For practical purposes, the lawyers are the only ones who are going to win . By the time they are going to finish the case the man will be dead. Happy victory.
People feel a great sense of relief when a really evil person is captured and a jury of citizens declared to his face that he is, indeed, evil--with the entire population of the planet watching. I promise that a good many of the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of his victims will sleep a little easier, even if he drops dead ten seconds after the reading of the verdict.
anyways whats the use...he is 97, and its been a joy ride, having a little fire at end, isnt that big of a deal for him. battle lost.
It's not for him. It's for
us. It reassures us of our humanity, that we can never forget or forgive crimes of that nature.
I've posted this in another discussion and some of you may have read it, but it's quite relevant here. When I was in Yugoslavia in 1973 (some of you kids probably never heard of Yugoslavia) my friend took me downtown to the main park in Niš, one of the largest cities in Serbia. There were three monuments in the shape of weeping humans. He explained that the large one represented the Jews, who suffered most under the Nazis. The second one was for the Serbs, because it's their country after all and they suffered too. The small one was for the Gypsies. I thought I misunderstood his word in Esperanto. "Gypsies? You guys hate Gypsies. Why did you build a monument to them?"
He said, "Because even the Gypsies didn't deserve
that. Nobody did."
We have a Holocaust Museum here in Washington. (I haven't been there, places like that make me cry so badly that I can't see anything.) They have one exhibit that is just a pile of luggage that people brought with them to the camps. They carefully wrote their names and addresses on the various cases.
They assumed that when the war was over, they'd be going home. And don't get me started on the baby shoes. Honestly, I don't know half of the exhibits they have because just reading about that stuff makes me cry.
Some neo-Nazi scumbag walked in the door one day with a shotgun hidden under his raincoat, and killed one of the guards. An Afro-American guard! That was just too poignant.
I don't care about capital punishment, I think most people just want justice. If guilty, I don't need him to be useful to society, just out of it.
I think a lot of people would like to walk past his cell, just to see him and to let him know that they (or more likely their parents or grandparents) survived. There are a lot of reasons why capital punishment isn't necessarily the kind of "justice" that is needed after a crime.
Still I find it difficult to feel for this guy. I have never been in his shoes so should not judge, but I think I would be more merciful if he had turned himself in decades ago and devoted his life to educating people about what happened and promoting charities to improve the lives of the ww2 victims. Maybe I ask too much. Maybe that would have put him at risk of murder by the hands of other outstanding criminals. I don't know.
You don't understand evil. I'm not sure that any of those guys ever really repented and realized or decided that they were wrong.
For one thing, antisemitism was one of the defining motifs of European Christendom for more than a millennium. Many people raised their children to believe that the Jews were determined to destroy their way of life and make them all their slaves--or at least their clerks. Even people who weren't raised that way lived among people who were. They were excoriated for being wealthy, even though that wealth was due to a Christian misinterpretation of a line in the Bible, assuming that any lending of money for interest was equivalent to usury and therefore a sin. Since it was only a sin to lend but not to borrow, they were happy to borrow from the Jews, who naturally became bankers. Duh?
Anyway, once you've murdered dozens or hundreds or thousands of innocent people, you absolutely
have to spend the rest of your life believing that you were right. Who could live with that memory if they realized they were wrong?
I don't really feel like I have any right to judge even though it is a task I find easy to do.
Arguably the most important service that civilization performs for us is justice: deciding who's right and wrong. This does away with the Stone Age system of the stronger killing the weaker. The certainty of justice is in fact what makes civilization even possible: We no longer have to devote a considerable fraction of our time, attention and other resources to
protecting ourselves against each other, allowing us to be more productive, generating the surplus wealth or "capital" that advances civilization.
Civilization has a legal system that appoints people to do the judging properly: accumulating all the evidence, weighing it, arguing it, listening to all the witnesses, consulting with experts in the law, and finally making a dispassionate ruling
on behalf of all of us. You and I are not supposed to judge others, unless we're called upon to be jurors and do it right.
Definitely makes me question myself.
Nothing wrong with that. But when you find the answer, be satisfied with it, and with yourself, and move on. No one is perfect, but if we all do the best we can it will be okay.
Yeah I'm loving the moral equivocation between Holocaust victims and Nazi genocidaires, there. Because we all know that the Holocaust was a perfectly understandable, if not exactly justified, response to the extreme provocation of Jews... umm... insisting on prosecuting war criminals even if they're really old, or something?
I'd just roll my eyes at that. Except then I pick up my newspaper and see the Jews punishing the Palestinians for the Holocaust, because they were never given the chance to bomb Germany.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you're offered a choice between being killed yourself, or murdering a 5-digit number of innocent people, you're ethically obligated to choose your own death.
Hell, every day there's a story about some guy who risked his life to rescue
one child.
It's an instinct in our species. We're pack-social, which means that we watch each other's kids. But more than that, our children have the longest maturation of any mammal. (Elephants grow up in five years, whales in two.) That means that we have to be on our toes and keep an eye on
everybody's kids for a decade and a half, because their parents have a lot of other important things they have to do in addition to being parents.
I mean geeze, that is one of the
defining characteristics of human beings: to be kind to children.
It is not even a slight exaggeration to say that anyone who can kill children casually is
not human.