Justice, Vengeance and Punishment

This morning I read in the paper the news that a 91-year old woman is to be charged with being an accessory to murder.  Not wholly outside the realms of possibility you might think, but this woman is charged with being accessory to 260,000 murders.  In brief, she was employed as a radio operator by the SS, and served at Auschwitz for three months in 1944, at the age of 20.

I have to confess that this troubles me, and I question the value, or even the rightness of this prosecution.  Now, obviously the Holocaust was one of the greatest evils ever enacted by mankind, and the name Auschwitz should never cease to be associated with horror, death and evil on an industrial scale.  It should never be forgotten, and everyone associated with it should have carried the burden of it for the rest of their lives.  I imagine that this woman probably has.

However, to punish her now, at the age of 91, seems to me almost pointless.  Indeed, what is the point?  Generally, punishment functions (or should, if it’s not completely arbitrary and tyrannical) as rehabilitation, incapacitation, deterrent, retribution, or some combination of two, three or all of the above.

Could it be rehabilitation?  I think that she’s rather beyond that now.  She has presumably managed to live for the last 71 years without killing anyone, or joining in on a national program of industrial genocide, and the odds of her repeating her crime seem extremely low.

Incapacitation?  See above.  This elderly woman hardly needs to be kept apart from a public that she would otherwise endanger.

Deterrent then? I very much doubt that this woman needs persuading not to join in a mass atrocity again.  I imagine that she feels sufficient shame, and besides, if a new Nazi party were suddenly to appear, she’s a little old to be joining a new SS.  Of course, this could be seen as a deterrent to others.  “No matter how long you can keep quiet, no matter how much time passes, if you are party to an atrocity, you will be found and punished.”  Whether this really works in practice is debateable.  Are the members of IS really going to look at this 91 year old woman and think, “Gosh, that could be me in sixty years!  Time to give up the whole global jihad thing before it’s too late!”

That leaves us with retribution.  This has always been problematic to me, because it smacks more of revenge than justice.  It may surprise you (since I am in many ways a wishy-washy liberal type) to know that I am not necessarily against the smacking of children (within very tight bounds, and as an absolute last resort).  However, it should never be done out of anger, or a desire to punish for the sake of punishment.  Never, “You’ve done a bad thing, so a bad thing is going to happen to you in return!”  I believe in it solely as a deterrent.  A desire to punish this woman for what she did is understandable, but unless she’s a monster (which is of course possible), she’s already lived a life of punishment knowing that she was involved, if only briefly, in the Holocaust and with Auschwitz.

 

And lest we forget, this was not the commandant, this was not the person who turned on the gas chambers or pulled the trigger; she was not even a guard.  She was a radio operator, and she was there for three months, she was 20 years old, and the Nazis were at the height of their power.  Did she request the posting?  I don’t know.  Did she believe, heart and soul, in the rightness of what was happening there?  Again, I don’t know.  Perhaps she did.  We must at least assume that she was aware of what was going on.  Perhaps she has lived her life with a sense of wronged righteousness, and a continuing belief that Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the rest should all be put to death.  If that is the case, and I struggle to believe it, will spending her few remaining years in a prison change her mind?  Will it give the victims, or their descendants, some sense of justice done?  Again, to me it smacks less of justice, and more of revenge.  And as likely as having lived believing that she did nothing wrong is the possibility that she has spent her entire life since trying to atone, trying to live a good life and help others.  Again, we don’t know.

Of course, if it were my parents, grandparents or great grandparents in the mass graves at Auschwitz, I might feel different.  After all this time though, I’m not sure I would.  This woman’s incarceration won’t bring back the dead or put wrongs right.  Will the imprisonment of this old woman really persuade future regimes, future dictators, future maniacs with poisonous ideologies, future populations that have to live under them, to reconsider?  I can’t see that it will.

I do believe that there will come a day, and it can’t be very far off, that she will have to stand before a Judge and give an accounting of her life, and I do not and cannot know what the verdict will be.  However, I see no point and no profit for anyone in conducting a prosecution that seems to me to be far more about revenge than about justice, not for her, for the victims of Auschwitz, or for those prosecuting her.

Principle, Ideology and Reality

This is a quote from a comment on a story on the BBC website, regarding the election of Mr. Corbyn as the new Labour Party leader, presumably from someone who views the appointment with a degree of disapprobation:

“Well, they got what they wanted, the Marxists, the Trots and all the other fantasy economics fans. Principle and ideology have finally trumped reality.”

I have stated before my intention that this not become a political blog, and I’m sticking to that principle.  I don’t wish to discuss Mr. Corbyn, or the merits or otherwise of his various beliefs and policies.  Instead, I want to examine what seems to me the startling assertion of the commenter that principle and ideology shouldn’t trump reality.

On the surface, there is a certain hard-nosed pragmatic sense to saying “You have to accept reality”, “That’s the way things are”, and “You have to take the world as you find it”.  Since I am rarely pragmatic or sensible, and since my nose is fairly soft, it’s a view that I reject utterly.  If we allow ourselves to accept that the world is this way, and that’s how it’s always going to be, then we are gradually drawn to the conclusion that this is how it is supposed to be, even how it ought to be.

