IN what may become the last trial for war-time crimes by a living Nazi, an 86-year old man is up for prosecution for the murder of unarmed civilians in Holland during the war, a reprisal for Dutch resistance murders of Nazi leaders in Holland. Der Spiegel reports:

"He joined the Waffen-SS, the elite military arm of Hitler's murderous SS organization, in 1940 and served on the Eastern Front for two years before returning to occupied Holland to join the 15-strong hit squad "Special Command Feldmeijer" in 1942.

His job was to help eradicate the Dutch resistance by shooting civilians deemed to be sympathetic to it. "We didn't know the men," Boere told SPEGEL ONLINE last August. "The security service of the SS gave us the name and off we went."

According to Dutch and German court documents, he and a companion shot dead a pharmacist, a bicycle dealer and another civilian.

In the case of the pharmacist Fritz Bicknese, Boere and a companion -- both dressed in civilian clothes -- walked into his drugstore in the town of Breda on July 14, 1944, asked him his name and then opened fire. Bicknese bled to death on the floor.

Boere admits that he was a "fanatic" at the time. "I'm sorry about what happened in 1944. I pray for the dead every night and for everyone who died in the war." He said he only realized after the war that he had believed in "total nonsense." ..."

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There's the rub. What technique, or approach could dislodge belief in total nonsense without requiring it to run through the complete physical dramatization of violent death given and taken?

Where's the key to sanity, or the formulation that might make it impossible to believe in such fictions?

Along with water and energy, this is one of the big crises of human history, because we have so many more people sharing the bounded space of the planet than we did even a generation ago. So we can no longer afford the luxury of indulging in psycho belief systems.

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