Honour in Combat

[Black Jack Pershing II]

Andreas posted:

[being in the SS] may deserve punishment, but not the death penalty.

Is that because you oppose the death penalty in all instances, or that you do not feel that being in the SS as a volunteer is wrong enough to merit death?

[Dandelion]

Originally posted by zmoney:

Now if this happened yesterday then it would be a slippery slope because you would defenitly want to draw the line so the GI's wouldn't go around killing prisoners. But that wasn't the case anyway.

It did happend yesterday, don't you read the papers? And it happends all the time, to all nations in armed conflict. How would this discussion ever be obsolete? It happends and will keep happening because far too many people carry personal values such as... well, yours.

Dandelion

[zmoney]

Originally posted by Dandelion:

It did happend yesterday, don't you read the papers? And it happends all the time, to all nations in armed conflict. How would this discussion ever be obsolete? It happends and will keep happening because far too many people carry personal values such as... well, yours.

Dandelion [/QB]

Dadelion, your crazy. I could have sworn we were talking about WW2, which ended in 1945. And in particular this specific case involving Dachu. Saying that because some GI’s shot some SS scum at a concentration camp will lead to GI’s rounding up other German prisoners and killing them is just plain stupid. Because it didn’t happen, we know this because the event already took place like 60 years ago.

Further more I think the word slippery slope is way over used these days. What in the papers today said anything about soldiers killing prisoners? You also need to watch your trolling Dandy because I wasn’t trolling any one or advocating we kill German scum with out a trial. I was just trying to convey the point of; I hardly think this was a premeditated war crime intent on wiping out the German people. I think this was just something that these guys stumbled upon and its not like they had seen this type of evil before, and they reacted. Now if they just captured other soldiers else where and executed them on the spot that would definitely be a full blown war crime, and I’m not trying to defend that behavior.

So again Dandy how does this Dachu case in any way reflect on other events involving prisoner abuse today?

I hope there will be more people like me that will not stand for people like you who want to defend people who murder others just because they are of another race or religion.

[ February 15, 2006, 10:59 AM: Message edited by: zmoney ]

[Other Means]

But they must be defended. Becuase then they will be found guily and then justice will be seen to be done.

If you kill people without due process then you remove from yourself the right to use due process and place your actions outside of its moral framework.

Doing so removes any higher moral ground we may try to hold and therefore removes any right we may have to conduct war on people who have no such moral framework.

[Kingfish]

Originally posted by zmoney:

The sheer absurdity of this statement almost makes it worthy of a sig

[Kingfish]

Originally posted by zmoney:

I hope there will be more people like me that will not stand for people like you who want to defend people who murder others just because they are of another race or religion.

But wait, I should have continued reading. This next gem is a hoot as well.

I think its best that we cut you some slack at this early juncture and assume you misunderstood Dandelion, and haven't read any of his posts to accurately gauge the kind of person he is.

Trust me, your opinion of him is so off the mark it would be hilarious if not for the subject matter.

[zmoney]

Two quick points here:

1) No they mustn’t be defended here because this isn’t a courtroom.

2) I’m not saying that these soldiers were 100% right for what they did. I’m just saying there’s a huge deference between killing POW’s that surrender on the battlefield (clearly a war crime) and killing these SS scum at the prison when it’s a huge shock to your system when you stumble across something like that. They weren’t thinking clearly at the moment. Plus I think a thing a lot seem to be missing here is these were guys from 60 years ago that weren’t exposed to things growing up like we are today. Such as the news showing pictures of genocide, from Rawanda, Kosovo or wherever. This concentration camp was totally foreign to these guys so they didn’t know how to react. Should they have turned them over for trial? Yes. Did they? No. Do I understand why they reacted this way? Yes. That’s all I’m saying. I didn’t say they didn’t deserve reprimand. That's like saying you go to your friend’s house, you find him almost dead and his family grotesquely murdered. Before your friend dies he says to you; the guy who killed my family is in the bathroom. So you go in there and kill the guy who is in the bathroom. Is this right? No. But I can understand why you did this.

