Comments of the Day
Here’s a few comments (mostly from women) on the New York Times (NYT) article that describes how Donald J. Drumpf (Trump) treats women. Of course he treats most women as his playthings– subjects of his empire of money. It seems that a perfect rejoinder to any comments Drumpf cares to make about how Hillary Clinton’s husband treated women is to say that Donald is just like Bill. It is essential to say that President Clinton treated women as his sexual objects when they appeared to be vulnerable and attractive, just as Drumpf does. But when Drumpf complains about how Hillary’s husband was a serial philanderer, Hillary should just say, “Well, that was my husband… but now I’m the one who is running for president, and you’re the one who did the mistreating. That’s the height of hypocrisy and you’re just as bad as he was.” (Or, as one commenter remarked, she could say, “I married Bill ‘for better or worse’ not ‘until someone hotter comes along.’ “)
Now for the comments (by the way, there were over 3000 comments on the article, close to a record):
BR
NY May 14, 2016
I am the VP of construction referred to in the article. I wrote a memoir, All Alone on the 68th Floor: How One Woman Changed the Face of Construction, much of which deals with my 14 years on and off with Donald. He gave me a tremendous break putting me in charge of Trump Tower. He said I was a “killer”. He liked having powerful women around him. He treated me with respect initially, but by he end of our relationship, he acted differently, blaming me for something which was out of my control. We parted amiably, but when I saw him randomly after I sent him my book, which I thought he would like, he was very nasty to me. My memories of him are mostly good, because they are based in our Trump Tower years, when Ivana was around and Trump was so accessible. We were almost friends. He took my advice, and Louise Sunshine’s, another “killer”, who was a powerhouse. He hired other strong women in the 1980’s but when I left there was only one woman exec left and she was soon gone. The entire 1980s crew had departed and from that point on, I think Trump stopped hiring people who would take him on and challenge him. He became too famous. Too full of himself. We did a poll in California in 1991 and he had more name recognition than the president, back then. It is a shame what happened, but you can tell from the article, it is predictable. I have no animus toward Trump but is not ready to be president. He has no political experience, and his policies are mostly anti women.
4188 Recommended
That was the most recommended comment. Note that last sentence. Here’s a paraphrase: ” I don’t dislike Trump, but he’s not ready to be president: no political experience, and his policies are mostly anti-women.” That’s why over 90% of women should vote against Drumpf in the final election for president.
lakeleader
oologah OK May 15, 2016
What I find most telling is that this story is all on the record–no unnamed sources. It also shows that he was selective in precisely the way lechers, sexual exploiters and worse behave. Anyone who has covered this kind of behavior–especially when it crosses the line into criminal, which this does not–at least as presented–knows the pattern. I’ve been doing it for four decades and watched the rules change dramatically for what is acceptable sexual/ “romantic”/mysogonistic [sic]/simply joking based on people who work closely together, regardless of gender and without sexual innuendo. Trump apparently hasn’t learned that he’s no longer a 20-something stud in the early ’70s and that such behavior is totally unacceptable when many of the world’s most powerful gigures [sic] in government, business, law, academia, etc. are female. Just more proof he is utterly unfit–and dangerous–as a candidate to be the nation’s commander in chief. Lord help the world should he actually win. 1525 Recommended
teacherusa
USA May 15, 2016
I am a feminist and a Democrat and I passionately oppose Trump’s candidacy for president. That said, I don’t find this article helpful. First, Trump openly expresses the thoughts that other men have but don’t vocalize. They lack Trump’s power and prestige, so they keep these things to themselves. We are not talking about a small percentage either. Look at how many men across the country watch porn. Once again, Trump will score points for saying and doing what other people wish they could. Great.
Second, any woman in America who has gotten involved in a co-ed organization (work, internships, even higher education) has experienced things like this. It’s part of life. Deal with it and do your part to make change, like raising your sons to respect women. I was first propositioned by an older, more powerful man than I when I was 16. Thanks to my father, in whom I confided, I came out unscathed. It was scary and it left an unsettling memory, enough so that I found my heart pounding in anxiety when I unexpectedly passed him on a staircase a few years later (thankfully, he walked right by me without any sign of recognition).
This experience has repeated itself several times since. Each instance made me stronger and more able to fend for myself as a woman. Were the experiences unpleasant, uninvited, and unsettling? Yes. But they are part of life. Sorry, but this article fails to indict Trump for anything other than crude behavior that women encounter every day.
