The Salvation War: Pantheocide Epilogue Up

[darksoul]

This wouldn't work.

1. At which phase of death? A human can be brain dead, with all mental state variables erased, and still be breathing and their heart running. There can even be cultured cells alive from that person years after death.

2. If a person goes from completely alive to ashes in a fraction of a second, it's difficult to see how this technology could work. The casualties from the nuclear blast earlier in this book all survived their death.

The simplest explanation is that something is recording a person's memories throughout their entire life, and advanced technology allows one to access this 'backup log' and do everything we observe in this book. I've decided to call that 'something' a soul because it is an existing and well understood concept.

Ok, point taken, an ongoing backup process would be required. My point is that it seems to me to be less multiplicative of entities to assume this backup function is performed by the same mechanism that creates the second-life body after death. So instead of scanning the body state at the moment of death, this would maintain ongoing scans of all human beings and when they die, for whatever definition the mechanism has for death, then route the data to the resurrection function. I mean, obviously we're talking about technology that is even beyond Clarke's Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- in this case it's indistinguishable from a power exceeding that of God Himself) and super-Clarkian mechanisms would be required for any of the scenarios we're discussing -- whether it's an ongoing constant scan-with-backup, a scan at the moment of death, or a capture of a naturally-occurring soul at the moment of death.

The question of what happens to people who are brain-dead but still breathing is an interesting one, and also whether those in persistent vegetative states are resurrected with fully restored mental capabilities. It would suck to be resurrected as a 2nd-lifer but with only the fragmentary memories and mentality that a person in a persistent vegetative state could muster.

As I said before, no active scan is needed if humans are instrumented to implement passive listening. These are basic programming principles.

When auditing a system, you can intrude into it every certain time to record the data you need, but that requires time and resources not easily allocated to the task. So came the events and listeners. In this way, information is only recorded when something (an event) is fired. An external mechanism (the listener) is tuned to one or a few events, and record information of relevance to the audit logs. The downside of listeners is that they must be fast, thread-safe, and can`t record all that much information.

A couple of things must hold true for this to work:
1 - humans must be instrumented : the first life bodies must contain some form of event throwing mechanism.
2 - Information gathered is not that exact. It`s coarse grained, meaning that petty details like the color of the bike that run before you when you where 25 and were going to work for the first time would be recorded, but the second and third day it won`t, because it didn`t mattered then (and most likely doesn`t matter now either). There is no place where second lifers' memories are stated to be comprehensive. No one has tested that. It may seem comprehensive to they, but it may not be. How can you remember if your memories are not complete?

So given this mechanism and assumptions, is not that hard to grasp the system. It requires a marvelous display of technology, specially biological, but it's not magical nor it's out of our reach in due time.

The question is, why would someone bother?

[Junghalli]

I mean, obviously we're talking about technology that is even beyond Clarke's Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- in this case it's indistinguishable from a power exceeding that of God Himself) and super-Clarkian mechanisms would be required for any of the scenarios we're discussing

Not necessarily. I can imagine how it would be done with a relative minimum of magic:

1) Micro/nanotechnological sensor network in the brains of first life humans.
2) An assembler capable of creating a second life body.
3) The assembler is backed right in front of a portal (the Minos Gate). When something is shoved into the gate from the other side it is disassembled for raw materials.

There may be serious feasibility issues with some of these, particularly the sensors in first life people not being noticed in brain dissections and the like given how thoroughly they'd have to infiltrate the brain (or even whether it would be possible to do such a thing on a living natural brain), and the assembler being able to work as fast as it does, but in principle the only thing in there forbidden by real physics as far as we know is the portal, and primitive demons and angels and modern humans can create them so they don't seem to require any astounding technological feats.

[Jamesfirecat]

Nope.

Richard Dawkins writhed and twisted on the burning sand, trying to evade the flurries of searing flakes that tormented him. As far as he could see, he was in a featureless desert, broken only by the forms of other victims thrashing about in the same agony as him. He had no idea how long he had been here, all he could remember was the knife plunging into him and then everything round him converging into a single bright dot, the way an old-fashioned television did when the station closed down. Then the impression of a tunnel and the sudden impact of the pain as he had found himself here.
...

“Hell boss. Sir, stay still Sir, we’ll get you out of this. Just hold still.” The tool-steel bolt-cutters sliced easily through even the thick bronze shackles.

