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On the evening of Saturday, December 1, when three bombs went off in Jerusalem, causing mass carnage, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News all pounced on the story, showing footage from Israeli TV accompanied by interviews with Mideast experts. ABC and CBS stayed with their college football games, and NBC remained with the NBA. The contrast provided further evidence of how the center of gravity in television news is shifting from broadcast to cable. At any time of day or night, Americans have three newscasts they can tune into. That's the good news. The bad is that all three remain of pretty poor quality. Since September 11, Fox has solidified its reputation as the most blatantly biased source of news on TV. As Jim Rutenberg recently observed in the New York Times, the network has become "a sort of headquarters for viewers who want their news served up with extra patriotic fervor" inflected by "unabashed vehement support of a war effort, carried in tough-guy declarations often expressing thirst for revenge."

Yet CNN and MSNBC are not much better. If you watch the former for even a short while, for instance, you're likely to see retired general Don Shepperd standing before a map of the Middle East discussing US military capabilities. Shepperd makes no effort to divorce his role as a news commentator from his position as a former Air Force officer. Worse, CNN seems increasingly to rely on him to comment on political matters that extend well beyond his expertise. On a recent segment, for instance, reporter Catherine Callaway fed the general a series of leading questions about which countries the United States should go after next in its war on terrorism. "Do you think Somalia could be a likely target?" she asked. Well, yes, Shepperd said. "If you're serious about terrorism, you have to go against Somalia at some time."

The problem extends beyond flag-waving, though. For all its aspirations to be a global news network, CNN remains relentlessly parochial. Its anchors love to engage in happy talk, making the network at times seem like a local TV station. Interviewing Danny Glover about a benefit he was planning for Afghanistan, the endlessly effervescent Paula Zahn fawned all over him. Stories about September 11, meanwhile, tend toward the mawkish. "When we went by ground zero, what went through your mind?" a reporter asked tourists aboard a Circle Line trip around Manhattan.

Even more troubling, CNN, while devoting far more time to international affairs since September 11, has narrowed its definition of the world. In the initial weeks after the attacks, the network made at least a token effort to explore the nature of Islam and the politics of the Middle East. Over time, though, it has essentially conflated foreign news with the war on terror and the fight in Afghanistan. While obsessively covering the hunt for Osama bin Laden, it has spent next to no time examining Third World poverty, the exploding AIDS epidemic, the economic meltdown in Argentina or the changes sweeping Putin's Russia.

MSNBC has seemed similarly fixated. In recent days, for instance, as the military campaign in Afghanistan has progressed, it has become fascinated with the caves of Afghanistan, flashing sophisticated diagrams of underground bunkers as military experts describe how to penetrate them. Its daily show "A Region in Conflict," meanwhile, seems largely a star vehicle for correspondent Ashleigh Banfield. With her stylish haircut, designer glasses and plucky reporting style, Banfield has become TV's new "It" girl, but her dispatches from the field often seem cartoonish. In one early report from Peshawar, Pakistan, she charged into a marketplace in the middle of the night to interview displaced Afghans about their political preferences. "OK, which do you support, king, Taliban or Northern Alliance?" she asked over and over, moving restlessly from one startled subject to another, conveying little to viewers beyond the fact that she, Ashleigh Banfield, was willing to go out among the great unwashed at 2 in the morning.

In the past two weeks, however, MSNBC has given some sign that it is willing to break the mold of cable news. As retired general Anthony Zinni arrived in the Middle East on his peaceseeking mission--an event largely ignored by CNN--MSNBC correspondent Gregg Jarrett began a week of on-the-ground reports from Israel and Palestine. Peering into places TV cameras rarely venture, Jarrett took us to a neighborhood in southern Jerusalem that is so often targeted by nearby Palestinians that each apartment has at least one room with bulletproof glass, where family members can gather when the shooting starts. He also filed from a Jewish settlement in the West Bank--the first time I recall seeing such a report on American TV. Jarrett spoke with the parents of Yaakov Mandel, the 13-year-old boy who last spring was beaten to death while hiking in the nearby hills. Despite the guilt they said they felt over his death, the couple expressed their determination to remain.

On the other side, Jarrett reported from a refugee camp in Ramallah. "A lot of Americans wonder why Palestinians are so angry," he said. "They feel this is their land, and that it's occupied." In many areas, he went on, there are no running water, no toilets, no jobs. At an Israeli-manned checkpoint, Jarrett highlighted the humiliations Palestinians must endure, and in Bethlehem he showed the physical scars left from ten days of occupation by Israeli troops. One family showed him the remains of their house after the Israelis got done with it; they were living in a tent.

Overall, Jarrett did an extraordinary job of capturing the grievances on both sides and of showing the need for a peace settlement to end the escalating bloodshed in the region. He also showed what cable news is capable of, if only it has the imagination, and the nerve.

