November 27, 2007
Neutrality is a sham. Pacifism is a sham...
Norman Lebrech explains how there is a back-story to the latest album by soprano Anne-Sofie von Otter... [Thanks to Bookwormroom]
....Her tragic tale begins on a train, as so many war stories do. Anne-Sofie's father, Baron Göran von Otter, was a Swedish diplomat in wartime Germany, adjutant to the ambassador. On the night of 20-21 August 1942, travelling from Warsaw to Berlin, he became an involuntary witness to the Holocaust.
Standing in the corridor because he could not get a sleeper, the diplomat saw an SS officer glancing in his direction. When the train stopped at a station, both men got off for fresh air. On the pitch-dark platform, the SS man asked for a light for his cigarette. Von Otter produced a pack of matches with a Swedish crest. 'I must talk to you,' said Kurt Gerstein.
'With beads of sweat on his forehead and tears in his eyes' (as von Otter reported to his superiors), Gerstein explained that he was head of a Waffen-SS Technical Disinfection unit, responsible for supplying poisons and gas equipment. 'Yesterday,' he told von Otter, weeping uncontrollably, 'I saw something appalling.' 'Is it about the Jews?' said the diplomat.
Over the next six or eight hours in the train corridor, having examined Gerstein's papers and satisfied himself of his credentials, von Otter heard a detailed account of the mechanics of genocide, the gas chambers, the mass graves. Gerstein gave chapter and verse, the names of senior personnel, the look in a little girl's eyes as she was shoved naked to the slaughter. 'I saw more than ten thousand die today,' he wept.
He implored the Baron to inform the Swedish government, in the hope of stopping the slaughter. 'I had no doubt as to the sincerity of his humanitarian intentions,' said von Otter, who promptly wrote a report to Stockholm and heard nothing more. Not long after, he was recalled. When he looked for his own report in Foreign Ministry files, there was nothing to be found....
....Von Otter's career stalled, possibly because his 1942 report compromised Sweden's blind-eye neutrality. He rose no higher than consul-general in London, and died in 1988.....
Of course his report disappeared. There was not the slightest chance that Sweden was going to allow itself to be aware of what was going on next door. 'Cause they are better than the rest of us, and don't get involved in evil stuff like wars.
It's the same thing now, with "liberals" not wanting to know about the atrocities of Saddam's regime, or about the concentration camps of North Korea---not as long as there any chance that they will actually have to help do something about it. Especially if they might have to cooperate with President Bush. Better a million rag-heads should die, than that the latte-sipping crowd should have to support America or her elected leaders.
Posted by John Weidner at November 27, 2007 05:42 PMMeh. Cut the Swedes of the early '40s some slack, John, though I'm inclined to agree with you that oftentimes their grandchildren aren't worth the powder to blow them up.
Sweden in 1942 was encircled by the Nazis-- occupied Norway to the west and north, German-allied Finland to the east, and Germany and occupied continental Europe to the south. The only reason Sweden wasn't occupied by the Nazis was that Sweden was more valuable to Germany as a friendly (if only by reason of brow-beating) neutral than as yet another satrapy.
Given the help Sweden gave the Allies on the sly during the war, I think that Baron von Otter's missing notes have little to do with official Swedish policy and everything to do with the ideology of certain people in Sweden's Foreign Ministry.
Even our own State Department fell victim to "fashion" in those far-off days. It can be argued that one reason our efforts to pry the Japanese out of China in the '30s were unsuccessful was because the State Department was under the sway of a clique that believed that the Chinese could do no wrong, and that the Japanese were evil incarnate.
Yes, the Japanese were a pretty rough bunch. (My interest in Japanese animation and comics led me to study Japanese history, particularly from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 onwards, and the more I read about Japan in the early 20th Century, the more I realize just how screwed up their government and the Army were prior to 1945, and why.) Maybe a better-informed leadership at State might not have been able to do much about Japanese interference in China. But they had no chance at all with the blinkered leadership they did have.
Our grandparents' generation had their strengths and weaknesses, and labored under handicaps that we can only guess at, given how time obscures things.
Posted by: Hale Adams at November 27, 2007 10:01 PMI don't disagree with any of that. It's not really Sweden that bugs me, but the aura that lingers around neutrality in our time, the assumption that neutrals are better, and more "peaceful."
And in a wider sense the assumption that inaction is not a form of action, which can have bad consequences just as action can.
Posted by: John Weidner at November 28, 2007 06:10 AMAnd you are right on the Japs. History as taught obsesses over the evils of the Germans, in order to shine a benevolent light on ther glorious victory of Democrats allied with Stalin. And minimizes what a fascist monstrosity Imperial Japan was, in order to assume a moral equivalence--that our nuclear bombing was equivalent in evil to starting a war that killed tens-of-millions.
How many people know that Japan had its own nuclear bomb program? Which was dropped for purely practical reasons?
Posted by: John Weidner at November 28, 2007 06:19 AMWell I can see what you monitor your posts for spam. I don't think I've seen so much negativity on so many diverse topics in one place in a good while. I guess you must be one unhappy person in San Francisco. You really need to move. But I'm not sure where reactionary land is?
Posted by: Sherry at December 3, 2007 11:21 AMOh, I'm SO impressed by another Lefty who can sneer, but can't compete in the arena of ideas. You must be about number 1,600 since I started blogging in 2001.
And Leftists who CAN compete in the realm of principled debate? Well, I'm still waiting for the first one.
Posted by: John Weidner at December 3, 2007 11:53 AM
