Demjanjuk - guilty or not guilty?

[rjmacs]

Chakravartin wrote:
Maybe it was a tough choice for him: Slaughter tens of thousands of innocents, go into a POW camp or try to escape.

But it shouldn't have been a tough choice. Even if he made the initial decision under duress, he had plenty of time to think about it and to change his mind. Instead, he chose to kill people. To herd men, women and children into gas chambers where they were put to death like stray dogs.

Where's the morally ambiguous aspect of that? Should the justice system go easy on him because he could have ended up in a POW camp had he refused to slaughter people?

Chakravartin,

I went out of my way not to comment on his state of mind, because i have no idea what it was. I also don't think there's anything morally ambiguous about genocide or mass slaughter. However, our legal system is adept at holding individuals responsible but remarkably poor at bearing witness to systems that twist people into executioners. Totalitarian states aren't open, forgiving systems in which people handed a list of options and invited to reflect on the possibilities, deliberate the consequences, and make moral choices. They are conscience-destroying machines that literally deprive people (victims and perpetrators alike) of the capacity to know and do good, leaving only wickedness. Courts aren't designed to illustrate this point; i think we'd all be better off not pretending that these abominations are simple matters of individual conscience. It's overly simplistic and it makes scapegoats of the people we happen to find and decide to prosecute. I'm not saying that Demjanjuk doesn't deserve to be before the court; i'm saying convicting war criminals isn't enough, and the way we convict them largely distracts from an underlying and far more frightening evil. Nazism didn't (and couldn't) operate because Germans and their allies were just bad people who had no trouble slaughtering innocents. It took a lot of work to make that happen, and much of the work was put into destroying people's capacity to distinguish good and evil.