Wednesday, May 15, 2013

The Benes Decrees -- Pro and Con



Back in 2005, on a comments thread of Jihad Watch, I facilitated an off-topic discursion on the Benes Decrees between Hugh Ftizgerald (who cited them as a historical example of a salutary and beneficent mass expulsion of a population from a country) and his detractors, a couple of intelligent Leftists I had known from a now defunct philosophy forum, The Examined Life.

This dusty old issue, what the Czech government felt it had to do to its German population beginning in 1945, in the immediate aftermath of the horrific Nazi invasion and occupation, has resonance and relevance in our time, when we would contemplate the eviction of our unwanted tenants, Muslims, for the hostile, deadly and seditious tenets of their Islam.

What follows are extended quotes from that debate.  First from the Leftist who called himself "Anonymous" who had a penchant for referring to Hugh as "Shughie"; followed by Hugh Fitzgerald's rebuttal.  (For more matter related to this, see the full comments thread at this URL (which for some reason does not work for me): http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/008168.php).

Shughie might well offer the Benes Decrees as an example of what a liberal, tolerant state felt compelled to do after World War II; but he’s still talking through his arse. The Decrees were neither liberal nor tolerant; they were statist and retributive. The bulk of them (90% to be precise) pertain to the nationalisation of heavy industry and the banks, the regulation of the press, and the confiscation of property to meet the costs of reconstruction; hardly the acts of a liberal regime. The most illiberal of them all, however, was the presidential decree of 1st February 1945, entitled ‘The Great Retribution Decree’, reissued in June 1945 when Benes returned to Prague, by which ‘collective guilt’ was ascribed to entire ethnic groups for the crimes of the Nazis, and which provided for summary ‘justice’ to be dispensed to the Sudeten Germans and Slovak Magyars without due process by ‘extraordinary people’s courts’. I guess this is what you guys find so attractive in the Benes Decrees: not because of the socialist revolution they set in train, but because they set a precedent for your ascription of ‘collective guilt’ to Muslims generally for the atrocities carried out by some of their number, on the basis of which ‘collective guilt’ your crackpot scheme to expel all Muslims from the ‘West’ would be an instance of justified expulsion rather than unjustified expulsion. But we have for weeks now been asking for a justification of your ascription of ‘collective guilt’ to Muslims generally; and the best been able to come up with is ‘Well, the Czechoslovaks ascribed it to the ethnic Germans and Hungarians in 1945.’ Well, whoopee-do!

Shughie’s talking through his arse too when he says that the Benes Decree was designed to end, once and for all, a perceived security threat to the nation of Czechoslovakia. Crap! The particular decree to which you are referring here was, even in its title, explicitly designed to exact retribution of the ethnic Germans for the evils perpetrated by the Nazis. It also represents a continuation of a policy of ethnic cleansing which the Czechoslovaks had been pursuing since the birth of Czechoslovakia in 1918. In 1918, the government of the newly founded Czechoslovak Republic agreed to guarantee the rights of national minorities under the protection and supervision of the Geneva-based Council of the League of Nations. This obligation, however, was never honoured during the twenty-year existence of the first Czechoslovak Republic. The Prague government revoked acquired rights of domicile, treating millions of people of German and Hungarian origin as aliens lands they had first settled in the 12th century. They were victims of harassment and deprivation. The Czechoslovak government confiscated land from their German and Hungarian owners, without compensation, for distribution among Czech and Slovak colonists. In addition, a punitive tax was enacted, called the ‘capital levy’, to collect up to 30% of the value of German and Hungarian property. A model of liberalism and tolerance indeed!

The Czechs represented only 43% of the mosaic state and attracted political problems for themselves in their own republic through their intolerance. Even their ruling Slovak partners were dissatisfied with Czech domination in the partnership. The Sudeten Germans, with a population of 3.5 million and representing the largest minority group in Czechoslovakia, establish contact with the autonomous Slovaks as well as with the Hungarian and Polish minorities, and in 1935 these minorities formed an autonomist bloc against the Czechs. This so-called ‘German Party’ was the largest political party in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s.