Chapter 28 of Armageddon?

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 4#p2725504[/quote]

Whoops my bad, well shows you what I get for commenting without bothering to reread the chapter involved....

[darksoul]

I mean, obviously we're talking about technology that is even beyond Clarke's Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- in this case it's indistinguishable from a power exceeding that of God Himself) and super-Clarkian mechanisms would be required for any of the scenarios we're discussing

Not necessarily. I can imagine how it would be done with a relative minimum of magic:

1) Micro/nanotechnological sensor network in the brains of first life humans.
2) An assembler capable of creating a second life body.
3) The assembler is backed right in front of a portal (the Minos Gate). When something is shoved into the gate from the other side it is disassembled for raw materials.

There may be serious feasibility issues with some of these, particularly the sensors in first life people not being noticed in brain dissections and the like given how thoroughly they'd have to infiltrate the brain (or even whether it would be possible to do such a thing on a living natural brain), and the assembler being able to work as fast as it does, but in principle the only thing in there forbidden by real physics as far as we know is the portal, and primitive demons and angels and modern humans can create them so they don't seem to require any astounding technological feats.

My idea, precisely.
That quote is not mine, though.

that we haven't detected the instrumentation doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just mean we are not looking for it. It can be anything.

So, a wild theory: If caelis can control nephilim because they are more in tuned with their brains, and if UCs are in a way our ancestors/engineers, they can detect brain activity acrross dimensions, because we would all be "nephilim" to them...
just a thought.

[wickeddyno]

That's the very, very simplified version. One step higher than that is the version where you take into account that the quantum fluctuations happen way more often in the immediate vicinity of the hole than they do an normal flat space. Space around a black hole is curved to an extent that makes Hell look almost pancake-flat, and that creates a stress which has a lot to do with particle pair production.

Sure, and I think you are correct on this, but even normal space that's not heavily curved will have vacuum fluctuations, and some of these will occur close enough to the border for one of the particles to pass over during their lifetime. It'll just be a miniscule amount, but possibly enough to detect.

[Junghalli]

Good point, I hadn't thought of that. We have precedent for action between dimensions without a readily apparent conduit in-universe.

[Tiwaz]

Mmm. Regarding repunishment of Nazis...

Bad precedent.

We can't think small along lines "Oh yes, and Nazis have to be punished again/punished too".

Why?
Think history. Where do we stop? Roman slaughter and enslavement of Carthage?
Mongol horde ravaging cities?

Huge variety of other murders, slaugters and whatnot our history is rather rich with.

And let's go to more modern times. If Nazi goes hanging again, what are you going to do when old Wehrmacht/IJA second lifer comes from Hell and starts pointing fingers at American/British/Russian/whatever soldiers for atrocities during WW2?

Are those nations prepared to round up THEIR criminals and put them against the wall?

If not, it is unwise to make mistake of making handling nazis public.

[darksoul]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

this is an useful tool to resolve in a "hard" way all the debate we had a while ago about caelis descending from humans, or viceversa, or whatever (there wasn't a clean decision back then).
Basically, proving that mithocondria in angels came from humans positions they as our descendants, and viceversa, without complex biological theories based on phenotype.

if our mithondria are not related linearly or are not decisively tested at least, that could mean we are descendants from a common ancestor.

Just presenting a tool to develop.
And I know this is a little late, but, homo caelis is a family, at least a genus , not a species at all. it encompasses subfamilies and tribes, as well as several species. Ought to be precise on that bit.

[darksoul]

Mmm. Regarding repunishment of Nazis...

Bad precedent.

We can't think small along lines "Oh yes, and Nazis have to be punished again/punished too".

Why?
Think history. Where do we stop? Roman slaughter and enslavement of Carthage?
Mongol horde ravaging cities?

Huge variety of other murders, slaugters and whatnot our history is rather rich with.

And let's go to more modern times. If Nazi goes hanging again, what are you going to do when old Wehrmacht/IJA second lifer comes from Hell and starts pointing fingers at American/British/Russian/whatever soldiers for atrocities during WW2?

Are those nations prepared to round up THEIR criminals and put them against the wall?