557 Recommended
Sadly, here is the unvarnished truth: “this is crude behavior that women encounter every day.” Nothing unusual in his behavior, most powerful men do it.
MRO
New York, N.Y. May 16, 2016
I just want to point out that Trump lost New York City (with the exception of Staten Island)–his home town. In the neighborhood where he lives he got 7 votes (probably his family members who bothered to register to vote). Hey, people in the rest of the country–why do you think this is? Because we had enough, over decades, of this boorish, ego-maniacal, obtuse, no-nothing letch and, as the writer says, he is nothing more than a wealthy jerk who is conning the gullible.
2 Recommended
So he lost the city in which he is best known– New York.
Last, the most insightful comment about his character:
Trixie Wolf
Columbus May 14, 2016
The most striking thing from all of these reports are the incessant signs of deep insecurity. This is why Donald Trump is who and what he is, and why he is successful at most of what he does in spite of tremendous failures: he’s motivated by a need for validation far greater than most of us can imagine.
Oddly enough, I came away from this well-balanced piece with a slightly better impression of how Donald Trump treats women. It’s obvious that he cares about women being successful (at least, those women he associates with). If only he measured their success through a less-sexist lens, his efforts might be laudable.
The fuller the picture I gain of this man, the more it evokes my pity. It is clear that Donald Trump has no insight into his personal biases and how they shape his interactions with other people, and that’s par for the course with prejudiced mindsets. Of course he doesn’t think he stereotypes women: he believes that those stereotypes that he relies upon are in fact a true reflection of reality.
I wonder what will happen when he loses the most prestigious competition in the world to a woman.
280 Recommended
The bottom line: he is a deeply insecure person, extremely sensitive to slights; as some have said, he is “thin-skinned.” Not presidential material. We need a calm, unflappable, secure, responsible person who is immune to insults and treats everyone with the same respect and concern.
Venezuela, a country with one of the largest oil reserves in the world, is suffering an economic emergency that is combined with a social and medical emergency.
There are a number of factors coming together in this country, all of which are negative in themselves; together they are disastrous. Rightists in the United States claim that Venezuela’s problems all stem from its “socialist” economic system, but that is irrelevant to its current problems. The leaders of the country have been socialist and/or communist for at least seventeen years, and when oil prices were high, they appeared to be doing well. Now, however, oil prices have collapsed and hollowed out Venezuela’s economy.
Venezuelan oil, although present in large quantities, is expensive to produce and refine. This is very different from the situation in other oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia and Iraq, where the oil is cheap to pump and easy to refine. In those countries, it is still profitable to pump oil at current prices, but in Venezuela, profit margins were thin even when prices were high, and now there is no margin. The government made this situation even worse by failing to save any money while prices were high, instead siphoning off profits into graft and corruption that enriched the political elite and powerful private corporations.
Another disaster that has exacerbated Venezuela’s problems is their dependence on hydroelectric plants to power their country’s electric grid. Several years of drought have left the hydroelectric plants stalled and there has been no provision for alternate power generation systems. As a result, there is insufficient electric power to run the country and everything has been blacked out more than half the time.
The worst suffering from this situation has been in health care. Needed medical supplies, medicines, diagnostic equipment: everything that we take for granted here is missing in Venezuela. Antibiotics are available only on the black market. Public hospitals are operating under conditions resembling those of wartime. The New York Times (NYT) has an article today about the medical emergency that the country faces. It makes for sickening reading. Additional articles recently have described the rampant corruption and graft that has poisoned the country for years; only now, with the crash in oil prices, has the corruption been exposed.
The government of Nicolas Maduro has even prevented help from entering the country from outside. Operating under emergency decrees since January, Maduro has threatened legal action against any outside agencies that attempt to provide emergency aid and promised seizures of factories that have been idled by the economic crisis. The United States has little influence in Venezuela and has been blamed for meddling in its economy. American intelligence sources say that they fear rioting and collapse of the government, with a remote possibility of a military coup. Violent change in the Venezuelan government seems likely and foreign intervention would probably be resisted.
These problems are not limited to Venezuela; other South American countries are in trouble as well, though perhaps not as severe. Argentina and Brazil have similar problems, especially with official corruption and impunity of powerful private interests. These problems are not readily amenable to solution, either from within the countries affected or by outside intervention. The root causes of South American problems seem to relate to unlawful behavior by powerful interests both within government and in private combines.