The radicalisation of the internal political situation in Czechoslovakia worried the founders of the country – the British and French governments – and led to the emergence of the recommendation to appoint a mediator to arrive at a negotiated settlement of the minorities problem. This led to the convocation of the four-power Munich Conference (consisting of Britain, France, Germany and Italy) at the request of the Czechoslovak government, which culminated in the Munich Agreement of September 29, 1938, and the cession of the Sudeten German districts to Germany. These historical events forced Benes from office. Benes fled to Britain via Rumania several days later, with millions of dollars worth of US currency and gold in his possession. And the rest, as they say, is history.

‘Well, no one in all of Europe thought the Benes Decree was wrong. No one then, and no one now.

No one save the Allied Powers, who vetoed the expulsion of ethnic Hungarians from Slovakia following the brutality and indiscriminate nature of the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from their homelands, the Commissioners with whom Czechoslovakia negotiated its accession to the EU, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, and Václav Klaus. Even the Papacy protested at the time, the ethnic Germans being Catholic and the Czechs Protestant. Hardly anyone, really.

By the way: here is Article III of the German-Czech Declaration on Mutual Relations and their Future Development which was signed by Helmut Kohl and Vaclav Klaus in January 1997.

Quote:

III
The Czech side regrets that, by the forcible expulsion and forced resettlement of Sudeten Germans from the former Czechoslovakia after the war as well as by the expropriation and deprivation of citizenship, much suffering and injustice was inflicted upon innocent people, also in view of the fact that guilt was attributed collectively. It particularly regrets the excesses which were contrary to elementary humanitarian principles as well as legal norms existing at that time, and it furthermore regrets that Law No. 115 of 8 May 1946 made it possible to regard these excesses as not being illegal and that in consequence these acts were not punished.

So, Shuggie is also talking through his arse when he says that the Czechs don’t have a problem with the Benes Decrees.

I don’t have a problem with justified expulsions. We in Britain have expelled quite a few nasty buggers recently; and their expulsions have been entirely justified, on the grounds that they are foreign nationals who breached the conditions of their leave to remain in this country by engaging in criminal activity. What I do have a problem with is wholesale ethnic cleansing of the sort which you propose on the grounds of ‘collective responsibility’, and of the sort which Czechoslovakia carried out in retribution for the evils it suffered. I’m still waiting for some justification of the claim that Muslims generally are to be held collectively responsible for the acts of Islamic terrorists, just as the Bohemian, Carpathian, and Moravian Volksdeutsche are still waiting for some justification of the claim that they are collectively responsible – purely in virtue of their ethnicity – for the acts of their Reichsdeutsche cousins.

Finally: I can’t let this pass without a quiet chuckle at the ignorance of the man.

Quote:

After German aggression in two world wars, the Czechs were fed up. They simply were not going to endure the security problem of a powerful German population anymore -- so they expelled them, to lands already peopled by those who spoke the same language, shared the same religious beliefs and customs and fairy-tales and main sense of identity and all the rest.

Point 1: the Czechs were not on the receiving end of German aggression in the First World War; as anyone with the least knowledge of Central European history could tell Sherlock, the Czechs were a minority within the Austro-Hungarian Empire until Czechoslovakia was born – just as Iraq was born out of the bloated, corrupt, moribund, fabulously putrid Shariah Turkey after World War I – in 1918, and were as such part of the Reichsdeutsche aggression against the Italians.

Point 2: the Czechs expelled them from lands already peopled by those who spoke the same language, shared the same religious beliefs and customs and fairy-tales and main sense of identity and all the rest; the lands from which the Bohemian, Carpathian, and Moravian Volksdeutsche were expelled were their ethnic homelands, and had been since the 12th century.

Hugh Fitzgerald's rebuttal:

"No one save the Allied Powers, who vetoed the expulsion of ethnic Hungarians from Slovakia following the brutality and indiscriminate nature of the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from their homelands, the Commissioners with whom Czechoslovakia negotiated its accession to the EU, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, and Václav Klaus. Even the Papacy protested at the time, the ethnic Germans being Catholic and the Czechs Protestant. Hardly anyone, really."
 
The statements above are sly, because each purports to be about the Benes Decree in toto, or misquotes someone (Kundera did NOT denounce the Benes Decree -- he is quoted previously as having said he had mixed, complicated thoughts --clearly, he may have thought it was executed too broadly, or with too great ruthlessness. That is not the same thing as denouncing the Benes Decree -- he was given a clear chance to do so, and did not.

