The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

So who is not guilty, on this new theory of the law?

The people who cleaned the offices and took out the trash at night?

Janitors who cleaned the toilets?

Plumbers who repaired the toilets?

Cooks and mess workers?

Is Auschwitz Guard Oskar Groening Guilty by Association in Holocaust Deaths?

Sloppy journalism or sloppy legal blathering?

Pendas said the prosecution can argue that the death camps were, in their entirety, designed for the sole purpose of mass murder, and therefore, anyone whose contribution was indispensable for the extermination operations can be considered co-perpetrators of murder.

. . . . 

The German government has been committed in the past couple of decades to go after not only those who played a major part in the Holocaust, but also "ordinary people" who helped Auschwitz and other notorious Nazi death camps function, Goda added.

None of these spear-carriers or other "ordinary people" were individually indispensable, of course, though it was indispensable that there be spear-carriers, cooks, and janitors at the camps, that there be someone, anyone, doing such work.

So, prosecution and punishment are to reach right down to the lowliest illiterate and retarded schmuck who spent the war peeling potatoes in a camp, the potatoes for the staff and the peels for soup for the prisoners.

Apparently it does not interest anyone to ask, either, what might have happened had any such folk tried the experiment of principled refusal to do their jobs.

To empty the wastebaskets, say.

Or wash the turnips.

Say what you like, but this looks to me like remorseless, relentless vengeance to buy German officials and self-righteous middle-class bien-pensants a good conscience.

Nobody dares to demand this stop, to denounce it, to say "No."

Who would take such a risk in Germany, where it is a serious and prosecutable crime to say anything that derogates from the uniquely monstrous moral horror of the Holocaust?

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