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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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Accessory to 300,000 murders. I can hear Bruce saying "That's special, isn't it?"
That probably counts as "actually" doing something.
I'm just wondering what you would think if he were a 94 year old who had been accessory to 300,000 child murders?
Is it OK for him to have a toaster in prison? |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | Accessory to 300,000 murders. I can hear Bruce saying "That's special, isn't it?"
That probably counts as "actually" doing something.
I'm just wondering what you would think if he were a 94 year old who had been accessory to 300,000 child murders?
Is it OK for him to have a toaster in prison? |
Difference would be what? I dare say a number of the 300,000 were children.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| think positive wrote: | | Firstly, I'll keep it short, as I remember years ago when a younger David trivialised the whole death camp situation. (Not convinced David, you believe any of them should have been on trial, sorry). |
I feel like I deserve the right to defend myself from that accusation – you almost make me sound like a Holocaust denier – but unless you can actually provide a quote, I have no idea what you're talking about. I certainly can't imagine that I would have ever 'trivialised' what happened in the death camps.
As for which of the participants should have been on trial, that's a difficult question that I don't think anyone can answer conclusively without thinking about it deeply, but obviously I believe the ringleaders and architects of the policies needed to answer for their crimes.
It's a shame you felt the need to drop that in, because otherwise I agree with a great deal of that post. One exception is this:
| think positive wrote: | | At what point does 'the rules are different in wartime" end? Without knowing the answer to what he did since, we have no right to comment. |
I don't think the issue is 'wartime' – the Holocaust was not an act of war, but of mass murder – so much as the orientation of the society itself. If you live in a society where a certain kind of brutality is normalised and mandated, what extent of participation is required in order to be punished in a future society?
I think we need to keep the principles of criminal justice close by here. To what extent is the casual Nazi in Hitler's Germany a danger to public safety after 1945? To what extent do the post-1945 public need to be deterred from such acts should tyranny ever return? To what extent does punishment serve a rehabilitative function? And to what extent does it provide comfort to the sufferers?
On most of those counts, convictions like this would seem to fail absolutely. Public safety? Obviously an irrelevant concern. Deterrent? How can it possibly apply, when the lesson is "don't follow the rules of your society if they happen to be immoral"? Rehabilitation? One presumes that it has already occurred.
The only way that such a punishment could be justified is that it might bring some comfort to victims, but which victims? Of the few who still live, who would hold a grudge against such a casual participant compared to those who caused them actual harm (the soldiers, the architects of the policy)? And if a very few just want to see as many participants punished as possible, is that justice being sought, or just an undirected form of vengeance?
An analogy I've used in the past regards animal rights. Let's say, in an Australia of the future, any deliberate killing of a mammal is classified as murder, equal to taking a human life (and to adequately consider this hypothetical, you have to put yourself in the shoes of a radical vegan who believes this to be so). Evidently, the mass slaughter of animals in this country for food, for science, for cosmetics and for sport would be seen as an unspeakable crime. But would it be right to punish the butchers and abattoir workers of today? Would it be right to punish the ordinary citizens who once supported the meat industry by buying unethically sourced meat from the supermarket? Would it be right to punish the politicians who allowed the meat industry to thrive? Or would we just punish those who were found to have been unnecessarily cruel while carrying out their duties?
Those are open questions. I would be inclined to avoid prosecution in most cases. How about you?
_________________
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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Fair enough I apologize
_________________
You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| stui magpie wrote: | | Pies4shaw wrote: | Accessory to 300,000 murders. I can hear Bruce saying "That's special, isn't it?"
That probably counts as "actually" doing something.
I'm just wondering what you would think if he were a 94 year old who had been accessory to 300,000 child murders?
Is it OK for him to have a toaster in prison? |
Difference would be what? I dare say a number of the 300,000 were children. |
A hell of a lot of them were, especially the girls, the men and older boys survived because they could work.
