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 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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