Principles and ideologies, both religious and political, vary widely and often conflict bitterly, but at the heart of all of them is a sense that the world is not as it should be; that things need changing.  This can be formalised as a conception of sin, that we are not the creatures that we were created to be and that God wishes us to become, or it can be a looser idea that we ought to strive to be better than we are, and that the world ought to be better than it is, whatever we conceive ‘better’ to be.  Our differences in opinion as to what ‘better’ is can sometimes be vast and vicious.  We can look at others’ efforts and think that they will actually make the world worse if they succeed, but ultimately we must recognise that they think that they are trying to improve things.  We may not agree, we can even work to oppose them, but we must respect that they think they are trying to help.  They have recognised that the world is not as it should be, and are working to change it, just as we are, and that is extremely important.

A woman in a church I used to attend once said to me (I forget what I had said to spark the comment), “But there are always going to be poor people!”  It’s so easy to shrug and say, “Well, that’s just how things are.  There are always going to be homeless people.  There are always going to be wars.  There is always going to be injustice.  There is always going to be inequality and cruelty and starvation and hatred and bitterness and selfishness, misery, pain and unscrupulous individuals.”  If we pause and ask, “But why?” the response is the shrug and “That’s just how things are.”

How things are?  Yes.  Sadly and to our shame, that is indeed how things are.  But that is a long, long way from saying that this is the way things ought to be.  If we accept that the world is as it ought to be, then we can be led to assume that we are also as we ought to be, and perhaps this is what has happened.  Most people nowadays find the concept of sin as understood by most Christians to be not only laughably archaic but also slightly distasteful.  Nobody likes being told that they are doing wrong, that they are not as good as they should be, but pragmatic realism offers them an escape.  “This is how things are.  This is how I am.  Anything else in unrealistic, idealistic nonsense.”

This is not a plea for naïve idealism.  We have to be aware of how things are (without necessarily ‘accepting’ how they are) in order to function in the world, and in order to try and change it.  We should "be in the world, but not of the world", and to me that partly means being aware of the reality without accepting it as inevitable.  Counter to what the commenter thinks, I believe that reality should never trump principle and ideology.  I’m not even sure that the principles and ideologies should have to be ‘realistic’.  Aiming at impossible goals and failing can result in more than aiming at realistic goals and succeeding.  As CS Lewis put it, “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

Our reality is not so good that I think that it can’t be improved, and I shall dream of a better world, filled with better people, and if people accuse me of being unrealistic, then I shall take it as a compliment.  I’ve used this quote from ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’ in this blog before, but I think that it bears re-use here: “Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever.”

The Ethics of Enforcing Ethics: Part 2

Yesterday, the BBC carried a story regarding the Archbishop of Canterbury’s opposition to assisted dying.  Now, personally I happen to agree with the Right Reverend Welby’s stance, although I freely admit that it is a grey area, and it’s hard to know which is more compassionate, and whether anyone can or should be asked to suffer, perhaps needlessly.  That’s not a discussion I want to get into now.

In their ineffable wisdom, the BBC opened this story up to comments, and as with any story even vaguely pertaining to religion, the comments swiftly filled up with mockery, vitriol and abuse.  One of the frequently repeated comments boils down (when various insults have been removed) to “Why does this person think he has the right to try and force his beliefs on us?”

At some point, I’ll remember to get round to writing out my view on ‘rights’, but that day is not today.  I do not think that Welby has the right to try and share his beliefs with others; I think he has a duty to.

(Most) Christians believe that life is sacrosanct, and that this is one of those objective pillars of faith on which the church stands.  As I said, I don’t want to get into the assisted suicide debate here, but the fact remains that Christianity presents the sanctity of life as a fundamental truth.  Now, we might be wrong about that, but that’s what we believe, and if we believe it to be an objective and absolute truth, how can we possibly refrain from trying to share that truth, and prevent people from going against it?

Now, obviously I am not in favour of some sort of theocratic oppression, in which people are forced to obey the beliefs of a vocal minority.  I don’t believe that anyone should have someone else’s beliefs forced on them.  However, we absolutely have a duty to share them, and to try and persuade others, especially in an instance like this where lives may be taken, and even doing it forcefully (but never forcibly).  I occasionally indulge in a fond day-dream of a utopia in which people with widely differing, even diametrically opposing views can air and discuss their opinions without censure or censorship, but in a respectful (even if forceful and challenging) fashion, and listen to the views of others in a calm and equally respectful way.  Alas, this seems unlikely to ever occur.

I’ve posted before about the strange doublethink that allows us to rail against forcing our morality on others, and then passing law after law which does exactly this.  We state as absolute truths that theft, fraud, murder, assault and rape are wrong, and feel comfortable forcing these beliefs on others through punishment for failure to comply.  We understand the moral imperative that causes us to make these rules and laws, to constrain people from doing what we know to be wrong.  However, some people seem to fail to understand that exactly the same moral imperative drives people to protest outside abortion clinics, and for faith leaders to speak out publically against assisted suicide.  The only difference is majority opinion, and should morality really be a democracy?  A debate can be had here, but almost everyone will agree that certain things are fundamentally wrong, while others are fundamentally right.  It is around the edges that we are permitted to quibble.

If anyone, atheist, agnostic or believer, perceives an injustice, then surely it is their moral duty to speak out against it?  Others don’t necessarily have to agree with them or even listen to them, but to suggest that they ought not to speak at all is utterly wrong.  After all, silence and inaction are consent and, “all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”.