As for guilt well anyone hi stands by and allows a baby to be killed by smashing it against the wall, and does nothing, either then or after the fact, is guilty of something
_________________
You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | Accessory to 300,000 murders. I can hear Bruce saying "That's special, isn't it?"
That probably counts as "actually" doing something.
I'm just wondering what you would think if he were a 94 year old who had been accessory to 300,000 child murders?
Is it OK for him to have a toaster in prison? |
A gas oven might be more appropriate
_________________
You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| David wrote: | | think positive wrote: | | Firstly, I'll keep it short, as I remember years ago when a younger David trivialised the whole death camp situation. (Not convinced David, you believe any of them should have been on trial, sorry). |
I feel like I deserve the right to defend myself from that accusation – you almost make me sound like a Holocaust denier – but unless you can actually provide a quote, I have no idea what you're talking about. I certainly can't imagine that I would have ever 'trivialised' what happened in the death camps.
As for which of the participants should have been on trial, that's a difficult question that I don't think anyone can answer conclusively without thinking about it deeply, but obviously I believe the ringleaders and architects of the policies needed to answer for their crimes.
It's a shame you felt the need to drop that in, because otherwise I agree with a great deal of that post. One exception is this:
| think positive wrote: | | At what point does 'the rules are different in wartime" end? Without knowing the answer to what he did since, we have no right to comment. |
I don't think the issue is 'wartime' – the Holocaust was not an act of war, but of mass murder – so much as the orientation of the society itself. If you live in a society where a certain kind of brutality is normalised and mandated, what extent of participation is required in order to be punished in a future society?
I think we need to keep the principles of criminal justice close by here. To what extent is the casual Nazi in Hitler's Germany a danger to public safety after 1945? To what extent do the post-1945 public need to be deterred from such acts should tyranny ever return? To what extent does punishment serve a rehabilitative function? And to what extent does it provide comfort to the sufferers?
On most of those counts, convictions like this would seem to fail absolutely. Public safety? Obviously an irrelevant concern. Deterrent? How can it possibly apply, when the lesson is "don't follow the rules of your society if they happen to be immoral"? Rehabilitation? One presumes that it has already occurred.
The only way that such a punishment could be justified is that it might bring some comfort to victims, but which victims? Of the few who still live, who would hold a grudge against such a casual participant compared to those who caused them actual harm (the soldiers, the architects of the policy)? And if a very few just want to see as many participants punished as possible, is that justice being sought, or just an undirected form of vengeance?
An analogy I've used in the past regards animal rights. Let's say, in an Australia of the future, any deliberate killing of a mammal is classified as murder, equal to taking a human life (and to adequately consider this hypothetical, you have to put yourself in the shoes of a radical vegan who believes this to be so). Evidently, the mass slaughter of animals in this country for food, for science, for cosmetics and for sport would be seen as an unspeakable crime. But would it be right to punish the butchers and abattoir workers of today? Would it be right to punish the ordinary citizens who once supported the meat industry by buying unethically sourced meat from the supermarket? Would it be right to punish the politicians who allowed the meat industry to thrive? Or would we just punish those who were found to have been unnecessarily cruel while carrying out their duties?
Those are open questions. I would be inclined to avoid prosecution in most cases. How about you? |
The function of punishment in such cases is purely exemplary - we're expressing the extent of our collective repugnance. That's why it doesn't matter how old or decrepit the defendant is (save, perhaps, in assessing the appropriate sentence - even so, 4 years seemed to me to be a little light on for being an accessory to 300,000 murders). |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Going on what you know about the case, what do you think an appropriate sentence might have been?
I think the problem with your summation is that, while there is indeed collective repugnance, it's not really directed at him or his specific actions; it's directed at the crime itself, a crime which he played a pretty tangential role in at worst.
I generally don't think much of scape-goating, and that seems to be all this is at the end of the day.
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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Accessory to 300,000 murders in these particular circumstances? Probably 300,000 life sentences, served (for the most part) concurrently.