[zmoney]

Originally posted by Kingfish:

I think its best that we cut you some slack at this early juncture and assume you misunderstood Dandelion, and haven't read any of his posts to accurately gauge the kind of person he is.

Trust me, your opinion of him is so off the mark it would be hilarious if not for the subject matter. [/QB]

I don't doubt he's an up standing citizen. I only posted that last paragraph in contrast to what he said about me. I think it’s funny that you went out of your way to defend him from my comment, yet you have no problem with the one he made towards me.

[Black Jack Pershing II]

zmoney -- I see from your profile that you are a lawyer too

[zmoney]

Originally posted by Black Jack Pershing II:

zmoney -- I see from your profile that you are a lawyer too

[Andreas]

Originally posted by Black Jack Pershing II:

Andreas posted:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr /> [being in the SS] may deserve punishment, but not the death penalty.

Is that because you oppose the death penalty in all instances, or that you do not feel that being in the SS as a volunteer is wrong enough to merit death? </font>

[Kingfish]

Originally posted by zmoney:

I think it’s funny that you went out of your way to defend him from my comment, yet you have no problem with the one he made towards me.

Probably because his comment is closer to the mark than your ridiculous assertion.

[zmoney]

Originally posted by Kingfish:

Probably because his comment is closer to the mark than your ridiculous assertion. [/QB]

It happends and will keep happening because far too many people carry personal values such as... well, yours.

I took offence to his statement so I posted something equally ridiculous.

[Dandelion]

Originally posted by zmoney:

Dadelion, your crazy.

You might want to check my profile for spelling.

I understand that you must feel that way. I am more accustomed to meeting your values, than you are meeting mine. But in this particular forum, one might have hoped you would have familiarised yourself with, er, crazy people.

Further more I think the word slippery slope is way over used these days.

I don't understand. How am I to understand that Zmoney? You are attempting to influence colloquial English? Is this part of the domestic US debate on methods in the war? What?

What in the papers today said anything about soldiers killing prisoners?

Why ask me? Read the papers. Or just stick around, news will eventually reach you.

Now if they just captured other soldiers else where and executed them on the spot that would definitely be a full blown war crime, and I’m not trying to defend that behavior.

That confuses me. Why aren't you? You are certain about wanting all the people you call SS scum to be killed unarmed and unheard. But all German and other Axis armed forces ultimately fought to protect and serve the central European totalitarian régimes, all of whom engaged in ethnic cleansing in one scale or other, against one group or other. It wasn't the SS but ordinary German infantry who took Warsaw and thereby enabled the ultimate extermination of the Jewish community there. The men who fought in Normandy were guarding the outer gates of Dachau. Why do you feel they are less guilty than a soldier guarding the inner gate of Dachau? And if they are not less guilty, why would they be spared your death sentences?

So again Dandy how does this Dachu case in any way reflect on other events involving prisoner abuse today?

It's "Dandelion". You might want to check my profile again.

Common components are

1. A group of individuals who either crack under pressure or go rogue.

2. Said group commit acts in direct conflict with the code of conduct, objectives and war efforts of their nation and service.

3. The act mirrors the behaviour of the enemy and draws unwelcome paralel between their own cause and that of the enemy.

4. Their nation and the service they belong to must carry the ill repute of this misconduct and the shame that goes with it, and the war effort is correspondingly sabotaged.

This pattern seems not very elusive to me, nor very difficult to see in any modern conflict.

Your use of "soldier" there confuses the issue however. The whole problem is that the individuals acting in this manner prove thereby to be inadequate as soldiers. They could be rogues, traitors or merely unfit to wear uniform and carry arms - whichever, they are not soldiers.

I hope there will be more people like me that will not stand for people like you who want to defend people who murder others just because they are of another race or religion.

Well apparently there are quite a few of you, in our time. In fact you might say you are en vogue. So don't hope, frolic.

