Righteous Indignation

If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.

—Victor Klemperer^* in his book I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years

Cory Robin uses this quote to explain his dissatisfaction with American Political Science Association, which has decided to have John Yoo, a man who supported the crushing of the testicles of a child of a terror suspect to extract information.

Dr. Robins is unamused by this, and explains the parallels:

The reason Klemperer reserved such special contempt for the professors and intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s was that professors and intellectuals played a special role in bringing on the horrors of the Nazi regime, as Claudia Koonz and other historians have documented. Not only did those professors and intellectuals provide some of the leading arguments for the rise of that regime, but they also served in that regime: as doctors, population experts, engineers, propagandists. And lawyers.

………

I fear that with this invitation to Yoo to address our profession, as if he were simply the author of controversial and heterodox opinions rather than the architect of a regime of torture and barbarity, the American Political Science Association has written itself a chapter in those future histories.

The APSA should be ashamed of themselves.

Attendees of the conference should bring extra pairs of shoes to throw at John Yoo.

^*Yes he was a cousin of actor Werner "Colonel Klink" Klemperer.