It isn't really like your Vegan example, is it? He could scarcely have thought it was OK to participate in such horrendous acts. Murder/genocide - call it what you will, it was never morally acceptable, whatever the domestic political position may have been. |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | Accessory to 300,000 murders in these particular circumstances? Probably 300,000 life sentences, served (for the most part) concurrently.
It isn't really like your Vegan example, is it? He could scarcely have thought it was OK to participate in such horrendous acts. Murder/genocide - call it what you will, it was never morally acceptable, whatever the domestic political position may have been. |
I totally agree with you, but doesn't take into account the 'kill or be killed' factor. Should it? I couldn't tell you. I like to think I'd choose death rather than be a part of something so evil, however factor in my kids, I don't know. It's a line I'm glad I'm never likely to encounter.
_________________
You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | Accessory to 300,000 murders in these particular circumstances? Probably 300,000 life sentences, served (for the most part) concurrently.
It isn't really like your Vegan example, is it? He could scarcely have thought it was OK to participate in such horrendous acts. Murder/genocide - call it what you will, it was never morally acceptable, whatever the domestic political position may have been. |
Isn't it? To this day, we happily accept certain forms of killing as morally acceptable, whether they be warfare (because taking a soldier's life seems to be considered by most to be morally unimpeachable), 'accidental' air strikes on enemy civilians, capital punishment (if you're of that bent) and animal slaughter (acceptable solely on the basis that they are considered lesser life forms). Given all that, and given the brutality of human history, I don't really see how you can believe in any coherent universal moral law against murder (unless you're appealing to some metaphysical absolute moral law, which is practically impossible without being some kind of religious adherent).
So to say that murder/mass murder will never be morally acceptable seems highly dubious, particularly given that we know for a fact that, in Nazi Germany, Jews were seen as subhuman, and killing them was not generally considered immoral. Which makes the 'Vegan' analogy even more useful, because if we did not consider animals inferior then how could we possibly defend their mass slaughter?
It's not even that obscure a hypothetical. I strongly suspect that there is going to be a big animal rights movement within our lifetimes that may well result in current practices being treated as barbaric. If so, the question then, as now, will be "can we judge people who acted under a different legal/moral framework to ours? Should criminal justice principles that apply in our society (for instance, the way we would treat an "accessory to murder" nowadays) apply to accessories to state-sanctioned murder? It certainly opens a huge can of worms, and the German court have well and truly prised the lid off. It will certainly make for an interesting precedent.
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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No, I don't accept your premise. They knew it was wrong and that they shouldn't do it but did so anyway.
It's not about "universal moral law" - it's about recognising that doing something that might have got you shot or hanged last week as murder may not be quite halal this week, either - especially if you aid and abet it 300,000 times. It would have required an extraordinary lack of capacity for self-reflection for this chap not to have wondered idly to himself whether what he was involved in was quite right.
The problem with your Vegan example is the inevitable element of retrospectivity it entails - there is no such crime as killing an animal per se (cruelty is, of course, actionable) but there was at all relevant times a prohibition against murder in German law. It's a politician's response to decide that killing some people isn't murder because "they're not really people" (even though, of course, they were until very recently). If you can accept that as a defensible proposition, you can justify anything. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | No, I don't accept your premise. They knew it was wrong and that they shouldn't do it but did so anyway.
It's not about "universal moral law" - it's about recognising that doing something that might have got you shot or hanged last week as murder may not be quite halal this week, either - especially if you aid and abet it 300,000 times. It would have required an extraordinary lack of capacity for self-reflection for this chap not to have wondered idly to himself whether what he was involved in was quite right.
The problem with your Vegan example is the inevitable element of retrospectivity it entails - there is no such crime as killing an animal per se (cruelty is, of course, actionable) but there was at all relevant times a prohibition against murder in German law. It's a politician's response to decide that killing some people isn't murder because "they're not really people" (even though, of course, they were until very recently). If you can accept that as a defensible proposition, you can justify anything. |
Correct. The Vegan example is more like looking at what white settlers did in taking land of Aboriginals, you have to look through the lens of how it was viewed at that time. We can say now how wrong it was but it was viewed differently at that time. The holocaust is/was totally different.