If not, it is unwise to make mistake of making handling nazis public.

there is a difference between nazis, mongols, american southern slave owners, Chinese revolutionary and counter revolutionaries, and such. Nazis organized crime knowing that it was crime, under pseudo-scientific theories to justify territorial expansion and economical growth. They were an Empire constructed over blood without any pretext like democracy for Americans, or Communism for Russians. they were just an Empire, an agresive one, in an epoch were they whole of the world condemned their actions for what they were: remorseless assassins and racists. So a retrial is founded.
Now, notice I say retrial, not repunish. We can't go anarchically punishing every criminal we found in Hell. Then again, we can go pardoning them either. You can imagine what would Hitler could do with an army of second lifers. We can't allow that, can we? he can be trialed, and put to superhell, not to punish him, but to remove him from society. as the same as the other nazi regime commanders. In this particular matter, as it involved a lot of countries, all the affected parties should take a part.
Not the same, for instance, if Chinese would like to put Mongols to trial. that's off, because Mongols fought Chinese as a whole country against another country, without any specific drive to exterminate them. That was their culture, as such, Mongols of the time weren't doing anything bad. they hadn't had the same concepts of right or wrong.
That's were you draw the line: Knowledge of right or wrong for a specific action. Also, territoriality. that's important. For example, I know how fond are Americans to blame Stalin of murder and stuff. Don't know, don't care. But putting him to trial is a matter of Russian internal affairs, which are the ones, through their mirror state (or in Russia's case, maybe several mirror states.. they kind of have a complicated situation on that) must decide how to handle the matter.
Oficial wars are not to be taken into consideration. We can't judge Napoleon for his crimes during the occupation of Europe. they weren't any guidelines on the mistreating of prisoners and such at the moment, and even if it were, Napoleon did what he thought was the fastest, most secure way to enhance his empire (why he wanted an empire is the crime to being with, but I digress).
We are dealing with high profile criminals, whose criminality is somehow dulled because of their historical significance, and whose cases must be examined one on one, and after they are given a background of the laws and social situation they are confronting (to evaluate their capacity to adapt) and an opportunity to defend themselves. even then, I wouldn't sentence them to death if it isn't in cases where the very presence of they among population poses a threat to peace (like any general, political leader or conqueror that doesn't realize his/her place inmediately). I'm thinking Alexander, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung (the chinese leader, forgive the spelling if it isn't correct), and probably about every king, queen, emperor or Pope since the dawn of time. Not to mention a SPECIALLY hard vigilance on Machiavelli and Fouche!!
Those guys give me the creeps.
Caesar was wise enough to maneuver his way to settle his own country, so now he is untouchable. Ok, so he got away without his lot. It's cool. but when you think about it, there is no way to get big without stepping a couple feet. automatically, everyone who ever run an empire, or a country in its expansionist phase was a criminal, so if they all were, none were.

I'm concerned about the common criminals. say, the famous Charles Manson. the guy was clearly delusional, and wrong. And violent. He could be killed, and be done with. the guy who kills his wife because he was cheating on him, not quite. the kids at Columbine, no. they were mentally fucked up, and maybe, just maybe, they got their lesson learned. And on, and on.
There is a retrial that must be held for each known criminal. High profile ones must be subject to trial pending from decision from Yamantau. And common criminals must be trialed by the country the belonged on in Earth, as long as there is any record of them. If there isn't, well, so they can't be trialed, they are free. We get as much as we can't, but if we can't convict a thief from the fifth century, that's not the end of the world.

Now, if we want to get into really thorny ground, consider terrorist attacks. An Arab that immolates himself for his God, is a religious fanatic. We know he was wrong in his motivation, but we know that now. He probably learned that as well. Is a person that fights for his ideals to the death worth of additional punishment, when the very basis of his whole life is taken from him? Maybe they should be controlled as potentially dangerous individuals, and forced to pay some kind of compensation to their victims, but that's it. Or is it?
the same holds for Israelis. So their country is the Holy land, huh? No more religious war, but what about territorial war, nationalist war? It won't take long for that to erupt again, if the division is not ended. After all, there is no point in being a Jew or a Arab anymore, except... their culture. And history. and resentments. And opening to Western ways.
remember, religion shape culture. Now religion is gone, but culture is to stay for a while longer. So, I don't buy that "peace because we took a nuke for you" story. Peace among states, yes. peace among every Arab with every Jew, not quite. terrorist suicide attacks will stop, that is certain .

To lighten thing up a little bit...
How about if we rescue Vlad the Impaler and the Marquis of Sade? Now there you have a couple of fellows I would LOOOVE to see what to do with....