The incomprehensibility of the Holocaust is no less true for being a truism. And it extends beyond the obvious historiographical no man's land: How to explain genocidal anti-Semitism in Germany? For everywhere we turn in Essays on Hitler's Europe we find imponderables. Why did Bulgaria refuse to deport
Jews from within its own borders, yet give up practically all the Jews who lived in the territories it occupied? Why did Romania, one of only two Nazi satellites that carried out mass exterminations on its own initiative, stop persecuting Jews well before it turned against Germany? Why did Pope Pius XII hide Italian Jews after having done nothing to warn them about their imminent fate? How can we compare the behavior of French and Polish "bystanders," when the punishment for assisting Jews in France varied, and Poles caught doing so were executed, along with their families? In the countries allied with Germany--Romania, Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Italy--proportionately, more Jews survived the Second World War than in anti-Nazi Poland and the democratic Netherlands: Why?

These are just some of the questions István Deák raises in his new book. Hitler's Europe consists of review essays that Deák wrote over the past eighteen years, mostly for The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. In its first three parts it addresses, among other topics, Hitler's popularity among everyday Germans, the debates over Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, Victor Klemperer's diaries, German Jews who collaborated with the Nazis and the ambiguities of Italian Fascism. Much of this is familiar ground. By uncovering complexities that other scholars have passed over, Deák does us the great service of making that ground less familiar. For example, when I Will Bear Witness, the diaries Klemperer wrote during the Third Reich, appeared in English several years ago, many critics and scholars hailed them as a triumphant deed and their author as an inspired humanist. A German Jew whose marriage to an "Aryan" kept him out of the camps, Klemperer took it upon himself to "bear precise witness," creating a unique record of life in Nazi Germany. Deák shares the general enthusiasm for the book's richness as a historical source. And he, too, admires Klemperer's courage: Had his journals been found Klemperer probably would have been put to death. However, without any revisionist bravado Deák also directs our attention to Klemperer's misanthropy. This includes the cruelty with which Klemperer treated the people who risked their lives to help him, his gratuitous recklessness with their safety (Klemperer names these resisters in his journals, thereby endangering them), his Schadenfreude toward fellow victims.

But Deák is even more effective in a less well-trodden area. For various reasons, such as the new availability of sources, it might be the most dynamic in Holocaust studies: the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. This is Deák's field. It is also where his roots are, a fact that he laconically adverts to as he discusses certain fateful Eastern European resentments. "As a former Hungarian, I would like to add that the grumblings of the East Central Europeans about a callous, uncaring, and ungrateful West are, in fact, not wholly unwarranted." Deák also tells us that he experienced the "fascist rule" of the Hungarian Arrow Cross, although he does not say just how he experienced it. A longtime professor at Columbia University, Deák has produced a number of influential works on Hungarian history. And while all of the carefully argued, elegantly written essays in Hitler's Europe will inform and impress, Deák is at his most redoubtably erudite when he reviews books that deal with Hungary, Poland, Romania and Lithuania during the Third Reich.

Reviewing historical studies is like translating poetry--at least in one basic respect. The latter activity entails choosing between sound and sense, the former between text and context. For space limitations make it hard to interrogate a work thoroughly while acquainting readers with its topic. And unless the book under review analyzes a well-known, uncontroversial subject, it will be hard to express the significance of its claims without acquainting readers with its topic. Deák's reviews are unrhymed. Of course, he engages with authors and their hypotheses, but the substance of his essays lies in his own narratives of the historical developments at issue. For example, his review of Thomas Sakmyster's book about Miklós Horthy, Hungary's Admiral on Horseback, offers intricate accounts of Horthy's path to power and of the difficulties he faced in answering his country's Jewish Question. We learn that Horthy owed his greatest triumphs to the Nazis, who enabled him to take back land Hungary had lost after World War I, and that Horthy was an anti-Semite who regarded Hitler's plans for the Jews as impractical and inhumane, in that order. We also learn about the Hungarian fascists who pressured him. Horthy set himself up to be squeezed. In the end, that is what happened. The Nazis even kidnapped his son to secure his compliance, for he had not acquiesced in all of Hitler's demands. Horthy argued that the "war industry" would not survive without Hungary's 825,000 Jews whenever Hitler pushed him "to take drastic measures" against them. Could he have done more? Probably not, Deák suggests. He adds that this hardly exculpates Horthy.

Yet Deák does not simply give us a balanced interpretation, according to which the theory "that Hungary collaborated with the Germans mainly to save Jewish lives is unconvincing," as is the widely held "belief...that Hungary could and should have resisted the Germans outright." With his next remark Deák unsettles our equanimity:

Horthy was right in arguing that the Jewish community would have been annihilated had Hungary resisted. Such was the case in Poland and in the Netherlands. It is true that anti-Jewish legislation in Hungary prepared the way for the wholesale robbery of Jewish property as well as for the 1944 deportation by brutal gendarmes of nearly half a million Jews before the eyes of an indifferent public. But it is also true that in such countries as France--where there had been no anti-Jewish laws before the German occupation--thousands of Jews were also deported by brutal French gendarmes before the eyes of an indifferent public. Meanwhile, in fascist Italy--where Mussolini had introduced some anti-Jewish measures as early as 1938--the public (and the Italian occupation forces in France and Yugoslavia) sabotaged the efforts of the Germans and their Italian henchmen to deport Jews to Auschwitz.

