveled from those values that America once claimed were so important to her. There is a further aspect of these developments that is equally significant, and perhaps even more depressing: the nature of the arguments employed by certain defenders of the administration, and of Gonzales, to minimize and even to justify completely what he did, and what our government continues to do. As I have time over the next week, I will examine some of those arguments in more detail.

For the moment, I will leave you with the words of the judge played by Spencer Tracy in Stanley Kramer’s engrossing and thoroughly admirable film, “Judgment at Nuremberg.” In a bit of perfect casting, Tracy plays the judge who oversees what many considered one of the more minor trials of those who participated in the crimes of the Third Reich. But Tracy’s character himself does not see the trial as minor at all: it is the trial of four men who were judges who carried out the Nazis’ laws and edicts. Tracy sees that the actions of these men, more than the acts of most others, carry the most disturbing lesson for the victors—and the gravest warning. For they were precisely the men entrusted to defend civilization against the barbarians’ assault—and for this reason, the treason they committed was perhaps the worst of all.