Category: War

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West Wing: Sorkin’s Soft Spot For Militarists

I love “West Wing”. It is one of a handful of television dramas (“The Bold Ones”, “Hill Street Blues”, the first seasons of “St. Elsewhere” and “Mad Men” ) that was worth watching for it’s artistic value alone. It is, at times, brilliant; it’s always at least very good (at least up to the fifth season). It is occasionally — very occasionally– annoying. We’re hardest on the ones we love, aren’t we?

Bartlet is allegedly a liberal, and he generally holds liberal positions on most social and some fiscal issues. In fact, the show makes a point of Bartlet– unlike Clinton and Obama in real life– actually standing firm for certain enlightened, tolerant, liberal positions, instead of compromising in order to cut deals with red state Democrats or Republicans.

Real liberals, however, don’t have a lot of reverence for the military. They might or might not believe that the military and the police are necessary, but it’s a regrettable necessity, and real liberals can’t not be conscious of the fact that the culture of the military is decidedly anti-liberal. Real liberals want to make the world safe for wimps. Real liberals recognize that the culture of authoritarian militarism is a self-sustaining model for violence and repression.

But Sorkin’s projection, President Bartlet, is a post-Reagan Democrat. Post-Reagan Democrats like Clinton and Obama realized that to get elected, you had to outflank the republicans on law and order and guns and the death penalty. So Bartlet sucks up to the military.

I think it is a desperate attempt by a thin-skinned liberal to prove to the world that he is not a pussy.

Why it matters to Sorkin, that Bartlet is not perceived as a pussy, is beyond me. It’s obviously a touchy issue, for it is handled on “West Wing” with this awkward, prissy bravado, as if Sorkin wants to make sure that no one suspects for even one moment that he isn’t willing to kill lots of people if it’s helpful to American interests, because, God bless us, we’re Americans. Behind that bravado can only be the absolutely godless and anti-liberal assumption that an American life is inherently more valuable than an Arab or French or African life.

In the episode entitled “What Kind of Day has it Been”, an American fighter pilot patrolling the no-fly zone over Iraq (part of the peace conditions after the first U.S. – Iraq War under Bush I) is shot down. Bartlett goes all mushy with concern about the pilot, his family, his pet hamster and goldfish, and at one point announces that if anything happens to this pilot he will invade Baghdad. He says this with great sterninity and gravitas. I am not a pussy.

No real person like this — Bartlet, at this moment– exists. A real liberal would have already been considering whether it would be wise to start an entire war requiring the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people to get back at a man for causing the death of one American pilot. But Bartlet is, at that moment, utterly a projection of Sorkin’s insecurities about his liberalism: they might not think I’m manly!

Sorkin’s fussy compensatory projections emerge quite regularly, often expressed as awestruck respect for Secret Service Agents and Generals. The awful part of this is that some liberals, knowing that Sorkin is an enlightened liberal himself, might conclude that most military men really are quite sane and rational and, well, just so damn manly.

The most evil moment of this Sorkinese perspective came in Episode 72 (“Election Night”) when Donna fell hard for Christian Slater as an uber-manly military aide. Oh my gawwdd– he’s just so hot! At least, compared to the thoughtful and compassionate Josh Lyman. But then, Donna spent much of the first season complaining about having to pay taxes. West Wing’s incipient Tea Party leader.

At a meeting in the situation room to discuss the downed pilot, a member of the “individuals in suits who sit in the situation room to make it look like an important situation has developed group” lamely suggests they pursue diplomatic channels instead of considering a military rescue. Leo, oozing with manly testosterone, castrates the man with rusty nail-clippers. We are not prissy little pinafore-waving dilettantes! Not we! And, after all, this is an AMERICAN life at stake. But Sorkin betrays his double-standard: this straw man arguing for negotiation is a preposterous caricature of a liberal’s projection of what a conservative thinks a liberal sounds like. Follow me? And he is provided to us precisely so Leo and Bartlet can look manly by contrast, even though they are in favor of health care.

I admire Sorkin’s ability to present both sides of most hot political issues with credibility and conviction. There is a case to be made for a strong military response to certain events, to lower taxes, and to strong security. But why is he so afraid to show us the Donald Rumsvelds, the Richard Perles, the Westmorelands, the Gulf of Tonkins, the faked intelligence, the paranoid crypto-fascists, the torturers (who all came out of the woodwork– you think from nowhere?– during the Bush Administration)? It’s a glaring omission, especially since Sorkin is so careful to show us the faults in the liberal true-believers. I am convinced he doesn’t want to be accused of being a being what used to be called a “bleeding heart” liberal.

