With the last Holocaust survivors quietly passing away, one might also expect to see accountability debates slowing to a trickle. Surprisingly, however, recent years show an upswing in corporate World War II-related atonement debates. Interest in corporate participation in mass atrocity has expanded worldwide; yet what constitutes ethical corporate behavior during and after war remains understudied. This article considers these questions through a study of the French National Railways' (SNCF) roles during the German occupation and its more recent struggle to make amends. This study demonstrates that ethical business leadership requires taking responsibility for past as well as current decisions. Most executives grappling with complex corporate histories work in isolation, in part because the scholarship on business ethics fails to provide guidance. Without such guidance, corporations often respond to accusations about their pasts with carefully crafted statements and legal strategies rather than deep expressions of moral leadership. To assist in remedying this tendency, this paper simultaneously encourages companies to engage in deeper reflection on corporate history, while urging scholars to help guide corporations through critical ethical conversations.
Mass atrocity requires the participation of numerous individuals and groups, yet only a few find themselves held accountable. How are these few selected? This article offers a framework that is useful for understanding how the condemned often embody attributes that keep them in the spotlight. Because norms used to identify perpetrators can set the context for future violence, long-term security requires interrupting both the actions of perpetrators and the discourses about them. A form of praxis, this study of the contemporary conflict over the French National Railways’ (SNCF) amends-making for its World War II transport of deportees towards death camps considers how certain perpetrators come to stand for the many. The SNCF remains in the spotlight not because of greater culpability or an unwillingness to make amends but because it embodies attributes of an ‘ideal’ perpetrator: it is (1) strong, (2) abstractable, (3) representative of the nature of the crime, and (4) has a champion-opponent who focuses attention on the perpetrator. Understanding the labeling process makes visible who and what we ignore at our own peril.
This article provides an overview of how research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is oriented to meet the current ecological and environmental challenges facing agricultural systems through strategic planning, as coordinated by the Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS). Strategic planning is a rigorous process across the USDA's agencies and offices, often requiring input from multiple stakeholders and multiple sectors. A subset of those agencies engages in, and supports, research. The OCS supports the USDA's Chief Scientist by coordinating high-level strategic science planning across the Department on both annual and five-year cycles (REE, 2012). OCS strategic science plans are reviewed and updated annually, and completely reformulated every 5 years. To develop these plans, senior advisors to the Chief Scientist work in tandem with partner agencies, such as the Forest Service (https ://www.fs.fed.us/), and experts from across the Department. These strategic plans play a major role in setting the tone and prioritization for research by first, making ongoing research visible and accessible to Department leadership for informed decision-making; and second, by making research and priorities accessible to stakeholders, which also ensures visibility. These strategic planning cycles incorporate in-house programmatic and academic review, as well as active stakeholder engagement, including surveys, public listening sessions and USDAsponsored meetings to identify research and development needs and opportunities. Research initiatives are developed with an aim to both maintain and enhance productivity, while ensuring responsible stewardship of resilient natural resources. The high-level strategic plan developed by the OCS sets the tone for science across the Department and is aligned to USDA-wide strategic goals. Individual agencies and offices additionally engage in more detailed strategic planning to implement research efforts. We do not describe those individual processes here, instead, we highlight examples of research at two USDA agencies: Research, Education, and Economics (REE, https ://www.ree.usda.gov/), and the Forest Service to illustrate how the Department orients scientific efforts to meet future challenges. We consider this specifically in relation to two of the seven major strategic goals of the Department: fostering productive and sustainable use of the U.S.'s national forest system lands; and employing
The French National Railways' Idealized War Identities
Post-conflict Narrative LandscapesMass violence relies on stories about who must die. These stories emerge first as propaganda that promotes dehumanization and exclusion of the targeted group. Narratives of exclusion even circulate in children's books, as they did in Germany prior to World War II, telling stories about Jews as poisonous mushrooms. Several survivors I interviewed recalled seeing these books, now commonly on display at Holocaust museums. These kinds of messages now circulate through social media platforms at an unprecedented pace. Divisive discourses come from within as well as from the outside by foreigners looking to destabilize a community. Those propagating the narratives suggest the need to eradicate or at least respond forcefully to evil others. In so doing, they position themselves as the potential heroes.Maintaining authoritarian control requires controling information and interpretation of that information. Citizens subjected to governmentsanctioned media campaigns struggle to discern constructed threats from real ones. Through social media platforms, torrents of disinformation produce paralysis. Other messages are more carefully calibrated, strategically oriented toward producing shifts in public sympathies (Krafft and Donovan 2020).Are these messages attempts to grab power, or genuinely harkening to a time (or time to come) when group cohesion was (or will be) necessary for survival, or some mixture of both? Regardless, the out-group finds itself labeled the "perpetrator," those with real or perceived threats to this group become the "victims," and those challenging the regime's exclusion attempts find themselves labeled "terrorists."
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