If we want to emphasize the causal link between the discriminatory laws that existed in Hungary before the Nazi takeover, and the atrocities that followed it, we should be able to locate analogous connections elsewhere. But when we broaden our scope, a welter of counterexamples confronts us. That France did not have such legislation mattered little. There, similar indifference greeted similar brutality. So how can we be sure that uncoerced anti-Semitic laws in Hungary facilitated what happened later, under Nazi supervision? This is not an isolated problem. In "Poles and Jews," for instance, which first appeared in the New York Review of Books, Deák cites events that militate against recent arguments about the extent of Polish anti-Semitism. Even as he tries to explain the notorious depth of anti-Semitism in Poland, Deák reminds us that "there are more trees at Vad Yashem in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of Polish helpers of Jews than all such memorial trees combined." Deák shows that although large, terrifying trends dominate the landscape in Hitler's Europe, general tendencies--the kind that bolster historical understanding--are scarce.

"Horthy was right in arguing that the Jewish community would have been annihilated had Hungary resisted": Most historians focus on the causes of actions and their effects. In Holocaust studies, by contrast, inaction is a major theme. The reasons for this range widely, from the sense that Jewish victims displayed passivity, to the ways in which the criminal character of the Holocaust determines scholarly approaches to it. Inaction matters here partly because inaction in the face of crime is a moral problem, one that cries out for historical scrutiny. When Deák asks what might have happened if Horthy had resisted, he does so to illuminate Horthy's constraints, or the roots of his inaction, and also to test the plausibility of Horthy's justification for not acting. What if he had defied Hitler? Just as Horthy himself maintained, the consequences for Hungary's Jews would have been catastrophic. Indeed, Hungary's two attempts to reach an armistice with the Allies resulted in "massive slaughter of the jews." This means that Horthy easily could have believed his own claim. We cannot know for sure. Yet we can say, as Deák does, that opportunism and indifference alone probably do not account for his passive behavior. Deák has evoked Horthy's moral resonance. Accordingly, he writes, Horthy "was not an evil man, but he was not a humanitarian either."

Such "what would have happened if" questions do more than help historians to assess character and assign responsibility. By their nature they argue for a principle that sometimes gets lost in discussions of the Holocaust: Things could have turned out otherwise. These gestures are important. However, set in the wide-open subjunctive mood, they build momentum fast and often go too far. Deák makes this point in the fifth and final part of Hitler's Europe, which reckons with two famous "what if" questions. What if Pope Pius XII had been less conciliatory toward Hitler? And what if the United States and Britain had bombed the gas chambers? His answers are sobering in both cases--especially in the latter:

But let us assume that such raids would have been successful and that only a limited number of inmates of the camps would have been killed even though some of the barracks were only a few hundred yards away from the gas chambers. And let us assume further that many inmates would have managed to escape. Where would they have gone, without any knowledge of the Polish language (by then most Polish Jews were dead), emaciated and dressed in prison garb? In Poland, the penalty for hiding Jews was the execution of the host and his entire family. And even if all the gas chambers and crematoria were destroyed, experience had already demonstrated to the Allies that even greater complexes could become functional again in just a matter of weeks. (In August 1943 the US Army Air Force sacrificed more than 500 airmen and fifty-four bombers in an attempt to smash the vast Romanian oil refineries in Ploesti, which were vital to Germany. Despite horrifying losses, the raids destroyed nearly half of Ploesti's total capacity; within weeks, however, the refineries were producing again at a higher rate than before the raid.) Moreover, the Germans would have been able to fall back on their time-honored method of shooting their victims. And if the rail lines had been bombed? The inmates in the cattle cars and those at the departure points would have been allowed to die of thirst, of the heat or of the cold while the lines were being repaired.

Deák puts the factual complexity of the Holocaust into his contrary-to-fact scenarios. As a result, they offer only bloody alternatives to a bloody reality, and little reason to impugn the United States and Britain for not trying to destroy the Nazi killing machines. Where the book that he is reviewing in this instance, Richard Breitman's What the Nazis Planned, What the British and the Americans Knew, suggests otherwise, it loses sight of the intransigence of its topic. But here as well there are twists: Deák agrees with some of Breitman's main criticisms. Not only did the United States and Britain know more about the Final Solution than they let on; according to Deák they could have done more to help. Late in the war they could have pressured Hitler's allies to undermine his genocidal practices. By then the outcome of the war had become clear, and the prospective victors had leverage. What prompted the inaction? Deák asserts that strategic issues, like the vagueness of their knowledge about the camps and the scarcity of flight crews skilled at precision bombing, deterred the United States and Britain from combating the Final Solution more aggressively. Yet he states that Anglo anti-Semitism probably did too. And so Hitler's Europe concludes by showing how the historiographical challenges of the Holocaust extend beyond Europe. Deák's focus, however, generally remains closer to the scenes of destruction. In fact, he recently wrote a characteristically searching essay on Polish collaboration and Bulgarian resistance. So perhaps Essays on Hitler's Europe will have equally unsettling sequels.

