A rant again. Where´s the connection between the Nazi era and today´s Germany and todays trial? Nothing.
"Gott Mit Uns" was inscribed on German belt buckles in 1914 before there were any such thing as Nazis.
My point is that claiming that you are following God while your opponent is not has been used to justify all sorts of trouble in this world.
The connection between the Nazi era and today is that Germany does not have a stable moral compass that it can look back on to provide stability for assuming any "holier than thou" attitude in the year 2003.
Depending on your age, either your father or your grandfather would have been involved in the Nazi era and the parents and grandparents have an effect on the child.
My personal opinion is that Germany, like a reformed alcoholic or like the son of an alcoholic, has reacted to the orgy of bloodshed and genocide that Germany was responsible for.
It has now gone over to the other extreme.
Just as the alcoholic or son of the alcoholic that rails against all alcohol, Germany now condemns the U.S. for exercising harsher punishments on individuals that have done nothing than, say, help murder 3,000 innocent civilians.
The son of the alcoholic who condemns the man having a glass of wine and proclaims himself to be morally superior to the wine drinker is very much the product of his father's alcoholic past.
So it is with Germany's new-found exagerated reverence for a crimminal's life that believes that 44 hours in prison for each human murdered is suitable punishment and claims a moral superiority over Americans who disagree.
Such an attitude is very much a direct connection with and a product of Germany's Nazi past.
Oh, I think it's exactly the same extreme, only with a different justification!
There is quite an amount of irony in what you wrote in #14--I thought you were aware of it and intended it: "Now, Germans believe that human life is so precious that a terrorist planner should only lose 15 years of it even if he helps murder 3,000 individuals."
As putupon said, 43.8 hours / death means "life is cheap." The life of innocents is cheap, that is--the life of murderers is precious. And that's exactly how it was in the Third Reich. New bottle, same beer.
Can you now see why we're worried, Michael? BTW Hitler was elected democratically, too--it's freedom that matters, not democracy.
Opponent? Which oppenent? The US justice system is not our oppoenent! We have our system, you have yours. We believe that ours is based on the Christian values, and yours is not. But we´re not opponents, and our systems are not in a competition.
Oh, and I deeply believe that we have a moral compass. Our system is stable, and you should prove the opposite.
We´re not in the other extreme, we just turned our backs on unhuman injustice, on cruel punishment, on unnecessary penalties. We judge individuals.
We do not differentiate in the number of deaths caused by one action. Osama could have killed 1, 1,000 or 1,000,000 people - he still would face the life sentence. And anyone who helped him without being the actual offender or encourager would face 15 years.
Get it: we judge the individual and we have legal maximum penalties.
Get it: we don´t have problems with people saying that the fine should be higher, but we have problems with people saying that our moral judgment would not be appropriate. I respond to those that our system follows the ideals of the New Testament, and that such a system based on Jesus principles cannot be immoral. In fact, those who disagree have to prove that their counter-proposal is morally.
The only connection between Nazi Germany and today I can see is, that our judgments are written in German as well.