New on SSRN: "Of Nazis, Americans, and Educating Against Catastrophe"

I've just posted to SSRN my new article "Of Nazis, Americans, and Educating Against Catastrophe," which just came out in the Buffalo Law Review.

It compares the lives of two architects of "racial" deportations that took place in the spring of 1942:  Benno Martin, the police chief (and lawyer) who oversaw the eastward deportation of thousands of Jews from Nuremberg, and Karl Bendetsen, the U.S. Army official (and lawyer) who oversaw the eastward deportation of thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

It deploys this comparison to support an effort to explore some of the all-too-human forces that tend to lead societies—as they led Germany and the United States in the years after the war—away from honestly reckoning with the choices people make to harness their professional energies to advance systems of repression.

It's somewhere between possible and likely that you scoff at the fairness of comparing any American involved in the deportation of Japanese Americans with any German involved in the deportation of Jews.  I try hard in the article to explain exactly how, and exactly why, this particular comparison is fair and useful.  If you read the piece, let me know if you're at all persuaded.

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Re: "It's somewhere between possible and likely that you scoff at the fairness of comparing any American involved in the deportation of Japanese Americans with any German involved in the deportation of Jews."

Perhaps I'm an exception, but it would strike me as quite the converse (i.e., the presumptive burden of proof should run in the other direction): one should explain why it's unfair or somehow wrong _not_ to make such a comparison. After all, at the very least, we're dealing with questions of professional role ethics, states and bureaucracies (legal and otherwise), nationalist ideologies, racism, and so forth, on the one hand, and questions of self-deception, states of denial, wishful thinking, self-awareness, moral development, etc., on the other hand. In other words, human agency and the various psychological and instititional conditions and structures through which it operates provide the fundamental analytic and synthetic framework as a backdrop to any particular comparative and historical investigation.

[Eric Muller]

Well, Patrick, in candor, I didn't think that *you* would scoff! :-)

[Orin Kerr]

Do you also compare Himmler and Earl Warren?

[Eric Muller]

Yes, Orin, but only on their views of the Commerce Clause.