I can see Trump’s tweet now: “Some people tell me that they didn’t care. I don’t know. That’s what they tell me. That they didn’t care. But I care. I care more than anybody else ever. Believe me. I care bigly.”
If this is the best, or only, example of ethics in the Trump Administration, well… That’s just damn sad.
Why is it even necessary to discuss deporting Nazis for war crimes trials? Is that where we are now?
Sounds like my role in the story, too.
You’re welcome, Nazi haters.
Literal LOL.
Which victims of the drug war should he consider pardoning? Keep in mind that he can only pardon people convicted in federal court and that he has no legal standing in state cases.
As has been pointed out, Germany got a new foreign minister recently who has a different opinion on accepting deportations like this. Trump doesn’t have any sway in internal German politics, so I don’t think he can actually claim credit for that. In general, Trump and his administration have told so many outright, bald faced lies that statements from them taking credit for things that happen are completely worthless at this point. You’d need to support your contention with information from a credible source, like someone from the German government, or someone involved in the case under a previous administration saying ‘yeah, we didn’t pursue it’. If the frequent blatant lies of the Trump administration weren’t enough, your own bold claim that previous presidents didn’t care to make an issue out of it casts doubt on your other statements, as it is clear that they did care at least enough to approve his deportation and request that someone accept him.
Likely aggravated by Trump’s penchant for calling Angela Merkel in the middle of the night to ask if her refrigerator is running.
You guys kill me.
He pardoned a woman who had served 20+ years of a lifetime sentence for a first time non-violent drug offense. Surely there are others with similar situations in prison on federal charges.
My point was that I’m not going to praise him for occasionally doing something good while he’s either ignoring the bigger picture or actively doing harm.
He also retaliated for the chemical attack in Syria.
I’ll believe it when I see the evidence.
So did Trump kick out the Nazi personally or did the Nazi find out via twitter, like many of Trump’s cabinet members?
Sorry to rain on the parade, but I don’t agree.
From what I read, Germany won’t prosecute him for lack of evidence. Himself denies having served in this camp.
After 75 years, it’s extremely unlikely that evidences of crime can be found, and if by chance they are, it’s extremely unlikely that the accused could provide evidences for his defense. For instance, it will be very difficult to find someone still alive who can say “I saw him there”, and if you can find such a person, it will be extremely difficult for an innocent accused to find someone still alive who can say “he wasn’t there, since he was elsewhere with me”. In other words, in the rare cases when you can mount a prosecution, the accused won’t have the means to defend himself, hence the trial won’t be fair.
It’s way too late to go after people who might have been involved in the holocaust at some low level (If I remember correctly, for the last one, even his identity was in doubt). There have been decades during which people could have been prosecuted and punished, and many of them high enough in the totem pole that their guilt couldn’t be reasonnably doubted. The overwhelming majority never was. Plenty who had been so important in the nazi apparatus that they couldn’t avoid being prosecuted were sentenced, and then paroled after some years and lived a perfectly normal life. What should have been done hasn’t been, and it’s way too late to pretend to catch up.
Going after someone who can’t even leave his bed, and, from my experience of 90 yo people, is likely unable to reason sensibly or remember anything reliably (IME most people this age, even when they don’t suffer from Alzheimer or such, and even though they might superficially appear sound of mind, are plainly unable to reason coherently), because he might or might not have been a camp guard is a parody. It has for sole pupose to make people feel good because they assume justice was finally served, while I see a fair possibility that an injustice has been commited. I see no reason to rejoice.
The overriding purpose should be to send a message that horrific crimes have no statute of limitations, and that no matter how long someone has gotten away with them they should never stop looking over their shoulder.
The ability to prosecute (or even deport) Nazi-era war criminals is pretty much over, but there are lots of others culpable for more recent mass murders/ethnic cleansing who need to be relentlessly tracked down and punished, and potential killers who might think twice if they knew they’d never be off the hook for their crimes.
The overriding purpose should be to send a message that horrific crimes have no statute of limitations, and that no matter how long someone has gotten away with them they should never stop looking over their shoulder.
The ability to prosecute (or even deport) over Nazi-era war crimes is pretty much over, but there are lots of others culpable for mass murder/ethnic cleansing who need to be relentlessly tracked down and punished, and potential killers who might think twice if they knew they’d never be off the hook for their crimes.
The Trump Administration gets a crumb of credit here.
The fact that we have to highlight ONE THING Trump did, when actually he really had nothing to do with it, that was ethically and morally correct, says a lot about the tragically low bar that has been set for this wretched Presidency.
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Because he wasn’t a Nazi SS Officer, he was a prison guard who would have ended up dead himself if he disobeyed orders, I would hate to be in that situation myself.
If you deport enough people, the law of very large numbers suggests that some of them are going to be very bad people. It’s almost impossible that some of them aren’t. On the other hand, it’s almost impossible that some of them aren’t going to be very good people as well.
The number of children in detention separated from their parents is huge. If Trump has his way, all those children will go back to their countries of origin. There is probably a future serial killer among them, who will be a serial killer no matter where he (and it is probably a he, but it could be a she) grows up. However, there are also probably 20 future oncologists, 200 elementary school teachers, and a Nobel-winning author, or the person who is going to discover the cause of autism, but none of those people are going to do those things if they get deported, because they may die of cholera at age 16, or at the orders of a despot at 21, or just spend their lives on subsistence farms, and never go higher than a 5th grade educations.
Yay! deportation!
I’m Jewish, and I’m in favor of identifying and punishing former Nazis, especially those who actively ran concentration camps, but I think the poster who pointed put that a 95-year-old may actually have gotten an upgrade by moving to a European country at this point is on to something.
In a very basic sense, Trump’s administration did the right thing by deporting this guy: it followed the letter of the law. However, it might have been more fitting to have punished him for lying on his citizenship application, but doing so in the US. And in the 14 years he continued to live here, he had been stripped of his US citizenship. He was here not illegally, technically, I guess, but I’m pretty sure he was ineligible for social security and Medicare. He may have even been asked to pay back any previous disbursements (although whether the government collected is another thing, but there could have been a judgement against anything he owned, or any investments he had).
Personally, I would have found it just as satisfying to know he was living here, but forced to do so with no rights of citizenship, and no rights to social security and Medicare, that he probably paid into for years. He could have been fined for lying on his application, and maybe even imprisoned for a while. I would have found that quite satisfying as well. Hell, if he’d been forced at age 81 to go out every morning at 6am and clean up trash on the highway with the drunk drivers, low-level drug dealers, and taggers, I’d’ve liked that too.
I’m not giving Trump points for this. He fired a whole lot of arrows at the side of a barn, and drew targets around some of them.
Meh.
I find that “everybody is required to pay into the medical insurance system”, including pensioneers. For the public system, the amount to pay is calculated depending on the person’s income; for those who instead opt for private insurance, the payments are based on risk assessment. Costs for those privately insured are normally incurred out of pocket and later reimbursed; according to my friends who’ve worked in Germany this was quick and normally painless (you may get a request for clarification, but not the automatic denials of the American system).
Link to English-language information from what appears to be the horse’s mouth.