[Junghalli]

this is an useful tool to resolve in a "hard" way all the debate we had a while ago about caelis descending from humans, or viceversa, or whatever (there wasn't a clean decision back then).

It's almost certain that they share a common ancestor with us somewhere because they can apparently derive nourishment from the same foods as us and even exchange genetic material with us (even if IIRC Stuart has said somewhere it isn't exactly interbreeding in the conventional sense), which suggests a similar biochemistry.

If we take the statements that they're millions of years old at face value I'm pretty sure it's pretty unlikely they'd be descended from mEve since the usual date given for mEve I've seen is within the < 200 k years range. If they weren't descended from mEve it wouldn't really tell us much. It wouldn't even really give us any kind of date, as we don't know when the mEve mitochondria lineage finished sweeping through humanity. Mungo Man lived within the last 100k years and he apparently was not descended from mEve.

That said we might be able to do some kind of mitochondrial and Y chromosomal dating though.

The fact that the various species can apparently interbreed and there has been significant introduction of demonic DNA into the human gene pool may complicate any attempts to get a divergence date. As would the possibility that HC is an artificially engineered race.

[Darth Yan]

What of people who were executed and later found to be innocent? I would pardon them.

PS is there an epilogue

[Tiwaz]

there is a difference between nazis, mongols, american southern slave owners, Chinese revolutionary and counter revolutionaries, and such. Nazis organized crime knowing that it was crime, under pseudo-scientific theories to justify territorial expansion and economical growth. They were an Empire constructed over blood without any pretext like democracy for Americans, or Communism for Russians. they were just an Empire, an agresive one, in an epoch were they whole of the world condemned their actions for what they were: remorseless assassins and racists. So a retrial is founded.

Is it? What does pretext matter at all? It is the deeds, not excuses which are punished.

And I challenge you to name empires NOT founded on blood.
Dig up history of British empire and you find huge amount of questionable activities.

Saddam using poison gas on Kurds? British did that first.
Concentration camps? British invention.
Genocide? Practiced by multitude of empires.

Now, notice I say retrial, not repunish. We can't go anarchically punishing every criminal we found in Hell. Then again, we can go pardoning them either. You can imagine what would Hitler could do with an army of second lifers. We can't allow that, can we? he can be trialed, and put to superhell, not to punish him, but to remove him from society. as the same as the other nazi regime commanders. In this particular matter, as it involved a lot of countries, all the affected parties should take a part.

And what about American war criminals? Or British? I think you are forgetting to look at the big picture. You build up Nazis to be exception which has to be handled, but in real situation it is impossible to make such exceptions, because very soon someone starts to ask questions about what will be fate of other war criminals who have not been put to trial...

Not the same, for instance, if Chinese would like to put Mongols to trial. that's off, because Mongols fought Chinese as a whole country against another country, without any specific drive to exterminate them. That was their culture, as such, Mongols of the time weren't doing anything bad. they hadn't had the same concepts of right or wrong.

Mongols genocided whole cities for sake of resisting them. For example Massacre of Baghdad. 100 000 to 1 million inhabitants slaughtered, whole city razed to ground.

And to be honest, Nazis did not see what they did as bad. So if you go down that road, you cannot punish them either.

If perception of right and wrong is up to accused, Nazis walk free.
If perception of right and wrong is not, then Mongols have to hang too. And whole lot of others.

That's were you draw the line: Knowledge of right or wrong for a specific action.

And you define this how? As said, Nazis did not think they did anything wrong. Their ideology saw those groups they exterminated as danger. Were they right or wrong in that accord is irrelevant, as they overall believed to do "the right thing".

Oficial wars are not to be taken into consideration. We can't judge Napoleon for his crimes during the occupation of Europe. they weren't any guidelines on the mistreating of prisoners and such at the moment, and even if it were, Napoleon did what he thought was the fastest, most secure way to enhance his empire (why he wanted an empire is the crime to being with, but I digress).
We are dealing with high profile criminals, whose criminality is somehow dulled because of their historical significance, and whose cases must be examined one on one, and after they are given a background of the laws and social situation they are confronting (to evaluate their capacity to adapt) and an opportunity to defend themselves. even then, I wouldn't sentence them to death if it isn't in cases where the very presence of they among population poses a threat to peace (like any general, political leader or conqueror that doesn't realize his/her place inmediately). I'm thinking Alexander, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung (the chinese leader, forgive the spelling if it isn't correct), and probably about every king, queen, emperor or Pope since the dawn of time. Not to mention a SPECIALLY hard vigilance on Machiavelli and Fouche!!
Those guys give me the creeps.
Caesar was wise enough to maneuver his way to settle his own country, so now he is untouchable. Ok, so he got away without his lot. It's cool. but when you think about it, there is no way to get big without stepping a couple feet. automatically, everyone who ever run an empire, or a country in its expansionist phase was a criminal, so if they all were, none were.