"It is almost impossible even now to describe what actually happened in Europe on August 4, 1914," Hannah Arendt wrote in 1950, in words that also seem to apply, with uncanny aptness, to September 11, 2001. "The days before and the days after the first world war are separated not like the end of an old and the beginning of a new period but like the day before and the day after an explosion.... [That] explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop." The chain reaction was the abrupt, unstoppable plunge into the protracted, unprecedented savagery of the two world wars and the two great totalitarian regimes, Soviet and Nazi, of the century's first half. It's still too soon to know whether September 11 (let us avoid the trivializing, disrespectful notation "nine eleven") will touch off a comparable--or worse--spiral of violence in the twenty-first century. An "explosion" we have definitely had; whether an unstoppable "chain reaction" of violence has been triggered we do not know. Yet already the elements of not one but at least three distinct possible kinds of disaster have appeared with astonishing swiftness.

First (to list them briefly), is the threat of a much wider conventional war. Even as the war in Afghanistan still rages, voices in and out of government are calling for new wars against new countries. The targets and justifications for attacking them shift with dizzying rapidity. The war most often mentioned is one to overthrow the regime of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The justification first given was a possible connection to the September 11 attack or the anthrax attack that followed; but when this justification seemed to fade (hard facts are impossible to come by), a new one--Saddam's refusal to let UN inspectors into his country to search for weapons of mass destruction--was brought forward. Next, we were hearing from inside sources that the targets might in fact be Somalia or Sudan. (The attack on Iraq would be considered later.) Meanwhile, other crises are sucked into the vortex. In the latest round of violence between Israel and Palestine, Israel, seeking to associate its own war on terror with the American one, has responded to the suicide bombings by the Islamic organization Hamas by attacking the head of the Palestinian Authority, Yasir Arafat. If this development leads to the collapse or expulsion of Arafat from Palestine and definitively ends hopes for a Palestinian state, it could rouse the fury of the Islamic world against the United States and Israel alike, and bring on the full-scale "clash of civilizations" predicted by the political scientist Samuel Huntington.

Second, the Bush Administration has responded to the terrorist threat with executive measures that some are calling the most serious threat to civil liberties in recent memory. The list already includes a roundup of more than a thousand people without charges; eavesdropping on conversations between terrorism-related suspects and their attorneys; a huge, ill-defined expansion of wiretapping in the United States; and, of course, the creation by presidential order of military tribunals that try and execute noncitizens in secret by majority vote. If, as George W. Bush says, we must not allow terrorists to use our freedom to attack us, then how much less should we destroy our own freedom in order to attack the terrorists? Freedom is not some glittering abstraction that hovers in the air; it is the Constitution and the rights it guarantees to citizens. To lose these will be to lose the war no matter how many terrorists the United States kills in Afghanistan.

Third, looming over all these developments is a threat unknown in 1914--the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, by the United States, or both. Osama bin Laden has stated that he possesses nuclear weapons ("as a deterrent"), and Administration sources are telling reporters that there is reason to fear that he may have radiological weapons (which use conventional explosives to spread radioactive materials across a wide area). Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has pointedly declined to rule out first-use of nuclear weapons by the United States at some point in the conflict.

What protection does the world have now against a new chain reaction, in which these dangers will feed on and produce one another? To the people--a large majority, according to the polls--who favor present policy, the protection probably seems adequate, or as good as it can be, but to someone like me, who, as this Letter has made clear, opposes both the war abroad and the inroads on liberty at home, Arendt's description of a world in which events are outrunning understanding and response seems frighteningly current. Neither widening war abroad nor loss of liberty at home nor the danger of mass destruction seems to have stirred a response anywhere near the level of the danger. We seem to be gliding in a kind of glassy calm toward a multitude of horrors. There is incontrovertible evidence--including a shocking series of photographs in the New York Times--that our new ally the Northern Alliance has been executing prisoners of war, but there is little reaction in the United States. Serious allegations have also been made that the Alliance, with the help of American bombers, has massacred hundreds of prisoners in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. The Administration has shown no interest in discovering the truth. The nation's shock was intense when Americans were killed in the September 11 attacks. But reports that villages have been destroyed by US bombing in Afghanistan go uninvestigated. Asked about the press coverage of the subject, Brit Hume of Fox News commented, "The fact that some people are dying, is that really news? And is it news to be treated in a semi-straight-faced way? I think not." The Administration is clearcutting constitutional protections, but few legislators take an interest.

It's one thing to face possible disasters; another to let them draw near without protest or action, as if in a trance or dream. "Nothing which was being done...no matter how many people knew and foretold the circumstances, could be undone or prevented," Arendt wrote of the earlier period. The question now arises whether an opposition today can find the ground on which to take its stand. Or will "every event," as Arendt wrote of the earlier time, "have the finality of a last judgment, a judgment that was passed neither by God nor by a devil, but looked rather like the expression of some unredeemably stupid fatality"?

