White Lightning Axiom: Redux

This topic of choice is not one I enjoy fixating on. I need to hammer on it for a bit so I can bury it in my active mind. I'm still bothered about the whole thing with kids and the abuse, brutality and murder they are subjected to. I am often accused of being inflexible and excessively judgmental. My attempts to pass the actions of others through a filter of my own matrix of morals and ethics in order to come up with a verdict of good or evil. Indeed, my absolutist morality has been countered on more than one occasion with ideologies that espouse situational ethics. The wikipedia gives this brief definition:

"Situational ethics refers to a particular view of ethics, in which absolute standards are considered less important than the requirements of a particular situation. The standards used may, therefore, vary from one situation to another, and may even contradict one another. This view of ethics is similar to moral relativism, and is contradictory to moral universalism, and moral absolutism."

Under this paradigm, the murder or suppression of several million individuals in the hopes to preserve a larger number is the correct course of action. The reasoning for the actions and what is being 'preserved' becomes more important than the actions themselves. The ends justify the means. The good of the whole trumps the welfare of the individual. Socialism in a nutshell, if I am not mistaken.

In the end though, human nature will question these actions and something must be done to convince the human machinery that these actions ARE just and there is no greater evil than to thwart that which must be done. No matter how distasteful. This is where the propaganda of scapegoating comes into play. The propagandists and their accompanying polemics move this agenda forward with their intellect and unwavering belief that their actions are intrinsically good. In the end, the systems that create these beasts fall upon themselves an implode. We know that though individuals can be silenced, ideologies remain and new champions of these wrongheaded precepts deny that any wrong has been done. The polemics engaged in the denial of the holocaust and other pogroms/ethnic cleansings/genocides must know it exists, but are busy fomenting hate. This is primarily to reinforce that what has been done was not wrong and what they believe should be done again is equally right. Where is this leading? Earlier in a comment I said the following:

"I know that children die every day, but the physical and psychological savagery described here ... I'm dumbstruck at the gross moral ambiguity that those who participated had to create."

I have come to the realization that those who commit the actions are guilty, but not nearly as guilty as those who build the framework that the mind uses to justify it.

Throughout history, there have been a notable number of 'Great Leaders' who have used these methods to advance their own agenda that stems from various motives.

Atilla the Hun - power and greed - died of excessive drinking, empire gone

Genghis Kahn - power and greed - died at 60 after becoming a bureaucrat, empire gone

Arnold-Aimery "Kill them all. God will know his own." under Pope Innocent III in southern France - power and greed - not much known of his fate, but the Church remains today in a less political incarnation

Stalin - power/insanity & fear, died of a stroke, empire gone

Hitler - power/insanity, died of suicide, empire gone

Rape of Nanking by Japan - belief of racial superiority - empire gone

Pol Pot in Cambodia

Algeria,Bosnia, Kosovo where sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims exploded after festering for hundreds of years

Rwanda where the Hutu killed their Tutsi brothers

Darfur where the Janjaweed are currently killing Animists/Christians/non Arabic Muslims

Saudi Arabia where camel jockey boys are purchased as chattel, abuse and raped as an assertion of power

Iran where the sex slave trade for girls under 14 is supported by their arrests and execution if they speak out

All these cases have children as their greatest victims. Then today I see something that gives me hope, if in no small part, that there are those who do not stand by and do nothing:
Child-porn sweep nets 39 arrests

HAMILTON, N.J. - State authorities have arrested 39 people, including a pediatric neurologist and a high school hockey coach, in a child-pornography sweep across New Jersey that traced movies and pictures being traded over the Internet.

Most are charged with voluntarily possessing and helping to distribute child pornography, including a video of a man raping his 5-year-old daughter in Georgia, authorities said yesterday

I feel better getting off my chest, but the pain remains no matter how muted or how deeply buried.