Truck driven into German Christmas market in deliberate attack - 12 dead

[palou]

Ruler said:

palou said:

Saying that a politician is responsible for individual death cases is ridiculous. Only statistics can reveal truth when dealing with a sample of 80 000 000 people. All decisions that someone in that position takes will lead to some deaths; it's their job to evaluate where more is to gain and what needs to be sacrificed. During Merkel's reign, overall, the number of violent deaths has gone down, statistically. While this most definately cannot all be attributed to her, for the very least, it's enough to make any accusations of murder unfounded.

yeah she is, not even the CSU wanted to let the refugees in, she made this decision all by her self above the party

That's not the point. Let's say a politician supports a largescale integration of solar energy in the country. Solar pannels use components (rare earths) which are mostly extracted in extremely poor countries, with corrupt countries (think: Democratic Republic of Congo). As is often the case when riches appear, the increased demand for these rare earths causes a plague of gang violence in the country. Children get kidnapped, and forced to work in mines, etc... (and yes, that does happen sometimes.) Is it reasonable to say that the politician is responsible for getting these children getting killed/enslaved? No; as the alternatives would have simply caused other deaths; thousands of migrant workers in the UAE if they go for oil, etc...

 

A politician makes a choice, and simply in how many peopl these choices affect, it will likely lead to the death of specific individuals, sacrificed in the place of other individuals that would have died in another scenario, for another decision. No matter what you do, some shitty things will happen to some people. You can't prevent that with this much responsibility. This is not preventable. A politician is a murderer if he makes choices which, very obviously, lead to much more death than it prevents. I would claim that it is for the very least highly ambiguous if letting in all these people has brought more or less death - I would lean towards the latter. If only ten percent of the refugees are from an endangered Syrian region, and only ten percent of those would have been killed in the civil war (extremely bloody, I might note 500 000 people killed to date)- , that's still 10 000 people, far far more than anything that has happened due to their arrival.