The Lion in the Desert

In 1929, after nearly 20 years of facing resistance in Libya, Benito Mussolini, the Fascist ruler of Italy, appointed General Graziani as colonial governor to put down the military resistance of Libyan nationalists led by Omar Mukhtar. Graziani was ruthless, and fortunately he was arrested when Mussolini was toppled. His foremost atrocity was putting over a million Libyan civilians in a camp in a desert, with the intent to starve them in retaliation for the guerilla fighters objecting to the Italian occupation. The film, The Lion of the Desert (1980), faithfully depicts the historical events that took place in Libya from 1920 to 1931. The sheer arbitrariness other than from brute force in the occupation and the impotence of the League of Nations are salient themes in the film.

Both in peace negotiations, which Gaziani posed merely to given him more time with which to build up his army in Libya, and after Mukhtar’s capture, the direct refusal of Mukhtar to accept the legitimacy of the presence of the Italians on Libyan soil combined with the inability of the Italian brass to furnish a legitimate justification for the occupation leaves the viewers with the sense that overwhelming modern military power was the reason in search of justification. At one point, Graziani admits to Mukhtar that the fact that Italy is there is what justifies the presence. The Libyan’s guns and horses are no match for the Italian metal tanks and machine guns. The result is a foregone conclusion. Yet Mukhtar holds to his principles rather than accepts bribes to turn on his cause.

The want of any international constraint on the fascists was also clear. At one point, the Italian delegation to the peace talks remind Mukhtar that the Libya is not a nation and thus the fighters don’t even have a voice in the League of Nations. No one would care, anyway. Yet even if a world does care, such as in the case of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza in 2023-2024, not even the World Court’s verdict and the United Nations itself had any teeth. At one point, Israel’s ambassador to the UN shredded the UN charter document in front of the General Assembly. That it had created Israel apparently made no difference to the Israeli government. As a concurrent case in point, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine triggered resistance from the E.U. and U.S., but pushing back the aggressor was difficult. Russia’s bully-threat of using nuclear bombs just showed how dangerous it is for the world being unable to provide a check against aggressors.

General Graziani’s mass camp for Libyan civilians is eerily similar to Israel’s camps for Gazans nearly a century later. In both cases, the world was not able to defend even such numbers of innocent civilians. In the film, an Italian military man admits that the Geneva Convention is not being followed. The same could be said of Israel in Gaza. The 9000 Palestinian hostages being held in Israel and the reports of the torture of at least some of them did not dissuade the U.S. from passing $24 billion in aid to Israel. Clearly, having the U.S. as the “global policeman” was not an effective basis for a peaceful global order. Similarly, the League of Nations is depicted as impotent in the film.

From the vantage point of more than 40 years since the release of the film, viewers could be excused for feeling utter frustration at the lack of political development since 1929. The advent of nuclear bombs just makes the lack of international political development all the more striking. At some point, humanity will likely pay dearly for its refusal to cede any governmental sovereignty to an international force with teeth. To be sure, back in the eighteenth century, Kant claimed that world peace would only be possible, rather than probable, if a world federation exists. But his notion of such a federation we would call confederal, rather than a case of modern federalism, as he makes no mention of ceding some sovereignty to the federal level. The UN, rather than the E.U. and U.S., is akin to Kant’s federation. I contend that the shift from confederal to (modern) federal would be decisive in shifting the chances of world peace from possible to probable.

In short, a film can indeed be useful in terms of depicting the need for further development in political theory. With all the advances in technology and medicine during the twentieth century, the lack of any international political development is all the more perplexing, especially given the brazen military atrocities against even civilians in Ukraine and Gaza. A look back to 1929 just shows how static the international system has been.

Judgment at Nuremberg

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a serious film that enables the viewers to wrestle with the demands of justice for atrocities enabled by German jurists in NAZI Germany and the post-war emerging Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., for which the American military needed the support of the German people against the Soviet Union. The film accepts the need of such support as being vital in 1947, when the actual trial took place (the film has it as 1948). To the extent that acceptance of this assumption is deemed spurious, the viewers would likely view the tension as being between the need for justice, a virtue, and expediency, a vice. Accordingly, the pressure from an American general on the prosecutor to recommend light sentences so not to turn the German people against the Americans and thus from helping them in the Cold War can be viewed as being astute political calculation in the political realist sense of international relations, or else undue influence or even corruption of a judicial proceeding.

