Book Review: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens

From a review:

Book Review: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: "“The Ghosts of 9-1-1,” originally published in a shorter form directly after 9-1-1,1 caused quite a stir amongst some American leftists. Intent on categorizing themselves and their loved ones as “innocents” in the wake of the attack, they flinched at Churchill’s description of the majority of those who died from the 9-1-1 attack as “little Eichmanns.” Whining “But Eichmann was a nazi!” – as though Churchill was unaware of that – those who use “nazi” to describe most everything they dislike are perhaps unable to comprehend how someone could use the same term with very specific intent.

Churchill uses “little Eichmanns” to describe that “cadre of faceless bureaucrats and technical experts who had willingly (and profitably) harnessed themselves to the task of making America’s genocidal world order hum with maximal efficiency...”  Eichmann, Churchill notes,

was a mere mid-level officer in the SS, by all accounts a good husband and devoted father, apparently quite mild-mannered, and never accused of having personally murdered anyone at all. His crime was to have sat at several steps remove from the holocaustal blood and gore, behind a desk, in the sterility of an office building, organizing the logistics – train and “cargo” schedules, mainly – without which the “industrial killing” aspect of the nazi Judeocide could not have occurred. His most striking characteristic, if it may be called that, was his sheer “unexceptionality” (that is, the extent to which he had to be seen as “everyman”: an ordinary,” “average” or “normal” member of his society. (“The Ghosts of 9-1-1,” note 131)

Although it is easy to see why many of us might wish to self-define ourselves out of this category, the fact remains that in the eyes of the world, today’s Good Americans are ultimately just as responsible for the state terror perpetrated in their name as were yesterday’s Good Germans. Then, with Americans cheering the loudest, the entire German people were convicted for “never attempting to meet the legal/moral obligation of holding their government to even the most rudimentary standards of human decency.” (7) Do American’s have less responsibility today then the Germans did then?"