It’s all a grand tribute to how TV and Hollywood works– we all love to look rational and enlightened and compassionate but when the rubber hits the road, we are brutes and killers and always will be.

Sorkin’s other soft spot…

Is Sorkin, like so many other Hollywood celebrities, in therapy? In episode “Noel” (Season 2), Josh Lyman has a episode Sorkin must have snatched right from the dime-store psychology section. Lyman is anxious, easily angered, tense, nervous, and he can’t relax. Instead of going to a Talking Heads Concert,  he yells at the President. He cuts his hand. Leo orders him to see a psychologist, Dr. Stanley Keyworth. Keyworth can only be described as godlike, in his infinite wisdom and patience. He is the ultimate projection of every psychotherapist’s wettest dreams. He is also, in his absolute conviction that he is fit to judge the sanity of other people, the most arrogant character ever to appear on West Wing.

We are asked to believe that Josh didn’t notice that it was a window, not a glass that he broke with this fist– repression!– and that whenever music plays he actually hears sirens, or at least his subconscious interprets the music as sirens, or thinks that it sounds like sirens which subconsciously reminds him of real sirens— whatever. The smugness with which Dr. Stanley asserts these things, and the creepy way Josh goes Bedford in response (after the cliché-ridden resistance phase has passed), practically crawling on his hands and knees and licking Dr. Keyworth’s boots, was a low point of season 2. I mean, really, really low.

Even more creepily, Sorkin glibly presents Stanley with the power to label Josh as PTSD and, if he wanted to remove him from the White House staff, and even have him institutionalized, all on the basis of and with the only authority of his so-called “expertise”.

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The Dog Must be Walked; War Must be Paid For

Why oh why oh why did the Democrats not demand that the Republicans pay for their wars out of current tax revenues?

Would Americans have voted for a war that was going to cost each of them, man, woman, and child, $750 (over $2000 per household) so far? Or would they have demanded better proof, at least, of the actual existence of weapons of mass destruction?

The Republicans cut taxes while taking on the war and then borrowed to cover the deficit. Why did the Democrats allow the Republicans to bill the war to future generations? Did they not realize that once Bush had run up the deficit, the Republicans, having whipped the nation into a patriotic frenzy (with, among other things, those nauseating “God Bless America” interludes at ball games), could now use the deficit as an excuse to slash spending on programs that actually benefit most Americans?

Was this planned?

David Stockton appeared on “60 Minutes” last Sunday. The former Reagan budget director actually advocated higher taxes on the rich for the simple common sense reason that the country’s bills need to be paid.

One could be forgiven with coming away with the impression that there is indeed a class war going on in the U.S.: the rich are out to destroy the middle class.

Common sense: whether you were in favor or opposed to the Iraq War, it defies belief that the Republicans were able to get away with cutting taxes at a time when it was clear that the government needed additional revenues to defend itself against terrorism. Who benefits the most from the peace and security of the U.S.? The rich. So who pays the least to defend the peace and security of the U.S.? Proportionately, the rich.

By borrowing the money for his wars (and that is absolutely what he did), and then cutting taxes to the rich, George Bush stunningly shifted the burden of the cost of the wars to the middle-classes. The next step in the process is for the Republicans to scream bloody murder about the awful deficit they created and weep crocodile tears: “now we’ll have to cut Social Security and Medicare and other social programs! Alas!”

The Democrat’s biggest blunder? By allowing themselves to be cornered into supporting the war and terrified of being accused of raising taxes, the Democrats consented to screwing themselves. They should have demanded that Bush raise the revenue to pay for the war without borrowing! That would have been a Rove-like tactic that might have brilliantly positioned themselves as the more fiscally responsible party in 2010.

Instead, they are like the adults whose kids promised they would walk the dog every day, if they would only, please, please, please, get a dog. And now the Republicans sit on their fat asses watching “American Idol” on TV, ignoring the dog.

And now, well, the dog must be walked. And it’s raining, and it’s cold, and it’s dark. And the dog must be walked.