Surprisingly, Gitta Sereny's new book on Germany turns out to be a book about love. There, among her many interviews, essays and investigative pieces spanning the past half-century in the life and memory of Europe's dominant nation, is Leni Riefenstahl, at the age of 90, confessing her ancient love for Adolf Hitler, an ardor shared by the unlikely figure of François Genoud, a Swiss lawyer and fixer and unabashed Nazi until his death in 1996, who in the same sentence absolves Hitler and exalts him. "It was some time before I realized that, and he was wrong," Genoud says of Hitler's bigotry and warmongering, "but I'm very forgiving to those I love, and the truth is, I loved Hitler."

And then there is Sereny herself, on the man she has become most closely associated with, culminating in a 750-page book after his death: Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and armaments minister who so narrowly escaped the hangman at Nuremberg, of whom it was said that his organizational genius prolonged the war by at least a year. Yet Speer was a man of taste, intelligence and profoundly distressed conscience--"in many ways a man of excellence," Sereny wrote in Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth. And Sereny writes in this one: "It was a long time before I grew to like Speer, but by the end of our first three weeks together [in 1978], I fully believed, and loved, that feeling of guilt in him." It is not as preposterous as it sounds. One is moved by most struggles, even those of criminals when their conscience is involved; and as the book makes clear, Sereny has a lot of love to go around, starting with her many old, old, often aristocratic friends (French, German and Austrian) to whom she devotes rather too much attention in the early pages. And, she says, recalling, collectively, her "most important years," as a child and young adult swept up in the mid-century cataclysm (born in Vienna in 1923, a teenager in occupied France caring for children in a Loire Valley chateau, escaping France through the Pyrenees, returning to Germany in 1945 as a children's relief worker), young people then were "creatures of emotion. We could love."

As Sereny notes in her introduction, The Healing Wound essentially comprises her autobiography--which she hadn't intended, but there it is. It is a march of triumph, a lap of honor, an honorary degree and career award--it presumes, without any real arrogance, that hers has been an important life, and that her witness must be shared. It is the only way to justify its organization, which is a collection of journalism over many decades, twenty pieces in all, most of which are prefaced by an essay on its circumstances and aftermath. Throughout the book she thanks editors and patrons, her American husband (frequently her co-researcher and photographer) and many friends; these are the most boring parts of her book, yet excusable. She has had an extraordinary life and made friends of the most remarkable people, yet she is not a show-off nor, apparently, even that interested in herself; self-absorption is not something a reader of The Healing Wound will have to live with. Frivolous herself in her youth--aspiring to be a dancer and actress in pre-war Vienna, loving parties in Paris--she has reworked her native emotionalism into something steely and unfazed for the only task she knows, the grim obligation of facing up to the twentieth century.

She is no intellectual, however. In none of her books does Sereny reveal herself as a profound thinker, or even a thinker, really, at all: She is in the truest sense a witness, and it is her patience and lack of easy judgment that explain her journalistic success. She deals in simple terms, speaking a simple idiom. The same ideas--trite as they sound--recur. She is emotional, loves children, believes they are born good. Crimes are committed by individuals, against individuals. Something must happen to people--probably in their childhood, or elsewhere in their moral formation--to make them commit unspeakable acts of evil, for she acknowledges that evil exists. Her conclusions can be simplistic--affronts, perhaps, to the discriminating intelligence. She believes that it was a lack in Speer's childhood that made him unable to feel or know empathy, hence his struggle. Similarly with the subjects of two other of her books: Into That Darkness, about Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka; and most recently Cries Unheard, about the Englishwoman Mary Bell, now living under another name, who in 1968 at the age of 11 killed two little boys in her hometown of Newcastle. Bell does not feature in The Healing Wound--it is a book about Germany, after all--but the other two do, from her original magazine profiles of them, before the books came out: Stangl in 1971, Speer in 1978. And her conclusions about the men, which appear in the books (both, it should be said, at two or three times the length they need to be), point to the resolution of Sereny's seeming simplicity, which is that when your beliefs are very basic and unchangeable, a certain mysticism is the inevitable result.

As is now widely known, Stangl died in prison nineteen hours after his last meeting with Sereny. This clearly has had a profound effect on her, who in Into That Darkness writes: "I think he died when he did because he had finally, however briefly, faced himself and told the truth; it was a monumental effort to reach that fleeting moment when he became the man he should have been." Her book about Speer, published in 1995, ends similarly: "To me it was some kind of victory that this man--just this man--weighed down by intolerable and unmanageable guilt...tried to become a different man."

The man one should have been, the man one tried to become... In the Sereny view of the world (which we might not be wrong ourselves to adopt), to be worthwhile life has its limits, and there is always our perfection, toward which we are striving. She quotes one of Stangl's prison guards, who wonders how Stangl can do what he has done or "even see it being done, and consent to remain alive." She quotes very close language from Speer's daughter to analyze Leni Riefenstahl. And there is a third person, the daughter of a Dutch collaborator, who says nearly the same thing, too: that for her parents to confess the "extent of their commitment...they would have to commit suicide." The repetition, because from so many voices, is uncanny; and it suggests that for human beings, survival is secondary beside the truth of one's life. This final rejection of materialism to me seems the essence of mysticism, a denial of the supremacy of our own lives. Not everyone will believe in it, but Sereny's iron consistency, in this as in many things, is impressive to behold.