Poor economic planning and lack of foresight by government agencies responsible for economic stability have a lot to do with these problems. Rightists in the United States and elsewhere have been quick to blame “socialism” for South America’s problems but that charge is a mischaracterization. The real problems have more to do with poor economic planning and graft by government agencies combined with opportunistic behavior of private interests, all mixed with rampant corruption and self-enrichment by government officials.
It is possible that the severity of these problems has some relation to overpopulation; certainly fewer people would have led to a smaller problem. If overpopulation has some partial causative relationship to the collapse of the Venezuelan money economy then it fits well with predictions that were made by biologists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1970, I recall being told as a student that human overpopulation would cause damage and collapse within fifty years, that is by the year 2020. It is now May 16, 2016 and we are on the way to fulfilling that prediction with the increase in boreal wildfires in Canada this spring.
Nonetheless, if we are aware of the source of the problems in South America cannot we step forward and fix them? There is some doubt that a procedure exists to resolve the corruption in the leadership of government parties, but this step would seem essential to improving the situation of parties affected by the crisis. If we do not address the corruption but merely supply the want then there is a risk of losing much of what is given to corrupt officials. That is what happened to the Americans in Iraq.
It is more realistic to expect that this crisis will continue in some form, that is evolve independently of any conceivable action by human agency, for a time again independent of human action. In Venezuela the medical crisis will be partially ameliorated by emergency assistance but the death rate will continue to be high. It is possible that Doctors Without Borders will offer some assistance. Clearly, the New York Times would like to see some effect of publicity, and anyone reading the articles who could help would be motivated to do so.
The Los Angeles Times has just published a tremendous series of articles online about the development of Oxycontin as a part of the nationwide epidemic of opioid drug consumption. The major problem with Oxycontin is that it is marketed as a twelve-hour drug but that almost half of patients don’t get the full twelve hours of pain relief. The company that produces Oxycontin, Purdue, went to great lengths to hide and distort the fact that many patients only got six or eight hours of relief. The worst part is that, after the period of relief has dissipated, drug withdrawal begins to set in as the pain returns worse than before. If the pain returns at six hours and you have to wait six more hours to get another dose of pain medication, you develop a paradoxical over-sensitivity which is excruciating and resembles ordinary drug withdrawal because it really is withdrawal– premature, but real.
Many patients have gone through the use of Oxycontin and have been cut off by their doctors, either because of “drug-seeking behavior” or the doctor has become anxious about being labelled a pill-pusher. Many patients display “drug-seeking behavior” because their doctors mistakenly believe that Oxycontin really does last twelve hours, and this mistake is reinforced by representatives of the drug company who deny that the drug could wear off in less than twelve hours.
There has been a double reversal of physician attitudes towards prescribing pain medication over the last forty years. At first, few pain medications were given and only in very rare exceptional cases such as cancer pain or for very acute severe injuries. Morphine was often given in acute myocardial infarction. In the late 1990s and the first part of the twenty-first century pain medication became more and more popular and easier to justify. Finally, all of a sudden in 2014-5, pain medications were removed from as many people as possible. The CDC released a new statement urging caution, and there was a general clamp-down, especially on the part of pharmacists. The most recent reduction in the use of opioids was justified, according to the CDC, by the tremendous increase in deaths from overdoses that has occurred over the last twenty years.
Some of the patients who are taken off pain pills will go on to take heroin, which turns out to be cheaper. Others will suffer through withdrawal. Those who take heroin are susceptible to overdose or infection with hepatitis B and C. Overdose is a particular risk with heroin because the strength of illicit heroin is never certain. Heroin has become more pure over the past few years as its cost has gone down. Some suppliers have even begun to mix illicitly produced fentanyl with the heroin to enhance its strength. Fentanyl is approximately fifty times as potent as heroin.
Users of heroin who are suffering withdrawal symptoms may accidentally overdose when their sensitivity to the drug’s effects increases during a period when they can’t obtain it. Resuming use at the former dose when one’s sensitivity to its effects has returned will cause an overdose. Taking heroin that is unexpectedly pure or has fentanyl mixed in may also cause accidental overdose.
Fentanyl is available by prescription as a skin patch that is designed to last three days. Removing the fentanyl from the patch and consuming it directly can lead to overdose when the amount of drug designed to be absorbed in seventy-two hours reaches systemic circulation all at once.
Finally, there is the possibility that someone taking heroin will deliberately overdose because there is a subliminal or even overt desire to kill oneself. There is a distinct feeling of suffering that underlies the desire to use heroin or Oxycontin. A person who takes these drugs is trying to relieve suffering and is aware that the pain will return after the drug wears off. There may be a desire for permanent relief which leads to the urge to end it all.