Indeed. So how can we blame few but not the rest?
You can't forge an empire without lots of blood, every single empire is drenched in blood.

So, how can one empire and it's builders be declared to be unholy and evil and rest walk free?

You can't. You can try to impose such double standards, but they won't hold for long.

For you what Nazis did is somehow horrible and acute, but that is because you are rather little distanced from it.

To second lifer who has spent few centuries in Hell, having died in Baghdad slaughter... Nazis are nothing. Mongols are the epitome of human evil.

And again, as we are on Nazis... WHAT ABOUT ALLIED WARCRIMINALS?
Pretending that only Germans somehow broke the rules is dishonest. Everyone did that.

So are you prepared to put row of [insert country here which is not Germany] WW2 vets against the wall to be shot? Because they have to be if you start dishing out punishments for breaking Geneva treaty.

If we are honest, most other countries have much more baggage they would have to purge before getting back to Germany.


Now, because of this I doubt there will be any trials.
Simply hitsquads who make some people.. Disappear.

[darksoul]

@Tiwaz

Dude, read the whole post before quoting.
Of course all empires are evil, I believe that was pretty clear. We agree on that.
Caesar must be let off the loose because he is important, as Abigor and Michael. They are above the law. Sad truth, but truth nonetheless.

The hit squads are actually the best solution. kill any high profile personality we encounter that can be classified as perilous. The problem with that is the same it always was: hitmen obey their orders without regard to justice or higher order. american hitmen will kill american enemies, chinese squads will kill their own, Israelis ones will kill nazis by the cartload, etc. Not sure that's a good thing to allow. So they'll be used in selective killing, which is not going to help much.

The problem with Nazis was that sure, you can talk about ideology and that stuff as much as you like, but in the end you can't call yourself a Christian and start a war to kill so many people, without distinguish anything other than race, and in some cases not even race. Besides, their war was not justified by nothing, since their theories were pseudo-science. Even if the Aryan race were to be found superior than other human races, that doesn't forfeit those other races' right to live. That is wrong, was wrong before Hitler, was wrong during the war, and is still wrong.
Mongols, on the other hand, did war as the knew. They couldn't take prisoners, they were nomads. they weren't civilized, not even superficially. What do you expect them to do? There weren't human rights or Geneva convention back then. But those aware of such things and committing acts of cruelty are therefore criminals.
there is still the chance that I'm mistaken about mongols and other barbaric races, and they turn out to be just cruel rather than a product of their time. if that's the case, well, off with their heads

well, perception of right or wrong is quite a fine line to thread, but I would say that each person should be judged on the basis of three criteria: danger to current society, fitness to his/her own time and culture accepted behavior, and ability to adapt to the new society. I suppose we could clean the slate for some of the less dangerous ones, but take the others under surveillance, imprisonment or simply put to death.

an alternative could be not to held anyone responsible for past crimes, except those we know to be clinically insane and criminal, and keep a very opened eye on them, forbidding certain liberties until we can be sure they behave as expected. Should they fail to, then we take them to trial. It's gonna be hard, but i guess we could do that, paroling every criminal up to date. Hell's wilderness is liable to became home of quite a dangerous crew... but it's a possible idea.

I still think some criminals should be retrialed on the spot.
So, Vlad and Sade, anyone? ideas?

[westrim]

I still think some criminals should be retrialed on the spot.
So, Vlad and Sade, anyone? ideas?

Sade? What for? All he did was write.

[Spekio]

@Tiwaz
I still think some criminals should be retrialed on the spot.
So, Vlad and Sade, anyone? ideas?

Look, not to get on Ad Hominens, but you are an idiot. Judged under wich law system again?
I could go on a long tirade on why you are wrong, but really, you don' t even know WHO you are talking about. Check Sade' s wikipedia page at least.

