Quote:
Originally Posted by Penguin
The argument that the prosecuted persons are old now is void in my opinion. Their victims never had the chance to reach an old age.
Better late justice than never, this is btw one of the reasons that in german law murder never becomes time-barred (word?). For example the former Stasi-chief Erich Mielke got prosecuted in 1993 for the killing of two policemen in 1931.
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While I cannot c onsider it to be justivce when a Nazi criminal has lived free for most of his life and the last 2 years of his life, maybe lives behind bars, I agree in principal -
we owe it to the victims and to the scale of the Nazi disaster to prosecute those having actively particiapted in the crime for the full lifespan they have. Justice to me has little or nothing to do with it. The final one or two years of a crimnal'S 88 years oflife in prison - a compensation of some mass killing he participated in? Hardly.
But I think at some time, the generation behind these active criminals, we sooner or later - better sooner - need to let this kind of thing come to a historic stop,. and move on. It's not as if we do not have more present, urgent, urgent problems to solve in the world we wilve in right now.
A society that constantly lives with its mind in the past, has no future.
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A short note on the rehabilitation thing Freiwillge has mentioned. While this is an ideal for European prisons, prisons also serve in the role of protecting the community against the evil-doers. Also, rehabilitation often fails or is not possible. Rehabilitation is something you define exclusively from the perspective of the community. If rehabilitation really were all what it is about, then I would recommend to enforce brain surgery and mandatory chemical supression of mind. Then you have the fully socialised and rehabilitated individual, from a communal standpoint. There is always a tensed balance link between rehabilitation, and conformism. I learned that the hard way when being in my training as psychologist and posyhcotherapist - the group pressure to make me (with my controversial and rebellious opinions, resisting against many psychotherapeutical holy cows) submitting to the wanted uniform ideal of the group and what a psycvhotherapist should be like, was immense and in the end aimed at just this: total conformity with the group's dogma and uniform ideal model.
Well, they failed.
But i payed a price, isolation, and finally turning my back on the whole field.