The prosecutor, Tad Lawson, having liberated death camps, rebuffs the General Matt Merrin’s pressure, and the four defendants get life sentences.  Whether Merrin’s claim that the U.S. needs the support of the German people in the Cold War is valid or not, pressuring a prosecutor is clearly depicted as unethical and so Lawson comes off as virtuous in resisting the exogenous pressure even though he is in the American military. It is certainly ironic that the victor army would push for lighter sentences for the vanquished; typically the question is whether a trial by the victors can be fair. Israel’s kidnapping and subsequent trial of Eichmann brought this question to the forefront. A trial in Germany would have also brought up this question. Britain would have been a good choice that would have avoided the conflict of interest.  In the film, Lawson successfully resists exploiting a conflict of interest by deciding not to curry favor with the general by urging the judges to go light in sentencing the defendants.

To be sure, chief judge Haywood has an opportunity to give a light sentence to one of the defendants. Ernst Janning, an expert jurist before the NAZI period and the Minister of Justice under Hitler, is the only one of the defendants who should have known better than knowingly convict innocent people, including Irene Hoffman for having sex with a much-older Jewish man, and sterilizing others, including Rudolph Petersen for being mentally impaired. Janning gives an impassioned speech to the court in which he admits his guilt, and that he should indeed have known better. Haywood holds Janning responsible for the latter’s use of the judicial system to send Jews and Poles to the death camps anyway; the crimes are simply too heinous for justice to be ignored. In the final scene, Haywood tells Janning that he should have known that it would come to such crimes the moment he convicted a person Janning knew was innocent. Using the gutted-out infrastructure of a judiciary to enable the state to engage in mass murder seems to particularly bother the chief judge. That is to say: a jurist who has written juridical books has no excuse in making a mockery of a judiciary.

After the last scene, the film indicates that none of the actual defendants of the American trial of jurists were still in prison as of 1961, when the film was made. Janning is loosely based on Louis Schlegelberger, who was State Secretary in the German Reich Ministry of Justice. He got a life sentence for conspiracy to perpetuate war crimes and crimes against humanity. He instituted procedures for the persecution of Jews and Poles, and thus played a vital role in the mass extermination. As much as such severe harm deserves harsh justice, he was released just a few years after having been convicted for “health reasons” even though he died in 1970. Similarly, Rudolf Oeschey had his life sentence commuted to 20 years, but he was released in just 8 years. Guenther Joel, chief prosecutor of the Ministry of Justice, got a 10 year sentence but was released in 1951. The same for Ernst Lautz, the Chief Public Prosecutor of the People’s Court. Herbert Klemm, State Secretary in the Ministry, had his life sentence commuted to 20 years but was released after just 10 years. Oswald Rothaug, a senior public prosecutor in the People’s Court and Chief Justice of the Special Court, had his life sentence commuted to 20 years but was released in just 9 years. Justice was clearly not served, and the film acknowledges this frailty of justice “in the real world.” The implications are that none of the fictional defendants would actually serve a life sentence, and the American military, which had tried and failed to get its way in the sentencing, ultimately gets its way. Any relief from Lawson resisting the pressure to urge light sentences such that justice wins the day is short-lived as the viewers read the film’s caveat at the end that in the end, all of the actual defendants of the jurist Nuremberg trial were still in prison as of 1961.

Interestingly, Maximilian Schell, who plays Hans Rolfe, the German defense attorney who applies NAZI thunder in severely questioning Irene Hoffman—such zeal being objected to by Lawson but allowed by the chief judge—beat out Spencer Tracy, who plays the chief judge who comes down on the side of justice (and is fair in ruling on the objections during the trial) and thus resists manipulations by “friendly” former NAZI civilians and the American military and a U.S. Senator, to get the Best Actor Oscar in 1961. Spencer Tracy is so mild-mannered throughout the film that his acting was typical rather than exceptional, whereas Richard Widmark, who plays Lawson, should have been in contention with Schell for the Oscar. Both actors are impassioned and frustrated, hence they both drew on strong emotions in playing their respective roles. Perhaps both should have gotten the award. The world, however, is not so just, as the movie makes clear in the end even if justice momentarily has the upper hand.