Is That Legal?

I believe that Germans like Grass and Ratzinger made a mistake by not standing up to Nazism

Right. Matter of fact, around 60 million Germans, the vast majority of French, almost all the Belgians, most of the European Jews, and many of the Yugoslavians made the same mistake. Of course the Poles (mostly dead), Ukrainians (mostly dead) Hungarians (mostly dead) and Dutch (mostly dead) did. So did the Russians (very many dead) unless they made the mistake of not wanting to march against the Germans in front of the NKVD battalions, in which case they too are among the ranks of the dead.

How easily we pass judgment. I thought it was Foucault who argued that against the monstrous machinery of the modern state, there can be no effective strategic resistance, only small tactics to win little battles here and there.

Fortunately, we live in a world where it is mainly only the conservative people fail to stand up to great evils, like Nazism. Whereas any good liberal was willing to fight tooth and nail against Stalin and his depredations, which were literally an order of magnitude greater. Just ask any liberal who lived through the Cold War... not a squish among them...

Amen, Al. This calls for a classic fisking.

"I don't have a big problem with Benedict's Nazi-era behavior. It was wrong..."

So let me get this straight: being forced into a totalitarian program for youths, and then conscripted as a soldier against your will, and then deserting that totalitarian army, is WRONG? How can he be blamed for being a conscript? He can't.

"What disturbs me is that so many decades later... his view seems little changed. 'That was difficult.' No, being sent to a concentration camp was difficult...."

Oh, I see. A mere description of the trouble of paying full tuition irks you. Don't like the word "difficult"? No, it's not the description that bothers you, it's the fact that he wasn't HEROIC enough! He should've defeated the Nazi Army one-handed and engaged Hitler in a duel to the death! And then he should've personally liberated every concentration camp victim and done slave labor for them for the rest of his life to attone for the fact that he couldn't manage to get sent there himself!

"None of my mistakes had such tragic consequences...."

WHAT consequences? You mean to say that the whole of WW2, the lives of 12 million concentration camp victims, and the safety of the universe, depended on a 14 year old boy risking execution to avoid his conscription in the Hitler Youth? Name one friggin' consequence that was "tragic." ONE. I'll give you a hint: THERE AREN'T ANY.

"In Catholic terms, he has not repented."

I see. An internet commentator on a left-wing legal blog has more knowledge on the theological nature of Catholic repentence than the former Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, and now the Pope. And what are your claims to authority on this matter? Let me guess: YOU HAVE ZILCH.

The only thing that would've satisfied the rabid, anti-Catholic liberals here would've been if Ratzinger took a bullet in the head. This is merely a proxy fight for an attack on dogmatic Catholicism and everyone here knows it. You're not fooling anyone. And it is pathetic.

Thanks for sharing those comments on Ratzinger; I keep going back and forth on this guy, but I hear the Wiesenthal Center has cleared him, so...

Since my comment has been held up as a bad example, I'd like to defend myself a little.
How many posters can truly say that they would have had the guts to stand up to a totalitarian government at the age of fourteen? Sure, everyone likes to think of himself or herself as someone who would be a hero, like Peter in the garden saying, "I will never deny you," and I'd like to think that I would have been a hero too, but I know that I can't say that with absolute certainty.
Wasn't the recent Supreme Court decision, which I assume most posters here would agree with, supposed to establish that juveniles don't have the same moral culpability as adults? It's an interesting thing to note that Ratzinger's desertion from the Wehrmacht occurred a couple weeks before he turned eighteen. Just around the time he became a full-fledged man, he realized what the right thing to do was. (Yes, after he deserted he just went home instead of joining a resistance movement - but again, how many people can truly say that they would have done better?)
I know that the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center aren't the authoritative judges of a man's Nazi culpability, but, as Isaac notes, they have defended Ratzinger.

"In Catholic terms, he has not repented."

Since repentence is turning away from sin and going in a new direction, it appears that he does demonstrate that quality of repentence. As to what is in his heart, I'd suggest that that is for God to judge, not Internet bloggers and commenters.

James, fewer people than ought to manage to stand up against totalitarianism, even when doing so bears little risk. Yet when it's gone, everybody opposed it. Why, how could it be any different? That so many in the west coddled Hitler, or Stalin, or Pol Pot or Mao, or for that matter still do coddle Castro and his Venezuelan protege, is galling. On my side of the aisle, it is galling that there are still pragmatists willing to spout the "but he's our bastard and will produce stability" argument to support tyrants.

Lost in this discussion is the fact that there are also degrees of resistance. If one lives in a truly oppressive police state, the only form of resistance may be internal. Those who survived Cambodia's killing fields are a good example. I'm not so sure how it was in Nazi Germany - I suspect it varied from town to town, but for kids aged 14, there probably wasn't much choice, or for that matter, much thought of effective resistance. That a young man eyeballing the business end of the gun doesn't stand up and shout "no further" doesn't shock the conscience. For someone in that situation, marching more slowly than he is ordered to march may take a colossal strength of character. On the other hand, it was and is unconscionable for those of us in the West to remain willfully blind toward totalitarian states, when we have the wherewithal to know what is going on, and can without cost shout and stamp our feet about it, even if we stop short of sending our soldiers to spill the tyrants' blood.

Although I don't agree with the reflexive stone-turning Eric is engaged in, I think his inquiry is at least fair. On the other hand, much of the more radical left has been extremely quick to throw stones at Ratzinger's insufficient resistance activities, when so much of the left spent most of the last century appeasing collectivist beasts, or actively serving them in the case of Joschka Fischer and his PM...

It turns out that all my life I've completely misunderstand the meaning of the word, 'mistake'. I always thought it was a fairly neutral word, appropriate for any situation where someone missed the mark. I thought 'mistake' referred to something done in error, without malicious intent. I thought that everyone made mistakes, from young children to the wisest, most respected people in the world. Now I see how wrong I was.

Apparently, a "mistake" is a terrible crime, and to suggest that someone made one is to sit in judgement on them. To call something a "mistake" is to heap blame on the person who did it. No one can be said to "make a mistake" until they have reached full moral maturity. Indeed, saying that someone made a mistake is analogous to sentencing them to death.

Well, what can I say? I certainly never meant to heap such a terrible slander on the new Pope as to suggest that he might once have made a mistake, even a normal, natural one. "Normal, natural mistake," how absurd that phrase seems now! Obviously mistakes aren't normal, much less natural. So what can I say? Somehow I'd gotten the word, "mistake," completely wrong. Using it in this context was an error, a wrong move, incorrect, but I can assure you, it was not a "mistake."

The Pope was 12 when Germany invaded Poland.

So a 12 year-old was supposed to resist Hitler, in a country where few adults and none of the religious institutions could do so?

When I was 12 I was worried about when to start shaving, not how to resist a totalitarian monster.

Well, Tom, this advances the discussion considerably: we have established at a minimum that, by my lights, anyway, you should never become pope.