Vaclav Havel, similarly, did not denounce the Benes Decree but apologized, late in his life, for the "sins and mistakes" assocaited with it. That again is not the same thing. No doubt an official of the British government might wish to apologize in German Jews interned along with others from Germany during World War II -- apologize for the "mistakes" of how the policy was applied, but not for the policy of interning enemy aliens. There is a distinction. Given that any Czech No one save the Allied Powers, who vetoed the expulsion of ethnic Hungarians from Slovakia following the brutality and indiscriminate nature of the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from their homelands, the Commissioners with whom Czechoslovakia negotiated its accession to the EU, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, and Václav Klaus. Even the Papacy protested at the time, the ethnic Germans being Catholic and the Czechs Protestant. Hardly anyone, really.

For 59 years every single Czech leader, intellectual or political, has been free to denounce -- with full-throated denunciation -- the Benes Decree by name. The fact that no one has, the fact that all these people -- Svoboda, Siefert, Dubcek, Kohut and tens of thousands of others, have not,and that the best that can be brought up are two statements by Havel about "sins" and "mistakes" that it is wrong to take as constituting such full-throated denunciation of the whole idea of expelling the Sudeten Germans, or that Kundera's remark about his "complicated" and "mixed" feelings constitute such denunciation, is absurd.

Of course there were things wrong with how the Benes Decree was applied, and the Czechs, maddened with a desire for revenge as well as to never again have to even worry about such a problem, were not in a Marquess-of-Queensberry frame of mind. And those Hungarians who were covered were not exactly in the same category; Hungary was not a threat, and had not been a threat, in the same way as Germany had.

As far as the Papacy complaining at that time, in those days the Papacy simply reacted to the fact that the Germans were Cathollic, the Czechs Protestant. Within the Vatican the sympathy for the Slovak bishop who had been a war criminal was also strong, and the Rat Line which helped such Nazis as Klaus Barbie get to South America was established with help from the same quarters. When I wrote that "no one" objected I meant, of course, not literally "no one" (oh, Germans protested, and some still do) protested -- there is nothing that has happened in the history of the world that "no one" has not opposed. I meant that none of those to whom the Czechs looked to for moral authority -- and an ambiguous quote from Kundera, and two from Havel made to Austrians about "sins" and "mistakes" when he might so easily, had he wanted, simply to say that the Benes Decree was immoral, was wrong -- and he did not -- does not convince.

What about the fact that some Germans wished to bring this up and force a Czech apology before the Czech Republic could join the E.U.? Well, so what? I am perfectly aware that there are revanshist circles in Germany; there are Germans who feel that the British were beastly to them by daring to bomb German cities as London and Coventry were bombed. So what? How does that vitiate the point that there are examples (and I could have given more) of expulsions after World War II of ethnic Germans that were, in the circumstances, humanly and even geopolitically understandable. And that, therefore, those who suggest that only bestial regimes -- Saudi Arabia with Yemenis, Kuwait with "Palestinian" Arabs, Libya with Egyptians, and so on -- are the ones to engage in mass expulsions. It isn't true. And the same goes for the Polish expulsion of Germans from the lands that Poland possessed, or repossessed, after World War II.

What is noticeable are the names that are missing. Where is Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Schweitzer, Rene Cassin? Where is De Gaulle or any of the French leaders? Did Camus or Sartre protest? What about De Gasperi? What about Vittorino? Cesare Pavese? Montale? Even Calvino, who had been a partisan? Not a single voice from the left, from Botteghe Oscure, thought to voice a protest? Just the Vatican, which in 1946 was hardly a paragon of virtue?

And of course I repeat my other example of justified expulsions. Who in Poland, and I named Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, but could have added to the writers Bronsislaw Geremek, Adam Michnik, and others -- who has seen fit to suggest that Poland was wrong to expel those ethnic Germans?

It is idiotic to compare what after World War II the Czechs and the Poles did with what Hitler, Stalin, and of course quite a few of the Muslim and Arab countries, routinely do, when they are not busy tormenting or even massacring their locals. I am thinking in particular of the mass expulsionj of 400,000 completely inoffensive Kashmiri Pandits by the Muslims, and the many millions of Hindus driven out of Bangladesh into India, but other examples also come to mind.


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