Of all the horrors that emerged from the Nuremberg war trials it was a simple lampshade that was amongst the most confronting and memorable. The systematic murder of 6 million Jews was simply too large an atrocity to truly comprehend, coming as it did after the mind-numbing numbers of war dead in Russia, Europe and amongst the allies.

The lampshade was a simpler and more inhuman talisman of the pure evil that drove the Holocaust. The lampshade belonged to the wife of the Buchenwald camp commandant. What made it unique was that the shade was made of tanned human skin, scavenged — that is the only appropriate word — from unknown victims of the Buchenwald concentration camp. (The commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp had possessed lampshades made of human skin, and had specifically tattooed prisoners killed in order to use their skin for this purpose.)

For 50 years or more it was a symbol of both pure evil and the depravity that made the Holocaust possible. It has faded from memory, but in the last week this symbol has been supplanted by a new talisman of evil presented as a gift by someone whose very family history should have made it an anathema.

State gifts are not a surprise. They are carefully choreographed well in advance. The prior approval of this gift is a calculated endorsement of evil.

The gold-plated pager, presumably with explosives removed, is perhaps the most obscene of gifts ever given to the president of the United States. It captures the depravity unleashed on Lebanon and Gaza. It is an artefact of an indiscriminate attack that is in itself a war crime.

To add further insult to this injury, the gold pager appears to be mounted on a plinth of wood taken from a cedar tree which is the national symbol of Lebanon.

Just as with the meeting between President Donald Trump and invited war criminal * Benjamin Netanyahu, it represents the contempt these two men hold for the post-World War II structure of global rules and institutions. The Nuremberg trials demand to ensure “never again” has been ignored and undermined with the willingly silent complicity of nations which should know better and which signed up to the Nuremberg commitment.

Netanyahu’s smirk of joy at the meeting where Trump announced his endorsement of the race-based expulsion of people from Gaza matches Hitler’s smile as he did his impromptu dance outside the railway carriage in Forest of Compiegne where armistice had been signed to end World War I. Hitler’s jig symbolized the destruction of a global order established with the League of Nations, although his dance provided no lasting talisman of the depravity to come. That talisman had to wait for a lady and her lamp.

The historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, observing the trial of one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, in 1963, coined the phrase “the banality of evil”. Stripped of his uniform and position of power, Eichmann was an ordinary man wearing thick black-framed glasses, hunched and humble, providing no clue to the atrocities he had overseen and directed. He was not the fierce-faced, monocle-wearing monster of demonic Nazi caricatures. It was this banality, this ordinariness, that Arendt found most disconcerting.

She would, perhaps, make the same observation of today’s friendly polish grandfather who as a Zionist immigrant to Israel, adopted a Hebrew name – Netanyahu.

The essential evil of Netanyahu and his willing accomplices in Biden and Trump is the normalization of evil, of carefully directed slaughter and deliberate unlimited destruction — a literal primitive barbaric biblical ploughing of the land with salt — as a valid and acceptable policy. This normalization is captured in the gifting of this pager. It is a golden talisman of the neo-fascism engulfing what was once called the civilized world.

We can do nothing directly about the behavior of Trump or Netanyahu, but we should expect genuine support for the concept of the rules-based order which Western leaders incessantly drone on about and use as a stick to scold the non-white nations in our region. Lacking the courage of Ireland or South Africa, our leaders cringe when it comes to standing up to those who rejoice in the war crimes they have enabled.

Recent legislation makes it even more difficult to hold our political leaders to account or give them the spine to stand up for the structures of the rules-based global order.

It is this appeasement of those who are the epitome of evil that poses the greatest threat to peace, prosperity and stability. The gifting and acceptance of this gold pager provides absolution for the policy based on war crimes that we thought were consigned to “never again”.

* International Criminal Court Pre-Trial Chamber I issued warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes on Nov 21, 2024. Netanyahu has denied the charges.

Daryl Guppy is an international financial technical analysis expert. He has provided weekly Shanghai Index analysis for Chinese mainland media for more than a decade. Guppy appears regularly on CNBC Asia and is known as "The Chart Man". He is a former national board member of the Australia China Business Council. The views expressed here are his own.

This is a republication from PEARLS & IRRITATIONS website at:  

https://johnmenadue.com/paging-the-lady-and-the-lamp/

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.