ABSTRACT
A few dissenting voices thus reopened in court the debate the lawyers had wanted to close before the beginning of the trial. But to what avail? Of what use, what impact could these testimonies and the contradictions they brought to the official version of crimes against humanity be, since material humanityflesh-and-blood humanity-let the judges and the prosecution down, undermined those who spoke in its name, and even carried sarcasm to the point of ostensibly choosing its designated assassins against its own spokesmen? If what Durkheim wrote is true-that “an act is criminal when it offends strong and definite states of the collective consciousness”—the presence on the bench of Jacques Vergès, Nabil Bouaïta, and Jean-Martin M’Bemba for the defense said in itself that the extermination of the Jews was a crime of local interest, a drop of European blood in the ocean of human suffering, and thus offended only the consciousness of white people.
