Christopher Simpson > Quotes

“Thus, the law and the crime became caught in a cycle in which the law facilitated the crime and the crime, in turn, helped institutionalize a form of law with which it could coexist. The losers in this vicious circle were the ordinary people, children, and rebels who have always borne the brunt of tyranny.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Crimes against humanity remain considerably harder to prosecute than war crimes, narrowly defined, in part because criminal nation-states are unlikely to prosecute themselves, and because international diplomatic practice—particularly by the United States—has blocked the creation of an international criminal court that would have jurisdiction to try perpetrators of these atrocities.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“By the time the genocide has ended, it is usually clear that the ordinary, integrative institutions of society remained centers of power during the killing and shared responsibility for it.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“The path of scientific discovery in U.S. communication research was not decided in advance by the government or anyone else, of course. Although government funding did not determine what could be said by social scientists, it did play a major role in determining who would do the "authoritative" talking about communication and an indirect role in determining who would enjoy access to the academic media necessary to be heard by others in the field.”
― Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960

“For Pell, a sweeping program of war crimes prosecutions of Germany’s economic elite was not simply a matter of justice, it was necessary to ensure the security of postwar Europe.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Discussion of psychological warfare remains controversial because reexamination of its record leads in short order to a heretical conclusion: The role of the United States in world affairs during our lifetimes has often been rapacious, destructive, tolerant of genocide, and willing to sacrifice countless people in the pursuit of a chimera of security that has grown ever more remote. Rethinking psychological warfare's role in communication studies, in turn, requires reconsideration of where contemporary Western ideology comes from, whose interests it serves, and the role that social scientists play in its propagation. Such discussions have always upset those who are content with the present order of things. For the rest of us, though, they permit a glimmer of hope.”
― Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960

“Hitler himself repeatedly raised the international community’s failure to do justice in the wake of the Armenian Genocide to explain and justify his own racial theories,”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Wilson preferred to sidestep the issue of war crimes altogether and leave it unresolved in any treaty ending the war.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Thus, Ford was willing enough to participate in Nazi anti-Semitism if it turned a profit.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Who then, or what, is the splendid blond beast? It is the destruction inherent in any system of order, the institutionalized brutality whose existence is denied by cheerleaders of the status quo at the very moment they feed its appetite for blood. The present world order supplies stability and rationality of a sort for human society, while its day-to-day operations chew up the weak, the scapegoats, and almost anyone else in its way.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Mental patients and disabled people appear to have been the first ones the Nazis actually gassed; they killed at least 50,000 in an experimental euthanasia program code-named Aktion T4 that began in the fall of 1939.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“The secrecy that surrounds
any CIA operation makes complete documentation impossible, but the
fragmentary information that is now available permits identification of
several important examples.”
― Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960

“IG Farben appears to have been the first company to fully integrate concentration camp labor into modern industrial production, and it eventually became known in Germany as a model enterprise for this new technique. Farben executives even provided advice and training on the large-scale use of forced labor for executives from Volkswagen, Messerschmitt, Heinkel, and other major companies.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Beginning in late 1914 and accelerating over the next three years, the Turkish government rounded up Armenian men for forced labor, worked many to death building a trans-Turkish railway for German business interests, then shot the survivors.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“supporters failed to mobilize enough international support to halt the mass killings and deportations, although they did succeed in placing the crime of genocide clearly on the public agenda for the first time in modern history.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Kennan argued that even if a purge of Nazis could theoretically be successful, “we would not find any other class of people competent to assume the burdens [of leading Germany]. Whether we like it or not, nine-tenths of what is strong, able and respected in Germany has been poured into those very categories which we have in mind” for removal from power, namely those persons who had been “more than nominal members of the Nazi party.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Once Wolff, Dollmann, and Wenner were safely beyond the reach of Italian law, they renewed their appeals for a complete amnesty from war crimes prosecutions.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Pell offered his solution through the newspapers. The definition of international crimes should be rearticulated, he contended, to include “all offenses against persons because of race, religion or political beliefs, irrespective of the victim’s nationality or the territory on which the crimes were committed.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Kerno determined that the War Crimes Commission records—including some 25,000 case files on alleged Class A war criminals, most of whom had not yet been tried—were to be retired to a UN warehouse and to remain closed in all but the most extraordinary circumstances.26 There the records remained for more than forty years, until the worldwide controversy surrounding Kurt Waldheim finally pried them open.27”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“From mid-1942 on, the SS became a major provider of slave labor to industry. German corporate leaders assiduously courted the SS to obtain labor, contracts, and influence”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“At least six of the most important U.S. centers of postwar communication studies grew up as de facto adjuncts of government psychological warfare programs.”
― Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960

“Shortly after the German collapse, for example, Tito’s government in Yugoslavia wished to try as a war criminal Miklós Horthy, who had been royal regent of Hungary and supreme commander of Hungary’s armed forces during its years of alliance with Nazi Germany. Horthy also shared personal responsibility for establishing Hungary’s anti-Semitic race laws and other persecutory measures.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“But so far as I can ascertain [the] record now is, despite our commitments and moral obligations: (1) we have failed to take effective action [to repatriate accused Yugoslav war criminals], (2) we have prevented [the] British from taking effective action, (3) we have not insisted that Italy take effective action, (4) we are apparently conniving with the Vatican and Argentina to get guilty people to haven in the latter country. I sincerely hope I am mistaken, particularly regarding [this] latter point. How can we defend this record?…”31”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“In late 1949, the British brought Karl Wolff before a denazification board (not an Allied court) in Hamburg—a move that might be fairly compared to charging the SS leader with traffic violations.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“These problems were particularly knotty in situations where the Nazis had “legalized” their acts of persecution by announcing laws and decrees that ordered deportations, compulsory labor, or seizure of property.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“The “legalization” established at Wannsee (and in related laws and decrees) achieved a relatively smooth linkage between the surface world of wartime life and the officially denied world of mass extermination.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“In this case, as in others, the split within the U.S. government was not over the facts of Schacht’s career, which were mainly a matter of public record. It was instead a political dispute, rooted in differing appraisals of the extent of the German business elite’s culpability for the actions of Hitler’s state and their responsibility for the actions of the institutions they led. Schacht’s case became the focal point for the ongoing debate over the role of private enterprises in public society—a dispute that in one way or another has been at center stage in American politics for most of this century.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Lansing strongly objected to any introduction of the concept of “laws of humanity” and to trials of foreign leaders before any foreign or international court. International law, he contended, regulated relations among nations; it had no jurisdiction over what a state chooses to do to its own people.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Kerno became an informant and intelligence contact for the U.S. State Department and FBI at the time of his ruling blocking the UNWCC records, according to U.S. files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.30 Many of Kerno’s contemporaries who knew his position and background believe he spied for the CIA as well. Kerno eventually defected to the United States in 1952”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“There were 5 million Jews to murder in the Nazi-occupied USSR, according to his list, and 2.3 million more in the former territories of Poland. Long-range plans called for the SS to eliminate all 4,000 Jews in Ireland once the German troops arrived.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century