The Splendid Blond Beast 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“It is individual human beings who make the day-to-day decisions that create genocide, reward mass murder, and ease the escape of the guilty. But social systems usually protect these individuals from responsibility for “authorized” acts, in part by providing rationalizations that present systemic brutality as a necessary evil.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Today, modern governments continue extermination of indigenous peoples throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, mainly as a means of stealing land and natural resources. Equally pernicious, though often less obvious, the present world order has institutionalized persecution and deprivation of hundreds of millions of children, particularly in the Third World, and in this way kills countless innocents each year.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“But the actual implementation of these treaties and the legal framework supporting human rights efforts remains notoriously weak.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“new international treaties intended to defend human rights have been signed since the end of World War II, including conventions against slavery, torture, race and sex discrimination, apartheid, and genocide.2 Each new agreement suggests that there is broad popular support for fundamental change in this aspect of state behavior and international relations.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“strategy for Germany entailed substantial economic costs for the United States, in addition to the tragic human cost of the Holocaust. One of these was the rapid build-up of an enormously expensive and dangerous military competition with the USSR that for almost half a century repeatedly threatened to lead to nuclear war.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“The law proved to be incapable of prosecuting genocide without drawing more “conventional” aspects of colonialism, national development, and international trade into the dock as crimes as well.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Meanwhile, the events of the Armenian Genocide and of the Holocaust also reveal a basic dynamic in the relationship of great powers to mass crimes. The problem is fundamentally structural; it is built into the system and not simply a product of a particularly evil or inept group of men.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“The USSR—and particularly Stalin, for it was he who almost single-handedly made key Soviet foreign policy decisions at that point—interpreted the contradictions in U.S. behavior as proof of the Americans’ bad faith.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“The U.S. abandonment of denazification and decartelization was not a product of the cold war—it was a cause of it, and a considerably more important cause than was recognized in the West at the time.”
― 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

“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

“As a practical matter though, all of the case filings were packed away in cardboard boxes to await a decision from the United Nations as to what was to be done with the UNWCC records.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Even those companies that have made some form of welcome restitution—Daimler Benz being the most recent case—go to considerable lengths to deny any culpability whatsoever for the Holocaust, portraying their payments to their former slaves as a form of charity.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“The German economic elite and corporations that had been active under Hitler have continued, for the most part, though without the Nazi rhetoric and police state powers of the Nazi period.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Amazingly, the legal precedent left by this series of trials seems to be that a nineteen-year-old draftee accused of war crimes cannot successfully plead that he was acting under orders, but the owners and directors of multi-billion-dollar companies can.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“It became customary to refer to the urgent necessity for ‘reversing the former policy of destroying German industries,’” Martin wrote, and of reversing a decartelization policy that in fact had not yet been implemented.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“Even when an account was blocked as required by law, German banks simply ignored the order.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“First, it was by now clear that thousands of suspects shared direct responsibility for some atrocities. Contemporary estimates concluded that there were about 250,000 to 300,000 members of the SS (this includes the militarized Waffen-SS units), 70,000 full-time Nazi party executives, 15,000 in the party intelligence service Sicherheitsdienst (SD), 15,000 in the Gestapo, and as many as 1.5 to 2 million in various brownshirt paramilitary and militia units. Even considering that these numbers might be inflated and the categories overlap with one another, it seemed in late 1945 as though “not less than 2 million persons in all of Germany (and probably not less than 500,000 persons in the U.S. Zone) will be war criminals under the Control Council Law.”10”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

“German courts convicted Wolff of complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews at Treblinka and sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. He served seven years before he was once again released.)”
― 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

“British government prosecutors delivered the coup de grace to the efforts to bring Karl Wolff to justice. They formally requested that the U.S. turn over the SS general and several senior Wehrmacht generals for a full British war crimes trial.”
― Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century