The real little Eichmanns: Alan Dershowitz
The worst thing about Adolf Eichmann was that he wasn’t a monster, but a fairly regular guy doing his job, a job that unfortunately revolved around killing Jews and other undesirables. And quite a number of the people involved in organising the Holocaust were of the same kind: fantatics surely, but not sadists. It seems that if you give people the opportunity and approval to organise horrible crimes, the people who get involved are as likely to be normal people as sadists –and it seems to be easy to get normal people involved.
We are seeing the same phenomenon in action right now, as the buildup of the Bush Gulag proceeds apace: seemingly normal people helping organise and rationalise not just illegal imprisonments of innocent people but anything up to and including torture and rape, if not murder. I think it’s time to expose some of those “little Eichmanns”.
Our first contestant: Alan Dershowitz. In 2002 he wrote and published a book called
Shouting Fire, which helped make the case for torture as a tool in the war on terror and recently he said this (link to page with audio file):
When you torture somebody to death ? everybody would acknowledge that?s torture. But placing a sterilized needle under somebody?s fingernails for fifteen minutes, causing excruciating pain but no permanent physical damage?is that torture?
In other words, Alan Dershowitz is one of those people who thinks we need to sacrifise our rights in order to safeguard them. With his book, his media appearances, op-ed columns and such he has helped create a climate in which torture has almost become acceptable –though fortunately most people still recoil from it when confronted with the realities of it, rather than the theory.
For this work, Alan Dershowitz is the first “little Eichmann”.