[Deebles]

@Darksoul,

With regards to any punishment you'd want to dish out to anyone that's been in hell for any real length of time... has it perhaps occurred to you that they'll already have been punished far beyond the worst prison sentences imaginable on earth? How are you ever going to trump that, and why would you want to?

We cannot be so cruel as to hand out unlimited punishment for what are ultimately limited actions. As for new & recent crimes... I'm thinking various periods of forced labour (not as cruel as for ordinary humans, with second-lifers' regenerative capacities), but ultimately execution. Because there comes a point when you'll really want to make certain people someone else's problem.

[impatrick4life]

I do not think there should be any punishment for past offenders (specifically, murderers) in Hell or Heaven, to be quite honest. Not even for Hitler or Stalin or Mao. The overwhelming majority of murders, as far as I can tell, are either the product of insanity or crimes of passion, which in the former case is alleviated by their translation to Hell/Heaven, and in the latter, a simple death sentence is ample punishment - in fact, honestly, I almost think the realization that comes afterward ("Oh, my God, I killed my wife....") is punishment enough. For the exceptions... well, there's few enough that it could be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Rapists, though... I'm in favor of reciprocal punishment, if you catch my drift

[EdBecerra]

"Oh, my God, I killed my wife....":twisted:

Of course, in this story, it's possible to be standing there and numbly muttering "Oh my wife, I've killed my God!"

Ed.

[atheistcanuck]

Well I think that a lot of people who did things that we would consider bad, were doing things that were considered normal at that time and place. Sure the people they were doing it to didn't like it but it wasn't considered out of the ordinary, and honestly the countries they were attacking probably weren't all that much better from our modern standpoint. So I don't think they should necessarily be punished, and besides, they've all been in Hell being tortured for a long time, like hundreds of years. So I think they've suffered enough even if you believe they deserved to suffer in the first place.

The nazi ringleaders and many other modern leaders of dictatorial regimes are different, because they've done things that were considered bad by most other people at the time they were doing it. But some of them have already been tried and executed, so they shouldn't be tried again because it's not legally permissible in most countries these days to try people for the same thing twice, the ones that escaped trial, however should be recaptured and tried. Especially Hitler himself.

[darksoul]

I still think some criminals should be retrialed on the spot.
So, Vlad and Sade, anyone? ideas?

Sade? What for? All he did was write.

I believe I recall he murdered at least one peasant girl, with all the torture, humiliation and other nice and pleasant actions he later described. I don`t know if he killed anyone else. But boy will he be pleased of what we are know!
And as a second lifers, S&M is specially rewarding, I would say.

EDIT: Actually, I don't have the book to back the murder of the girl at hand, so scratch that. Let's leave it at torture and sexual debasement.

[darksoul]

@Tiwaz
I still think some criminals should be retrialed on the spot.
So, Vlad and Sade, anyone? ideas?

Look, not to get on Ad Hominens, but you are an idiot. Judged under wich law system again?
I could go on a long tirade on why you are wrong, but really, you don' t even know WHO you are talking about. Check Sade' s wikipedia page at least.

read carefully. I`m not saying Sade is a criminal. I'm curious what to make of him.
Too unrelated subjects.
And as for the legal systems, that's explained before, when I talked about territoriality.
You should really pay more attention to what is written before answering, I would say.

[darksoul]

@Darksoul,

With regards to any punishment you'd want to dish out to anyone that's been in hell for any real length of time... has it perhaps occurred to you that they'll already have been punished far beyond the worst prison sentences imaginable on earth? How are you ever going to trump that, and why would you want to?

We cannot be so cruel as to hand out unlimited punishment for what are ultimately limited actions. In the end... I'm thinking various periods of forced labour (not as cruel as for ordinary humans, with second-lifers' regenerative capacities), but ultimately execution. Because there comes a point when you'll really want to make certain people someone else's problem.

I suppose that's a heavy argument to take into consideration. Still, there are at least four sentences we can hand out: forced labor, life in prison, forced rehabilitation, and death. Not as punishment, but rather as a means to control undesirable elements of the population, at least until they ceased to be reasonably suspect of being disruptive.
Maybe retrial is not the right word... more like a parole board/ psychiatric evaluation board / jury would be appropriate. What do you think?

[Simon_Jester]

Of course, in this story, it's possible to be standing there and numbly muttering "Oh my wife, I've killed my God!"

Is Michael married? Because credit where it's due, he did most of the real work there.