It is important for us to understand that the consumption of these drugs, even when supposedly for “recreational” purposes and not for relief of pain, may be in part related to a psychic sensation of suffering even if not acknowledged. When the drug wears off, even if there was no suffering before, there will be suffering from withdrawal. There is a direct relationship between suffering and the illicit or doctor-prescribed use of these drugs which cannot be ignored.
There have recently been dramatic increases in deaths due to overdose as well as suicides and, more generally, losses in overall life expectancy among middle-aged Caucasians in the United States, who have also suffered from economic reverses and loss of employment. The degree of suffering among this group of people cannot be overemphasized and should be addressed somehow. This is the best reason for enacting government policies which will provide relief of economic suffering: this suffering is life-threatening.
An Arkansas district judge, in the latter part of his second four-year elected term in his district, resigned on Tuesday, May 10, 2016, after a long investigation by a state commission into his behavior with some defendants. It seems that he would have the men, who were appearing in his court on traffic charges usually, take boxes of cans of food ostensibly for charitable purposes, to his house. He would then photograph them from behind while they were holding the boxes and bending over.
The State Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission obtained some 4,600 photographs of men, some of them nude and some after apparent “paddling or other sex acts” and stated that it had not finished processing the evidence. The commission had contacted several dozen men who had been involved in this activity, and had talked to hundreds of witnesses since the investigation began in 2014. The commission had ordered him to stop hearing cases in late 2015, but he had continued to draw his salary until he turned in his resignation. The commission still has not been able to decide on referring criminal charges.
According to a post from the New York Times:
Men who had appeared before Judge Boeckmann in court said they were asked to go to his house or to some other location with bags of canned goods, ostensibly for charity. Then, according to their accounts, the judge told them to bend over and pick up the cans as he photographed them from behind for what he said would be evidence of community service, according to a filing on the commission’s website.
In one case from 2014, he gave a defendant his phone number and ordered him to come to his house, where he photographed the man bending over and offered him $300 to pose as Michelangelo’s statue of David, the commission said.
The judge’s name is O. Joseph Boeckmann Jr., and his lawyer, Jeff Rosenzweig, denied that he had done anything wrong. He said that the judge had been near the end of his term and didn’t want to get “into a big fight” over the veracity of any allegations “over an office that he was going to vacate anyway”, but that if any criminal charges were filed he would fight them “vehemently.” I would suggest to this judge’s lawyer that a plea bargain would be more appropriate.
This website appears to be run by New York magazine and today it has a story about a “famous” doctor who has used his degree and “training” to make money by selling a worthless drink that supposedly makes you happy, horny, sleepy, or calm, depending on which of the four varieties you drink. None of these drinks contains anything that definitely works. They do contain ingredients that might have worked, only in sub-therapeutic doses. Things like yohimbine, for example, a drug that used to be available by prescription but was dropped because nobody could prove that it really did anything when taken in tolerable doses. At effective doses, yohimbine does some very strange things to you besides making you horny. We won’t discuss that because it’s nearly impossible to get in significant quantities so you can’t try it.
The company is Kole, and it has some very good lawyers, at any rate. They threatened to sue the author when they found out he was going to write an article about the company. That’s right, their first impulse when they heard of the possibility of exposure was to sue. They also went in the same day they heard he was writing his article and dramatically changed their advertising for these drinks. They toned down their claims so that they would fit into the FDA’s category of “foods” and “natural supplements” which don’t have to prove that they actually do anything, only that they are safe.
For two years, before the author started writing his article, they advertised that this stuff would work as an aphrodisiac, or for insomnia, to improve your thinking ability, or to calm you down. Therapeutic claims that the FDA never got wind of, or they would have gotten one of those cease and desist letters. The lawyers figured to slow down the author long enough to keep the FDA out of the conversation by threatening to sue him AND his sources just for writing an article about the man and his company.
So this is how the man is described in the article:
Kolé, then, might blend anonymously into the humming, multibillion-dollar background of the American supplement market, were it not for the fact that it was founded and is chaired by Dr. Bankole Johnson, chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Johnson is an established, respected expert who has built an impressive career as an addiction researcher. The founder of ADial, a pharmaceutical company which creates drugs aimed at curtailing addiction, Johnson haspublished quite prolifically, was once featured in an HBO documentary on addiction, and is currently a member of Maryland’s Heroin and Opioid Emergency Task Force.