Capital, carry on

Dandelion

[Dandelion]

Originally posted by zmoney:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Black Jack Pershing II:

zmoney -- I see from your profile that you are a lawyer too

</font>

[zmoney]

Originally posted by Dandelion:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by zmoney:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Black Jack Pershing II:

zmoney -- I see from your profile that you are a lawyer too

</font>

[Kingfish]

To each his own.

That said, there is a kernel of truth in his statement. If you advocate on-the-spot executions, no matter how heinous the crime, then the bar is lowered and suddenly every group that has suffered at the hands of another will find it a justifiable action. Doesn't matter it is SS-Topenkopf in Dachau or Serbs at Srebrenica.

Out goes the rule of law and, ironically, the need for lawyers.

[Dandelion]

He posted that as a joke look at my profile under occupation, because he is a lawyer.

Ah, I see now.

That was actually quite funny.

LOL!

Who would have known that Mr Pershing has Teutonic humour. I'm still petrified by his brutal view upon justice though.

Cheers

Dandelion

[Bigduke6]

Dandelion,

You're right, in general I'm quite a liberal fellow. But my point is that a concentration camp, like the Germans ran in WW2, is several light years beyond what lawyers are capable of handling. Justice in the "liberal western" sense was impossible. There was no way to track down the guards, find the witnesses, appoint the courts, run the trials, and (I assume) shoot the guilty.

This is not "no justice" in the sense of a modern industrialized nation, and (for instance) crack dealers not serving their full term because the jail was too crowded, or not even taking a rap because a cop got his procedures wrong.

This is "not justice" in the sense of people who used small children for experiements on the tolerance of the human body to pain, without anesthesia, to death, were able to walk free. People who were able to claim they were in the Waffen S.S. What, me torture prisoners Herr interogator? Impossible, in my unit we had the highest standards of honor! Besides, we fought the Communists!

To me, the arguement "Well, we need to give these guys due process" is a cop out. It is an attempt - conscious or unconscious - to avoid dealing with the problem of how do you actually impose justice, when the perpetrators and the victims number in the thens of thousands? In a continent with tens of millions of displaced persons?

It is all very nice to talk about the slipperly slope, but what about justice? Is the danger of the slippery slope of vigilante justice so clear and present, so threatening, that it automatically forecloses all means of imposing justice, but by the (relatively new and certainly west European) concept of individual due process? When you're talking about a place now commonly referred to, world wide, as "a death camp"?

I say no. I say a liberal, humanistic, thinking outlook demands a more reasoned attitude towards justice. Just because laws are written in a book does not make them gospel for all eternity, although lawyers would have us believe it. Men wrote the laws and if it serves human society to change them, then men can change the laws. All it takes is a common motivation to do so.

The question is: If the crime is so big as to include an entire society, how do you impose society-wide justice?

I submit that a place where 40,000 people were murdered through starvation and disease, by probably roughly a similar number of perpetrators more or less involved, qualifies both as a valid motivator, and a case of a society-wide crime.

Western jurisprudence, of course, does not admit society-wide crimes ever take place. Almost always, this assumption is valid. But not for Germany during WW2.

I say, a concentration camp where, for example, pregnant women were routinely faced, by the entire adminsration, with the choice of death of themselves or death of a child, is too horrific to risk not punishing every possible person complicit in that system. Protecting pregnant mothers is a human imperative far older than due process.

How do you prosecute participants in a system that imposed conditions like that? Most probably didn't break any laws. For practical purposes all could honestly claim they were following orders. Should all those camp guards have been exonerated, because the principle of due process includes the general rule that you can't punish a person for something that wasn't a crime at the time he committed the act?

The only way is to look honestly at what went on in the camps, conclude that that represented a level of depravity and human evil beyond any existing legal system, and then go about administering justice as the situation and logic, but not preconcepts about due process, dictated.

Remember, sometimes breaking the rules is for the greater good.

I respect due process, and about 99 per cent of the time I am on the side of the accused when it's a question of protecting a potentially guilty person, or indeed the innocent.

I assign concentration camps into the 1 per cent. I simply cannot see how any thinking person can contemplate what went on in those camps, the unspeakable crimes in their mind-boggling scale, and then say "Well, the way to deal with that is a nice fair court." Think of those pictures of that Polish Jew, naked in the bathtub of ice water, and then the expression on his face as the doctors ran increasing electric shocks. He eventually died.

Shrugging one's shoulders and bleating "Well, too bad we couldn't bring too many of those concentration camp guards to justice, it's just about impossible to stick it to the guards who electrocuted the Polish Jew, he's dead anyway, and besides we have due processs don't you know" is a milksop, it is lazy semantics. And it betrays that poor, suffering man.

I don't call that justice.

[ February 15, 2006, 01:26 PM: Message edited by: Bigduke6 ]

[Black Jack Pershing II]

Who would have known that Mr Pershing has Teutonic humour.

At least I've got that going for me. And that's General Pershing to you!

I'm still petrified by his brutal view upon justice though.

Perhaps the electonic medium amplifies the petrificacity of my brutal views. I think I'm a veritable pussy[cat].

[Wicky]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

Right before all those people died in all those concentration camps, if they thought about justice at all, it was a hope that somehow, some way, some day, the murderers would get what's coming to them..

This seems time for an approriate quote

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one's own way.

Victor Frankl

[JonS]

Bigduke,

I read your latest post, and came to the conclusion that in it you implicitly agree that they should have had a trial.

Bear in mind that plenty of people at Nuremburg were tried and convicted for things that weren't strictly crimes at the time and place they did them. Also the Nuremburg trials also weren't shy about handing out the death penalty.

I am not, and have never, saying those guys should go free (if guilty, of course), and I am not, and have never, saying they should not face the death penalty if so judged (though on principle I am opposed to the DP).

Lashing out and gunning down anyone to hand when first entering the camps is not justice. It is merely more wanton killing on top of the killing that had preceeded it.

You say that giving the guards due process is a cop out. Well, I believe that not giving them due process is an even bigger cop out. I mean, can you give me any good reasons why they shouldn't get due process, and if appropriate be conviceted and sentenced? If not, then gunning down random Germans who happen to wear a particular set of clothes in a particular time and place is nothing more than lazyness.

You can't be bothered with the hassle of mustering a coherent argument - with supporting evidence - to convict them, it's all too hard, so screw it lets just shoot them instead?* What kind of justice is that? You have no way of knowing if you even got the right guys! It might be satisfying at a visceral level, but it isn't any kind of justice. And denying that man who suffered in the ice justice is the real betrayal.

Regards

JonS

* which, by the way, is a post facto justification. I am certain the US soldiers who did the killing at Dachau went through no such justification process.

"Hey Walt, ya know, we should round these guys up and let JAG deal with them."

"Nah Joe, waste of time, there were 40,000 victims here, and about that many guards, and Nuremburg - a court which hasn't been created yet and which neither of us has heard of - probably couldn't handle that volume."

"Good point Walt. We've just won a global war, but there is no way we could figure out how to try a few 10's of thousands of krauts."

"Yep, and besides, those pictures of the pregnant women and the guy in the ice - which neither of us have seen yet - will sure piss me off when I do see them, and make a perfect justification for a bit of extrajudicial killing."

"Yeah Walt. This camp represents a level of depravity and human evil beyond any existing legal system, so I say we go about administering justice as emotion dictates."

"I agree Joe. Preconcepts about due process have no place here. Screw discipline and the rules. Lets just shoot someone."

* BLAM BLAM BLAM *

Nope, I'm pretty confident that conversation never took place. What happened at Dachau was a break down of discipline and was wrong and criminal. It is not up to Joe and Walt to take the law into their own hands, and figure the best way to deal with it is to start shooting surrendered enemy combatants.

Regards

JonS

[ February 15, 2006, 02:45 PM: Message edited by: JonS ]

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

The question is: If the crime is so big as to include an entire society, how do you impose society-wide justice?