[Tiwaz]

The hit squads are actually the best solution. kill any high profile personality we encounter that can be classified as perilous. The problem with that is the same it always was: hitmen obey their orders without regard to justice or higher order. american hitmen will kill american enemies, chinese squads will kill their own, Israelis ones will kill nazis by the cartload, etc. Not sure that's a good thing to allow. So they'll be used in selective killing, which is not going to help much.

And who is going to prevent this? Hmm?
Nobody.

Point with killteams would be to use them very sparingly, but in reality Earth governments are unlikely to be able to agree on who to kill and who not to. So each would want to run their own team.

Naturally, this would most likely be limited to unpacified regions of Hell. Pulling assassinations in areas with established order would be too risky (just like in Earth), at least in any great numbers.

Teams would prowl the uncharted territories trying to locate and eliminate unwanted people before they are recovered by actual recovery effort.

Point I wanted to drive home is that starting to pull off public trials for whomever you want to punish is going to open door for EVERYONE being scrutinized. Do you think it would take long after Himmler or Hitler is put to trial for someone to ask about properly prosecuting guilty parties of My Lai? Or french activities in their domains?

The problem with Nazis was that sure, you can talk about ideology and that stuff as much as you like, but in the end you can't call yourself a Christian and start a war to kill so many people, without distinguish anything other than race, and in some cases not even race.

Read about crusades. Those guys considered themselves good christians and they waged war in every bit as brutally as Nazis.
Acre and Jerusalem to mention couple massacres.
2700 prisoners slaughtered in Acre, perhaps 10 000 muslims in Jerusalem in their mosque and unknown number of jews burned alive in their synagogue.

Besides, their war was not justified by nothing, since their theories were pseudo-science. Even if the Aryan race were to be found superior than other human races, that doesn't forfeit those other races' right to live. That is wrong, was wrong before Hitler, was wrong during the war, and is still wrong.

So YOU say. But they did not see eye to eye with you. You must again choose, either personal perception of accused matter or they do not.

If they do, then Nazis must walk free just like Mongols, Crusaders, Muslims, Conquistadors and whatnot.
If not, all must be put to sword.

Mongols, on the other hand, did war as the knew. They couldn't take prisoners, they were nomads. they weren't civilized, not even superficially. What do you expect them to do? There weren't human rights or Geneva convention back then. But those aware of such things and committing acts of cruelty are therefore criminals.

Mongols had an empire. They weren't unwashed barbarians just riding on their horses. Remember Kublai Khan who met Marco Polo?
Guess where that "Khan" part came from...

Mongols had strategy to be so over the top brutal and barbaric against every city which resisted them that others would simply submit.
What they did was essentially attempt to scare cities to surrender. For this purpose they did things which would be horrible by standards of that time.

there is still the chance that I'm mistaken about mongols and other barbaric races, and they turn out to be just cruel rather than a product of their time. if that's the case, well, off with their heads

Indeed.

well, perception of right or wrong is quite a fine line to thread, but I would say that each person should be judged on the basis of three criteria: danger to current society, fitness to his/her own time and culture accepted behavior, and ability to adapt to the new society. I suppose we could clean the slate for some of the less dangerous ones, but take the others under surveillance, imprisonment or simply put to death.

And who would have the infinite wisdom to determine these things?
And who could be said to have actual authority to make such decisions?

an alternative could be not to held anyone responsible for past crimes, except those we know to be clinically insane and criminal, and keep a very opened eye on them, forbidding certain liberties until we can be sure they behave as expected. Should they fail to, then we take them to trial. It's gonna be hard, but i guess we could do that, paroling every criminal up to date. Hell's wilderness is liable to became home of quite a dangerous crew... but it's a possible idea.

I still think some criminals should be retrialed on the spot.
So, Vlad and Sade, anyone? ideas?

Again, who is the one to run the trial? Which laws will be applied?

I have distinct feeling that Americans presume that it is given that they are put to US style court, but today most of the world does not have US style court.
Nor does huge majority of the world sport laws similar to American ones.

And this is just modern world as it is, right now.
Start scrolling back in time and things get even more varied.

[Edward Yee]

I nominate that Lords of War follow one of these... "special operations forces,"* American or not...

* As well as the implications of calling them SOF, or if that wouldn't happen, then of selecting existing direct action (DA) operators and telling them "hey, new criteria for target selection!"