Calling Sereny a mystic, however, won't carry very far with her; for her, the answer to problems of morality always "lies in a personal and human rather than a theoretical or intellectual realm." What she believes comes from the stories she has recorded; she truly does seem to come in on a blank page. And here--and yet--in her simplicity and directness, she has things to teach us. A nearly universal ignorance about the difference between concentration camps (Dachau, say), slave-labor camps and extermination camps (Treblinka, Sobibor), and the presence and use of the gas chamber in all three, has created openings skillfully exploited by neo-Nazis and revisionists. It might seem enough, in the spirit of "never again," to organize modern education around the study of the Holocaust, whose symbol is Auschwitz; but Sereny has been meeting with young Germans for more than thirty years and has observed more closely than most how they have learned their country's past. It is riveting to see where an education concentrating on the murder of the Jews has failed them. A 1978 report, published in The Healing Wound, shows the stricken response of teenagers understanding for the first time that the Nazis slaughtered their own: 80,000 handicapped Germans and Austrians, a third of them children, gassed before the war. "Children? German children?" cries a stunned youth. "Here? In Hamburg?" Dachau, which Sereny saw as a UN relief worker after its liberation, does no good to anyone as a restored, sanitized museum piece: One teenager perceptively (if disturbingly) observes of one renovated barracks, where the "bunks, tables and chairs smell agreeably of pine," that it is much like the youth hostels he has visited on his school holidays: "Our sheets are blue-checked too."

Witnessing in 1993 the chaotic end of the trial of John Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian Clevelander extradited to Israel and condemned (in a decision later reversed) as the unspeakable Treblinka guard "Ivan the Terrible," Sereny reached conclusions that seem common-sense now: Victims should not try their tormentors. And it is time for the trials to stop--not for the sake of the old criminals but out of sympathy for the witnesses, whose memories are no longer safe, whose pain has been terrible and who should now be allowed "to let go of it--to rest."

Reviewing these essays, all these articles, one bends before the righteousness and moral force of Gitta Sereny, marvels at what she has seen. There is no furor or controversy she has avoided; she has not been afraid. Her iron is in every fire, and this book is the putting out of all those fires, whether the purported Hitler "diaries" that turned up in 1983 (she was part of a team investigating the fakery), Demjanjuk, Speer, Riefenstahl and Kurt Waldheim. Even before Deborah Lipstadt, Sereny tangled with David Irving, the only near-formidable one among the abject yet active class of Holocaust deniers, revisionists and Hitler enthusiasts. Irving sued her for libel before suing Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin, in a case he conclusively lost, last year in London, when his research was exposed as bogus [see D.D. Guttenplan, "History and the Holocaust," May 1, 2000]. But of course Sereny was there first, in 1977 reviewing Irving's citations in his book Hitler's War to refute his claims about Hitler's ignorance of the Holocaust. She is invincible, it seems. Beyond her relentless attention to detail, her mastery of archives, her exhaustive research and fact-finding, her interviews that go on for weeks or months, there is her own longevity and her native command of German and its many inflections. In her book about Stangl, an Austrian, it is fascinating how Sereny studies Stangl's voice and changing accent as he accounts for certain times of his life, speaking one way about youthful happiness and quite another about Treblinka, his crimes and complicities. She knows more than we will ever know--even Irving, to whom she condescends by none too slyly rubbishing his German: "I made him most angry in 1977 when I accused him of mistranslating something. Anyone who speaks German as a foreigner can make mistakes. He speaks very good German, but obviously my knowledge is deeper."

Naturally Irving cannot bear this, but Sereny is, among her other skills, a master psychologist. It is how she has insinuated herself so deeply into the lives of her subjects. Ever the haughty Viennese and friend of privilege when she needs to be, Sereny begins her "encounters," as she calls them, not by pretending gratitude to these men who have agreed to receive her, but by laying down rules:

My rule is to tell [her subject] at the very start how I feel about him. I do not pretend to come as his friend, to help or console him.... In the case of people involved with the Third Reich, I tell them what I feel about the Nazis and how I feel about them personally.

Of course, this is exactly the way to talk to men or naughty boys, for Sereny, in addition to everything else, is a woman; a wife and mother. And with these men--Stangl, Speer--it produces the hoped-for result: "Making such a statement creates a special atmosphere: people respond to it, speaking more openly, saying, perhaps, things they would not otherwise have said."

Speer lasted a bit longer than Stangl's single day or nineteen hours, but until his death he was in constant touch with Sereny, and it is in his profile published in The Healing Wound that he admits, most subtly and wearily, the truth that would have got him hanged in Nuremberg. Immediately Sereny concludes her profile: "He is a haunted man who has battled for three decades to recapture his lost morality. Unless we deny all men the potential for regeneration, this man, I believe, must now be allowed peace."