I still come back though to how this bloke could be considered an accessory in that nothing he actually did aided or abetted the slaughter other than the fact that he didn't try to prevent it or actively break anyone out, both actions that would have likely had him shot if he had tried.
The train drivers who delivered the human cargo to the camps for execution were more accessories than he was.
The prison guards who prevented them from escaping and who herded then into the ovens etc were far more accessories.
If this bloke is considered an accessory then as I said earlier basically so is everyone who wore a German uniform of any kind during the war. Do we really want to go there 70 years later? The only area where David's vegan simile almost works is that the young german men at that time had been fed several years of propaganda dehumanising the Jews, which goes toward them being able to do what they were told to do. It took witnessing the brutal murder of a child to snap him back to reality at which point he wanted out.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Rundle wrote a good piece on this a few months back before the trial. I won't post the whole thing, but here are some of the more pertinent paragraphs:
http://www.crikey.com.au/2015/04/23/rundle-nazi-trial-a-triumph-of-our-imagined-good-over-evil/
| Quote: | Rundle: Nazi trial a triumph of our imagined good over evil
...
Duress was relevant to anyone within the Nazi empire, a death cult that would not take kindly to statements of conscientious objection. To refuse to serve as a guard in one camp might find you an inmate in another. Yet even so the principle of duress could not survive the sheer amount of death involved. To participate in one, 10, 100 killings to save yourself was one thing — but then 1000? Fifty thousand? At some point, a principle of refusal overrides. It has to be a crime to continue to consent, even if refusing courts your own death.
But such a necessary principle creates an unusual separation between value and fact. It establishes as the necessary minimum of innocence, an act that most of us would fail to do. We can reasonably assume, unless wholly unrealistic about ourselves, that we might well fail the moral test — cling to life, do what we’re told. Every historical event and wealth of testing suggests this.
We’d all hope to be the refuser — and that’s what the success of “hero” movies turn on, our narcissistic magical feeling of specialness, that we would — but the evidence suggests otherwise. Prosecution of mid- and low-levels genocide functionaries is a tragic contradiction — we must refuse them the defence that arises from known human nature.
To now extend that and the burden of that contradiction to the most separated functionaries seems to have achieved a reverse effect to the commitment to common humanity that genocide prosecutions are supposed to serve. We now expect people caught up in the maw of mass killing to be vastly better than most might be in the same situation.
Assigned to gruesome, but non-lethal duties, Groening is implicitly required to at the very least have refused all duties connected to the mass killings, at which point he would have been in great peril. But the individual human is disregarded so that he can stand for the way in which we wish humanity would behave.
...
We may well be thinking about them for hundreds of years; nothing else like them may come along, though radical evil has many forms. When future historians judge our recent history and look at the three decades of needless suffering and death imposed by the IMF debt-bomb, the 12 million who died when AIDS exploded back into Africa, the five million children a year who die from water-caused diarrhoea, don’t expect to be found innocent.
In the meantime, what to do with Oskar Groening? If we had the courage we would admit that the legitimate desire to live gives one a lot of latitude when one is in hell, and that Groening’s request for a transfer to active duty, accepting the risk of death so as not to be part of a killing machine, more than meets that halfway.
But most likely we won’t, not out of fear that the guilty may avoid justice, but because we are not willing to surrender a final innocence about the triumph of good. This is not the Auschwitz guard we were looking for. |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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Whats that saying? Bad things happen when good people do nothing?
If he was stoking the fire, I'd feel differently. He tried to get out of there three times, as soon as he realised what was going on, he wanted out. Some of the stuff that went on there, well, I have a hard time finding him guilty. Especially now. And, from that short article, he seems remorseful, it would be hard to live with. He's 94, he's been publicly shamed now, just let it go.
_________________
You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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