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3%

In a very recent poll, only 3% of American voters considered the war in Afghanistan the “most important” problem facing the country. Now, you may say, well, that doesn’t mean a lot of voters don’t consider it somewhat important. I would suggest that the fact that only 3% consider it the most important (consider that way more people think there really are witches), that it is a dead issue.

So, ten years after this war was considered so urgent, so important, so vital to the security interests of the United States that thousands of people would die for it, and billions of dollars of weapons would be deployed for it, it now doesn’t even register on the radar. Is there a lesson here?

Sure there is.

  • Americans have a very, very short attention span. If you can distract them for a few days, you too can be a Senator or Congressman or president. Do not worry your pretty little head about the consequences of your decisions five years down the road.
  • Number 1 explains why so many state and city pension funds are bankrupt. Apparently, American politicians are almost uniformly irresponsible or stupid or both. Don’t blame them: the same voters keep putting them back into office because they promise to be patriotic, religious, and heterosexual.
  • Americans can be fooled over and over and over again. We are about to see an entire new crop of idiots thrust into political office where, God help us, they may get their hands on Social Security, Medicare, and the Education system. God help us again.
  • Those large segments of America’s deeply religious communities who claim to be pro life? Shameless liars, all of them. Life is cheap. Life is shit. People are dying in a war no one cares about. These people never actually save anyone’s life, but they are more than happy to kill for cheap oil.
  • Those nations who sign on to America’s wars? Do you realize that your soldiers are also dying for a war that barely registers in the consciousness of the population of the country that talked you into this?
  • Obama, I guess, would love to walk away. The fact that Karzai is now talking to the Taliban about an accommodation of some sorts speaks volumes about where this is going. How lovely to be a Republican: you convince Americans it will be clean and simple and decisive, you start the war, you wage the war, you lose the war (make no mistake about it: it is lost), you borrow the money to finance the war, you reduce taxes on the rich so they don’t have to pay for it ever, then you walk away from the disaster. Then, in the next election, you run on a platform of a government that is less intrusive and more fiscally responsible.
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Secured Confessions

“Still, our team pressed ahead and, together with agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, we tracked down many of the Qaeda members responsible for the attack, secured confessions from them and prosecuted them. We were aided by courageous Yemenis from the country’s security, law enforcement and judicial services who shared a commitment to justice and an understanding that ignoring Al Qaeda would only embolden it. We left Yemen with most of the terrorists locked up. ” Ali H. Soufan in the New York Times, October 11, 2010

Isn’t that amazing? They “tracked down” the terrorists who then “confessed” to the crimes, were prosecuted and imprisoned. Case closed, Perry Mason. On to the next injustice!

Listen to the glibness of “secured confessions from them”. What do you think that means? I guess Al Qaeda is not as hard-nosed as some people make them out to be! They were arrested. They were put in cells. The interrogator from the CIA or FBI said, “all right now — tell us the truth!” And the Al Qaeda member wept. Do I have to? All right…

I’m guessing that most people don’t pause at that “secured confessions” and wonder just what that means. I’m guessing that most people would just assume that the evidence that these men were responsible for the attack on the Cole is overwhelming and definitive.

I’m guessing that most people don’t wonder why confessions were necessary if this gentleman, identified as an FBI agent, had clear and convincing evidence.

I’m guessing that most people don’t wonder how the confessions were obtained– these men were held in Yemen, a Muslim state governed by Sharia law, whose elections are rated as “partly free” by international bodies.

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Bullies

There is a grave flaw in the conservatives’ argument that the government should stay out of our lives as much as possible. Or maybe it isn’t a flaw. Maybe it is the real essence of conservatism.

If our world is a school yard, big corporations and the rich are like the bullies. Conservatives want the government to stay out of it: the bullies knock you down, kick you, and take your lunch money. They abuse the girls, toss their garbage wherever they like, and when the ice cream man arrives, they take all the ice cream, drive off the ice cream man, and then resell it to the rest of the kids at twice the price. Oh wait– the school yard does have an army. It’s role is to go to other school yards and bully those kids and take their lunch money. They bring it back and have a parade commemorating their success, and then keep it all for themselves. Every day, they remind you that the bullies in the other school yards are all plotting to steal your lunch money, or worse. They make up songs praising themselves and force everyone to sing them.