That was in 1978; Speer had three more years. When he died, Sereny "was not sad.... I thought that his death was right." But still she thanks him, and honors his legacy to her, "a new understanding of the significance, in political events, of human emotions." Because, of course, Speer had loved Hitler, and because of that love, for which Speer had sustained the Reich well beyond its final breaking point, a world was changed. And strangely the love goes on, for Sereny herself, in what is the most perfect meeting of her subject and her own life, her personal history that this book is. In giving her "the gift of himself," Speer has provided Sereny the vital, life-cherishing context or opposition "against whom I could place, consider, deplore and mourn all those events, and all those human beings who had lived and died in my time."

But as to the living--there are always the children, as Sereny reminds us. Her introduction cites her love of children, and her previous book was about a child who killed children and is full of policy recommendations about how child criminals should be cared for and counseled or tried, if it comes to that. In The Healing Wound, hope for Germany must lie in its young, and she has had several generations to contemplate; there are reports here from 1967, 1978 and now 2000 and 2001. But even in her other articles they are never absent, and they are always intelligent, earnest, probing, serious--admirable, in fact. Again, the essence is the barest simplicity. Here Sereny presumes to speak for all of us: "It is time that we say loud and clear to the young Germans that we do not consider the children responsible for the parents' sins; that we do not believe in inherited guilt; that we do not accept the transferred image of the 'ugly German.'"

This is from 1978, but Sereny has always believed it, and believes it still, with the same triumph of hope over experience shared by any parent. It seems small-minded to call it anything but love.

'NO ONE WILL CARE...'

Washington, D.C.

On behalf of the members of our organization, each of whom is a survivor of torture, we wish to express our appreciation to Alexander Cockburn ["Beat the Devil"] and Patricia J. Williams ["Diary of a Mad Law Professor"] for their comments on torture and the US government, in your November 26 issue. Both of us are, unfortunately, well acquainted with our government's involvement in torture. The eagerness with which some in the media are willing, if not eager, to support its use does come as a distinct disappointment, as does the silence of Congress on the subject.

It is not uncommon for the tortured to be told by those who torture them, "Even if you survive to tell others what we did to you, no one will listen; no one will care." We are gratified to know that The Nation does care. Sadly, it seems that we cannot expect the same of the Bush Administration or most in Congress.

SISTER DIANNA ORTIZ, OSU
DR. ORLANDO TIZON, PhD
Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC)

HELP FAMILIES OF 'DISAPPEAREDS'

Charlottesville, Va.

I just read Miriam Ching Louie's "The 9/11 Disappeareds" [Dec. 3]. Is there an address to which donations to the Asociación Tepeyac can be sent?

VICTORIA ENGLE

Contact information for Asociación Tepeyac de New York: 251 West 14 Street, New York, NY 10011; phone (212) 633-7108; fax (212) 633-1554; e-mail AsocTepeyac@tepeyac.org.

TALKING TURKEY

Washington, D.C.

Ian Urbina's "US Bows to Turkey" [Nov. 12] certifies that some may get everything wrong indeed. Here are some essential facts on Turkey:

§ Turkey is a pluralistic secular democracy under the rule of law. It is party to the European Convention on Human Rights and is subject to, among others, the Council of Europe, the UN and OSCE monitoring on human rights.

§ Over the past seventeen years, we've had to fight the PKK terrorist organization, which attempted to divide our country and destroy the fabric of our society.

§ The terrorist PKK does not represent the Kurds, who constitute the majority of its victims. Our citizens of Kurdish origin prosper in every walk of life in Turkey. They enjoy the same rights of representation and regularly assume the highest offices, including in our Parliament.

§ Our Parliament decides whether our land and facilities may be used for military purposes by foreign troops. The Incirlik base is no exception.

§ In addition to the recent sweeping constitutional amendments, we have made important reforms in the way our economy is run. The benefits of those will be seen in the period ahead. Despite our economic turbulences, we have maintained our perfect credit servicing record.

§ Finally, Turkey has never, ever asked anything in return for its support for the campaign launched against terrorism, including our decision to give troops to "Operation Enduring Freedom." This is an outcome of our longstanding, principled policy to combat terrorism. And the sentiments of the Turkish people toward the September 11 attacks have probably been best conveyed in the letters, flowers and the fireman's helmet left at the gate of the US Embassy in Ankara.

SALIH BOGAÇ GÜLDERE
Counselor, Turkish Embassy

URBINA REPLIES

Washington, D.C.

A few comments from the Turkish Embassy merit response.

Indeed it is true that Turkey has been subject to international monitoring of human rights, the result of which has been a rather abysmal record. Even the State Department's Human Rights Report for Turkey discusses continued "serious human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, including deaths in detention from excessive use of force, 'mystery killings,' and disappearances. Torture remained widespread.... Security forces continued to use arbitrary arrest and detention. Prolonged pretrial detention and lengthy trials continued to be problems."

The consequences of these abuses and Turkish military behavior have been dire. As early as 1997, before the current market crash in Turkey and recent upswings in its military budget, the CIA's State Failure Task Force reported that Turkey was a nation in danger of collapse, due in large part to its ongoing war effort.