If you believe in the idea of whole societies being criminal, then presumably you believe in collective punishment. There are good reasons for why collective punishment is widely regarded as a harmfully stupid idea.

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

I say, a concentration camp where, for example, pregnant women were routinely faced, by the entire adminsration, with the choice of death of themselves or death of a child, is too horrific to risk not punishing every possible person complicit in that system. Protecting pregnant mothers is a human imperative far older than due process.

Summary execution for complicity in the killing of pregnant women? I hope you are very, very sure you have never been "complicit" in a society that does anything like that, then.

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

The only way is to look honestly at what went on in the camps, conclude that that represented a level of depravity and human evil beyond any existing legal system, and then go about administering justice as the situation and logic, but not preconcepts about due process, dictated.

And your idea of "logic" apparently consists in grabbing the nearest people to hand in enemy uniform, and killing them, without even pausing to establish whether or not they were the people who actually committed the crimes. I can't see any difference between your argument and the belief that there are some crimes so terrible that people must be punished for them whether they committed them or not.

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

I respect due process, and about 99 per cent of the time I am on the side of the accused when it's a question of protecting a potentially guilty person, or indeed the innocent.

So, can we conclude from this that the other 1% of the time you're opposed to due process when it's a question of protecting the innocent?

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

Shrugging one's shoulders and bleating "Well, too bad we couldn't bring too many of those concentration camp guards to justice, it's just about impossible to stick it to the guards who electrocuted the Polish Jew, he's dead anyway, and besides we have due processs don't you know" is a milksop, it is lazy semantics. And it betrays that poor, suffering man.

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

You have wilfully ignored the point Andreas has made at least twice now that the people killed on the spot may well not have been the KZ guards (who were probably miles away by then). In that case, your method of shooting the nearest people in SS uniform is equally as ineffective in bringing the guilty men to justice.

I don't call that justice.

Possibly not, but I think it's fairly obvious to all fair-minded observers that you wouldn't recognise justice if it bit you very hard in the arse. The point of due process is not, as you seem to imagine, to protect the guilty, but to make sure that you are punishing the right people.

John.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

Shrugging one's shoulders and bleating "Well, too bad we couldn't bring too many of those concentration camp guards to justice, it's just about impossible to stick it to the guards who electrocuted the Polish Jew, he's dead anyway, and besides we have due processs don't you know" is a milksop, it is lazy semantics. And it betrays that poor, suffering man.

I don't call that justice.

The "poor suffering" men and women were let down before the war, by all those that let it happen. People like the government of my own country, who won't spend on defence or stand up for what is right in the world.

Flushing the rule of law down the toilet won't help that state of affairs any. Better to get angry at the ones who failed before the crime than complaining about not summarily shooting culprits after the fact. The biggest crime is that we let it all happen, and we could have stopped it, as Winston Churchill said. Hindsight is a bitch.

[Zarquon]

Originally posted by Black Jack Pershing II:

I am not arguing that we should have had a national policy of summarily executing anyone suspected of being a KZ guard. All I am saying is that summary on-the-spot executions of those who were obviously KZ guards was not wrong and should not be punished.

Just trying to sum up the arguments here:

Blackjack says that

a) Anybody belonging to a highly criminal organization (like the SS) is guilty of all crimes perpetrated by the organization and can be shot on sight.

It is the individual soldier's right to decide what a criminal organization is, whether this organization's crimes justify killing all its members and therefore, who can be shot on sight.

c) The state should not interfere with that process because an individual's sense of ethics is sufficient to justify killing somebody.

BigDuke does not go quite so far and argues that

a) putting people on trial has its merits, except when it's impractical to do so. In such cases, BlackJack's version of justice is appropriate and justified.

being a prisoner of the US Army in 1945 does not qualify for a), i.e. by all practical means, the army wasn't capable of putting them on trial. Otherwise it would have been wrong to kill them.

Am I getting this right so far?