It’s a long article, and interesting if you’re fascinated and annoyed by people who misuse their training to produce useless items that clutter up the shelves of pharmacies and health-food stores, thereby making a lot of money.
The web site is a good place to look for entertainment, just like the Cracked web site and many others. You’ll go down the Internet rabbit hole in an instant.
What is the horrible, awful, despair-inducing truth that we have all missed over the last few months? The fact that millions upon millions of Americans are so deluded that they have seriously voted in favor of Donald Trump becoming President. The people who have voted this way either agree with the vicious lies, threats, and insults that he has been spouting nonstop since before he declared his candidacy, or else they have been ignoring the plain import of what he is saying. What is so horrible is that there are so many people in this country who think this way. It is not important that they are in the minority. What is important is that there are millions of them: a large minority of the American people.
That means that there are millions of intolerant, xenophobic, misled individuals who could form a lynch mob at any time. This is worse than “The Oxbow Incident.” A substantial minority of any random crowd could be goaded or fooled into infecting the rest with homicidal violence.
I despair for the future of the United States of America if this kind of people get any power at all– if any of them become policemen, city councilors, state legislators, or if any of them are seated on juries. In short, the temperament displayed by the people who voted for Trump is destructive to society as a whole. With this kind of attitude, what should they care about global warming, or even global thermonuclear warfare?
This is what we all need to see now. I am afraid that it may already be too late.
Comment of the Day
Guitar Man
New York, NY May 7, 2016
Many thoughts have crossed my mind in the last year, some wild, some way out there, some totally implausible…and I’m not the first, perhaps, to voice them, but here goes:
1) Trump doesn’t want the presidency, and doesn’t think he’l win (even at this stage). It’s all about elevating brand awareness.
2) Trump wants to win. It’s all about the ego, and nothing more.
3) Trump doesn’t want to win because he loathes the idea of giving up his NY life, his businesses, and of living the life he’s come to love, in exchange for perhaps the most stressful job on the planet (and one he knows will in no way resemble his life in the business world).
4) Trump’s primary goal is to intentionally bring down the GOP (for whatever reasons he may have).
5) Trump is devising a way to throw the election so it appears he lost while giving it everything he had (because he really doesn’t want the presidency). He’ll then spin the loss in a way that frames him positively (of course). A loss will, in effect, be a win.
6) Re #5, this is plausible because, in many ways, he’s already won: he’s singlehandedly smoked the GOP establishment and turned the entire party upside down. He can crow about this for years. Great talk show fodder for him.
Who really can say they know for sure?
726 Recommend
This comment appeared in response to an article in the NYT : “Republican Party Unravels Over Trump Takeover”. There were over 2000 comments on this article.
The analysis presented in this comment, that is, possibility #5, is most likely correct; Trump will lose the election but use his support to control a significant group of voters many of whom will have deep resentments over Trump’s loss. What he will do with them is anyone’s guess.
Another comment pointing out the source of much of Trump’s support:
DW
Philly May 7, 2016
I am absolutely astounded at the way these analyses ignore the obvious: the Trump phenomenon is the backlash against our first black president. Come on! You go back decades dissecting American conservatism, and you somehow manage not to mention that Donald Trump headed the “Birther” movement, which gave racists the okay to assert that Barack Obama was not a real American – explicitly because he was alleged (falsely) to have been born in Africa? HELLO?
Are we ever going to be allowed to discuss this elephant in the living room? Are we supposed to pretend FOREVER that the origins of this outburst of hatred are totally mysterious?
1218 Recommend
The racist backlash against Obama’s election gravitated towards Trump’s “birther” position and comprise a significant part of his support.
Finally: by not allying with Ryan, Trump can distance himself from the paralyzed Congress of the last few years:
Sombrero
California May 7, 2016
Where were they when the country was plunged into war, into recession, into engineered government shutdowns and legislative sabotage? Answer: They were aiding and abetting all of it, for their own personal and political gain. Exhibit A: Paul Ryan. Ted Cruz. Mitch McConnell. Eric Cantor. John Boehner. Jeff Sessions. Steve King….on and on and on.
Mr. Trump, for all his faults, stands apart from them and their elite-driven agenda of political, economic, and social destruction.
626 Recommend
Roses on the East Side of the House
According to the New York Times (NYT) Donald Drumpf is trailing Hillary Clinton by about ten percent in national polls, giving her a nearly insurmountable advantage in the Electoral College. Current polls show her winning 347 to 191 electoral votes. Clinton’s current standing matches Obama’s standing in 2012 except that she is ahead in North Carolina, a state Obama won in 2008 but lost in 2012. The only state in which she is polling worse than Obama is New York, and even there she is still well ahead of Drumpf. Even if Drumpf were to improve his standing by five percent in each state, he would still lose by 285 to 253. Only if he improved by ten percent in each state would he win the Electoral College.
Losing ten percent in the opinion polls in every state between now and November is highly unlikely but possible. The NYT gives as an example the 1980 election, when Jimmy Carter was ahead of Ronald Reagan in the opinion polls at this point. The key factor in the 1980 election was the presence of over 400 American hostages in Iran after the invasion of the American Embassy in Tehran. Carter’s inability to resolve the hostage crisis was the cause of his loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. If he had terminated the situation there would have been much more public opinion in his favor and he would have had a chance to win. The Iranians were aware of this perception on the part of the American voters and they used it to force Carter out of office.
Reagan used his agents to sell anti-aircraft missiles and arms to the Iranians in exchange for cash which he used to fund the “Contras” (rebels fighting the government of Nicaragua) in contravention of specific Congressional bans on payments to the Contras. The International Criminal Court (whose jurisdiction the US doesn’t accept) condemned these actions. Eleven of Reagan’s staffers were convicted in this scandal; Reagan claimed he had no foreknowledge of the plot, but Congress stated that “if he didn’t know what his staffers were doing, he should have.” When news of the plot became public, Reagan’s popularity declined from 67% to 46%, the biggest drop in a week in the history of popularity polling. (Wikipedia)
It would take a scandal of the order of Iran-Contra or the hostage crisis at the American Embassy to have sufficient negative effect on Hillary Clinton to boost Drumpf to victory in November. It is certain that the Republican strategists have many bogus scandals waiting for the right time to be revealed in the news media; these are the only weapons that they expect to have sufficient effect to pull off a victory for Drumpf in the November election.
Republicans are well aware that their policy positions are disapproved by the majority of the American electorate and that they have no chance of winning based on a comparison of their policies with those of the Democrats. They know that they must play the popularity game to smear Clinton sufficiently for at least a brief period of time surrounding the election. Look for revelations of some manufactured scandal implicating Clinton to appear in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, most likely some time in October.
(The two cats are named Morgan and Kitten; they were raised together.)
Trial in German Courts of Auschwitz Guards
Reinhold Hanning, 94, told a court today that he was sincerely sorry for his service as a Nazi concentration camp guard at Auschwitz in January 1942 to June 1944. (New York Times article of April 29, 2016)
“I am ashamed that I witnessed injustice and allowed it to continue without taking any actions against it,” Mr. Hanning told the court in the North Rhine-Westphalia city of Detmold, WDR, a public broadcaster, reported. “I am sincerely sorry.”
Herr Hanning was a front-line German soldier who was wounded in Russia; after he was rehabilitated from his wounds he was assigned to be a guard at Auschwitz, considered a non-combat position. He claimed that at first, he did not know what was happening, but quickly began to realize from seeing piles of bodies being removed. “I could smell the burning bodies…” he said.
Herr Hanning is one of dozens of former concentration camp guards who are only now being charged as accessories in the murders of millions at the concentration camps. Recent completed cases have included a four-year sentence for one soldier in his nineties and a demise before trial could be opened in another case. Despite the seventy or so years that have passed, a number of eyewitnesses still come to these trials and beg the defendants to confess.
The unique thing about this rash of “cold cases” from the Second World War is that they are being prosecuted in German courts, by German judges, who claim original jurisdiction for these cases and opine that there is no statute of limitations on murder. These cases began with the precedent of the trial of John Demjanjuk, a former concentration camp guard who lived in Detroit and was an autoworker for many years before being deported back to Germany, convicted in 2011, and sentenced to five years in prison. Demjanjuk had served as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland in 1943.
A survivor who testified at the Demjanjuk trial said it did not matter how short or long the sentence was for his crimes: (according to a New York Times article of May 12, 2011)
“I had an opportunity to say what I wanted to say for 50 years,” Mr. Cortissos, 73, said outside the courtroom. “I’m satisfied.” He added, “It doesn’t mean I can forget; it doesn’t mean I can forgive.”
Parts of the twentieth century are known to historians as the “bloodiest century in human history”; this includes the fifty million killed in World War Two. We should try to remember the lessons of history, or, as the saying goes, we will be forced to repeat them.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 