If George Bush runs this school yard, then the bullies take your credit cards and run up a huge bill buying weapons with which to go invade other school yards. They buy these weapons from themselves and make huge profits. Most of the weapons cost a lot but they don’t work properly and eventually get tossed. Then they hold solemn parades on the basketball court. “If only,” they tell us, “the other bullies would stop trying to take our lunch money, we could have peace!”

In Glenn Beck’s and Sarah Palin’s ideal world, that’s the way it should be. If you’re not big enough or tough enough to stand up to the bullies, too bad for you.

They look solemnly at the faces in the school yard: you don’t want the government telling you what to do, do you?

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The Last Christian President

I have long regarded Jimmy Carter as the only real Christian president of the last 50 years. He has recently given a number of interviews with the publication of “White House Diary”, an account of his four years in the White House.

Carter used to carry his own luggage, even as president. He also put a stop to the absolutely inane practice of playing “Hail to the Chief” every time the president enters a room.

Did you you hear that, tea party Republicans? You howl about your politicians being corrupted by Washington. So how did people react when Carter put a stop to paid musicians following him around with idiotic tributes every time he met with the public? They hated him. They hated him when he put solar panels on the White House and Ronald Reagan, in a monumental act of mindless spite, had them removed. They hated him most of all when he preached to America, when he suggested that people learn to postpone gratification, make sacrifices for the greater good, and stop indulging in mindless consumerism.

Frank Capra used to make movies about naive innocents of pleasant virtue suddenly being thrust into corporate or political rats’ nests of corrupt decadence. In the Capra films, virtue triumphed and “the people” came to the rescue. Well, no they didn’t– check out “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”. It’s actually one of the most darkly cynical movies about politics ever made.

So Carter kept America out of a war with Iran, and he cut U.S. dependence on foreign oil by substantial amounts, and his conservation policies produced stunning gains in efficiencies. And he was vilified by Republicans for leaving office with a deficit of about $45 billion. Ronald Reagan came in and tackled that deficit problem: he ran it up to $450 billion by the time he left office, but you should hear Republicans wax nostalgic about the “great” Ronald Reagan. It took another “liberal” (by American standards), Bill Clinton, who got the deficit under control.

The closest recent presidential candidate to Jimmy Carter was Al Gore, who, similarly, understood that some self-restraint and sacrifice is good for the country. Gore was smart and fairly virtuous– as politicians go– and he seemed more rueful than disappointed when the Supreme Court paid its debt to the Republican Party and put Bush into office. Gore, like Carter, was a bit of a moralist. He liked to lecture people about social virtue. Americans don’t like that. Gore might well be the best president the U.S. never had.

Since he left office, Carter has made a career out of volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, various peace missions, and living modestly on his farm indulging his grand-children. Everyone calls him the best ex-president there ever was. He may also have been the most responsible president there ever was, but his reward was to be ridiculed by the very people who elect those characterless, corrupt politicians over and over again to undo all the good policies Carter implemented.

The greatest compliment to President Jimmy Carter: the scads of third world dictators, torturers, and murderers who expressed their relief when he was knocked out of office by Ronald Reagan. Thank god! Finally an end to all the hassles about human rights, for heaven’s sake.

The attitude of many European leaders to Carter: I remember reading about it at the time and being rather flabbergasted that they seemed to prefer the worldy and “sophisticated” Nixon. I thought Nixon was the bad guy, bombing Cambodia, rattling the sabres, promoting the nuclear deterrent.

It turns out the Europeans appreciate someone who understands that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelets, as they say. Well, no, let’s say: you have to kill people to get what you want.

It’s complicated.

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Decrypt-Kickers: RIM’s Blackberry

I personally find it hard to believe RIM’s assertions that the encryption on the data stored by their Blackberry servers can only be cracked by the user. The spiel given to the media today sounded painfully precise and specious.

India, China, Saudi Arabia, and several other nations have announced that they want RIM to give them access to software that will allow them to read users’ messages and data. For a week or so, it seemed like it was something RIM could do, but didn’t want to. Then they announced that, no, they couldn’t do it. Only the user could unencrypt his own data.

Hmmm. Hmmmmmm.

Silent through all this was the U.S. Government, which, thanks to the Patriot Act, can now lock you up without a warrant, send you to Jordan or Syria to be tortured, then imprison you in Guantanamo for five years, with no consequences whatsoever (thanks, Obama, for tricking us into believing you really thought this was unconstitutional or an affront to human rights in some way). Does RIM want me to believe that the U.S. government was content to be told that they would not be allowed to look at anyone’s data? Tough luck, Mr. Cheney– that is a user’s private information. You have no constitutional authority to look at it without permission.