It is also certainly true that for the past seventeen years the Turkish Army has been fighting the PKK, an organization that has engaged in serious human rights abuses against civilians. But the PKK implemented a unilateral cease-fire starting in 1999, and their repression by the Turkish military has steadily risen. Is this the logic of self-defense?

The biggest stretch of all is the claim that Kurds have full and equal rights in Turkey. The nation's first Kurdish woman elected to Turkish Parliament, Leyla Zena, now sits in prison on a fifteen-year sentence for having committed the crime of speaking Kurdish from the floor of Parliament. In October a Turkish radio station was closed down for having played a love ballad in Kurdish. What was true in the 1999 Human Rights Watch Report is no less true in the current political climate: "Turkish journalists face fines, imprisonment, or violent attacks if they write about the role of Islam in politics and society, Turkey's ethnic minority, the [Kurdish] conflict in southeastern Turkey or the proper role of the military in government and society."

IAN URBINA
Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP)

US TERROR IN CHILE

Fredonia, N.Y.

It is most appropriate to be reminded of acts of terrorism promoted by the United States ["Indict Pinochet," Nov. 5] by citing the CIA's covert operations in Chile (1970-73).

Since September 11, 1973, Chileans have been honoring the memory of thousands who were killed and are still missing after Gen. Augusto Pinochet, with US support, put an end to Salvador Allende's democratic government of the Unidad Popular. And as you point out, an "infamous act of political terrorism committed in our nation's capital" occurred three years later: the car-bombing murders of Orlando Letelier (who had served in Allende's cabinet) and his American associate Ronni Moffitt.

Those involved were a US terrorist, Michael Townley (who operated in Chile), and three anti-Castro Cubans, all supposedly following orders from Pinochet himself.

One would have expected that the FBI and the CIA had some idea of how these terrorists found their way to the nation's capital and detonated a bomb in broad daylight not far from the center of the national government.

By the way, the Director of Central Intelligence at the time was George Bush, the father of the current occupant of the White House. Christopher Hitchens's "Minority Report" in that same issue gives other insightful views on the Nixon-Kissinger plan to destabilize democracy in Chile.

OSVALDO CHINCHON

OF OIL AND AFGHANISTAN

St. Paul

Warm thanks for Michael Klare's "The Geopolitics of War" [Nov. 5], which provides a much-needed historical background for the current war on Afghanistan. Two brief comments may supplement his fine work: Klare's list of Carter's militarization of the Persian Gulf in 1979, in the wake of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, omits one particularly notorious action--the decision to invest millions of dollars in military aid in the oppressive but convenient dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre in Somalia. As the New York Times reported at the time, this client relationship was meant to replace the strategic and intelligence base the United States had lost in Iran. The dismal continuation of that story, where any pretense of "nation-building" has long been abandoned, may well be instructive for what we can expect from the current pageant of US policy in Afghanistan.

And speaking of Afghanistan: Klare argues that the war against Osama bin Laden is primarily an attempt to safeguard a friendly government in oil-rich Saudi Arabia. But Bush Administration officials have cautioned us not to expect the bombing in Afghanistan to produce bin Laden's capture or death. The prime strategic importance of Afghanistan is that it provides the only convenient land route for the oil pipeline Unocal wishes to build to extract the vast oil reserves in Uzbekistan. Unocal reluctantly suspended its $2 billion pipeline project last year, when the Taliban became intransigent. The Bush Administration was unable to win further concessions from the Taliban even after paying them $43 million last spring, ostensibly to congratulate them for their helpful initiatives in the "war on drugs." It would appear that Big Oil's man in Washington has resorted to a more conventional method for guaranteeing access to oil.

NEIL ELLIOTT

KLARE REPLIES

Amherst, Mass.

I certainly agree with Neil Elliott on the significance of the US alliance with Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia in the wake of the Iranian revolution. On Afghanistan, however, I choose to differ. The United States is very eager to tap into the oil and gas reserves of the Caspian Sea basin, but the top priority for Washington has always been to build a pipeline from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan across the Caspian to Baku in Azerbaijan and then on to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. This pipeline would make it easy to ship Caspian energy to Europe and the United States. The proposed pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan might be of economic benefit to Unocal, but it has little strategic significance for the United States. So I remain persuaded that the strategic epicenter of this war is Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan.

MICHAEL T. KLARE

BRUSSELS SPROUTS?

Fredericksburg, Tex.

What have we here (on page 13 of your Fall Books issue)? The van of an Anglophilic booklover from Belgium (according to the letter "B" in the white oval)?

HORST WOITALLA

How short the memory of even our more respected pundits. Take Thomas L. Friedman, who argued in the New York Times on Sunday that because we now face an enemy unlike any other, "Atty.

See also "The Afghan Humanitarian Crisis," by Matt Bivens.

In Gore Vidal's novel of post-World War I Washington, Hollywood, the
toughest ticket in town is a pass to the Senate debate on the League of
Nations treaty.

Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

Transgender activists may force us to rethink basic assumptions about sex.

Fighting Words

Gerald Nicosia, author of Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement,