First, They Came For Demjanjuk

They had been running out of camps in which to try and frame him for involvement. By releasing him pending his appeal, despite having "convicted" him of a ludicrous number of crimes, even the court itself had effectively admitted that it did not believe its own verdict but was only doing what was required of it politically. In which case, it must be said that it lacked the undeniable courage of the Israeli Supreme Court.

All the way back in 1969, when (indeed, precisely because) many senior and numerous middle-ranking Nazis were still alive, the Germans granted themselves a general amnesty. That was why they now felt the need to track down any poor Slavic squaddie in his extreme old age in order to “try” him, far beyond absurdity, as an accessory to twenty-eight thousand murders, none of them committed in Germany, a country of which he had never been either a citizen or a resident.

We should take note. To assuage much the same guilt, some poor British squaddie may very well be made to pay for the letting off the hook of every American who really mattered in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

Requiescat In Pace.