I believe Obama probably doesn’t really like the Patriot Act. I’ll bet he also really thought he was going to change things. I believe that he doesn’t quite have the guts we thought he had when he was running for president. The American military and intelligence establishment, I figure, confronted him with their juiced-up scenarios of what could happen if one of these guys that they just know is a terrorist were able to blow up a subway station or the Statue of Liberty or something, and I’m sure the Republicans made sure he knew that they would be all over Fox News blaming him– and liberals in general– for the heart-rending deaths of innocent, lovable, happy, employed American citizens.

The essential dynamic here is this: if the intelligence agency really had enough accurate information to justly convict a person of a terrorism-related offense, they could easily do so legally any time they wanted. In fact, American juries fall all over themselves to convict anybody– especially colored or foreign people– of any offense imaginable, given the opportunity to do so, upon even the flimsiest evidence (and even, as recently reported, when the suspect has been exonerated by DNA evidence!).

The Patriot Act only exists so that the government can circumvent the normal, rational requirements of the constitution and lock somebody up just because they just know, in some intangible, irrational, unprovable, way, that the varmint was up to no good.

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Russell Defreitas and Obama’s Depressing Flag Lapel Pin

It is absolutely necessary that you believe there are dire threats against the United States out there and that only the institutional powers of the United States law enforcement agencies, along with Dick Cheney, can keep you safe:

But as time went on, more was revealed about the plot and the unlikelihood of its success (the fuel pipeline, for example, had safety mechanisms that would have prevented cascading explosions), as well as the level of government involvement (the informant had played a somewhat enabling role in pushing forward the plot). Ny Times, August 1, 2010

Yes, yes. And it turns out that one defendant appears to be somewhat inept:

Mr. “Russell Defreitas can’t mastermind his way out of the on-off switch on a video camera,”

That’s his own lawyer speaking.

And once again we have the specter of government infiltrators actually running the conspiracy– isn’t this “entrapment”? Yes, it is. Absolutely it is.

Feel safer? Mr. Defreitas is going to spend a long, long time in prison, mainly because he is a fool. There is not a politician in the United States who would countenance anything but the most draconian sentence imaginable. Do you hear me, Americans? You live in a nation where not a single politician of note has the guts or courage to state the obvious. Not a single one of your leaders, Democrat or Republican is willing to consider for even one second the possibility of saying what he really thinks about all this.

You’re laughing? I hear you laughing. Who cares about a man like Defreitas who sounds foreign anyway. But these same leaders are the ones who manage your economy and the environment and wars and intelligence and safety. And there may come a day when we all pay the price for the same lack of courage and conviction.

Obama’s depressing flag pin:

Yes, he had to do it. If he didn’t put the flag pin in his lapel, someone on Fox News would have zoomed in on the lapel and stared into the camera, oozing insider confidence, and whispered to his audience: “is it asking too much for our president to be even a little patriotic?” And Obama would have had to say on TV “I am patriotic” leading the viewer to wonder why he thought anyone thought he wasn’t patriotic. And so it goes. And so you Americans, so proud of your fantastic culture, your Coors beer, your jack-ass videos, your right to train your children to use rifles… we in Canada salute you.

 

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Wikileaks

It is very telling that the panels of experts summoned by TV news programs to discuss the Wikileaks issue are uniformly representative of old media. Here is a Washington Post reporter, here is a New York Times reporter, here is CBS News, here is the Wall Street Journal. Like a Greek chorus: bad, bad Wikileaks! How irresponsible! Do you people now realize how much added value we mediators of news events provide you? And then, with a straight face, one of them commends the New York Times for taking the story to the government first! To make sure they weren’t going to cause any trouble?

What the hell is going on here? We count on the reporters to be informed about the issues and speak to us as an independent voice. And here they get an interesting story about the extent to which the U.S. has over-stated it’s successes in Afghanistan, and they can’t decide for themselves whether or not it should be reported. So who do they ask? The government.

The Wikileaks documents reveal, among other things, that the government has misrepresented the activities they are conducting on behalf of the tax payer. Fox News bleats: we don’t want to know! And those who do want to know should be criminalized.

They all just demonstrated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, exactly why we need Wikileaks. In God’s name, we desperately need some journalists out there who aren’t in the toxic embrace of government or big business.

The New York Times has admitted that they were taken to the cleaners on the weapons of mass destruction issue in Iraq. Absolutely taken to the cleaners. They issued solemn editorials endorsing the invasion of Iraq. It only took them two years to realize they had been duped. And now, having not learned a blasted thing, here they are again, trying to be “responsible”, and completely abandoning their duties as journalists.

In two years, or five, will they finally admit that Afghanistan is a lost cause?

 

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I just happened to be wandering around Kursk one day with 1 million men and a few tanks and…

At the end of World War II, German Field Marshal Erich Von Manstein surrendered to the British and was incarcerated at a camp in Bridgend (somewhere in England) for about 8 years. His health, apparently, was a concern, so he was released early from an 18-year sentence (after a mere 4 years). Then he lived for another 20 years, during which he apparently enjoyed the confidence of the new, democratic West German government.

Von Manstein had lots of friends, including Churchill and General Montgomery. They testified to his good character. Von Manstein, you see, was one of those “honorable” Prussian generals who only wanted to serve his country with courage, dignity, and good grooming.

How he suddenly found himself in Stalingrad with a million Germans with guns and tanks remains a mystery to this day.

Von Manstein wrote in his biography that if Hitler had only left the generals alone to manage the war in the East, Germany would have won the war. What a shame. Isn’t that what comes to mind when you read a statement like that? What a shame.  If only…

Aside from the fact that it probably wasn’t true– Russia was not France– you would think Von Manstein would have been glad– given his avowed personal reservations about Nazism— that someone prevented Hitler from taking over the world. Especially since it couldn’t be him, what with duty and honor and all that.

Like Rommel, Von Manstein claimed he never carried out many of Hitler’s criminal directives and that appears to be partly true. Other than the one to kill 5 million Russians and bomb Stalingrad to the ground, of course.

So conservatives love to point to a guy like Von Manstein because, from a certain, twisted perspective, he seems to represent the idea that war-making can be ethical, uplifting, spiffy, and delightful. What fun it would have been if that parvenu Hitler hadn’t spoiled the party!

Unfortunately, one has to accept the fact that, like Rommel, and Beck, Von Manstein didn’t really seem to have that big of a problem with Hitler as long as he was winning. The ethical issues only seemed to come up when the possibility of war crimes trials appeared on the horizon.

That’s the problem with the entire “conservative resistance” to Hitler– they almost all supported him regardless of his policies as long as he was winning. The problem with the Jews? Well, you had to obey orders or you would be shot. Except that the Italians weren’t very good at obeying those orders and they didn’t get shot.  They were elbowed aside by people like Von Manstein so the real Fascists could get he job done: round up those Jews.

When Hitler started to lose, like Kurt Waldheim, the good generals  suddenly seemed to realize that the concentration camps were a bad idea. “I knew it! I knew we would get in trouble for that…”

Would Nazi Germany have defeated Russia if Hitler had left it up to the Generals? Maybe. Suppose the Generals had decided that a two-front war was not viable– suppose they would have concentrated all of their fire power on Russia. And suppose they would have prepared better and started in April instead of June…. Suppose they had seized the oil fields in the Caucasus before attacking Stalingrad?

But even the generals did not anticipate the T-34 tank, in the huge numbers the Soviets were able to muster, or the millions of soldiers they could eventually hurl into the war.

More importantly, they had anticipated that Russia would surrender after massive defeats on the battlefield.  Russia was not going to surrender under any circumstance.  There was no “there” there, for the “victorious” generals to arrive at.  Just desolation, destruction, and eternal resistance.

Von Manstein vs Rudolph Hess

Hess: left Germany in May 1941, years before most of the worst Nazi atrocities were committed.

Von Manstein: fought to the end of the Reich.

Hess: betrayed Hitler who ordered that his plane be shot down.

Von Manstein: loyal to the fuehrer to the end.

Hess: wanted to negotiate a peace deal with Britain, possibly with the aim of turning the Reich’s full force upon the Soviet Union.

Von Manstein: I was just following orders, except when I didn’t. Critical of the officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler.

Hess: life in prison.

Von Manstein: released after serving 4 years of an 18-year sentence.

… because of his health. He died in 1973.