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There is moral relativism and there is moral popularity and there is moral. Who knows where we end up? That's because there is no end to end at. History doesn't end at all. We do, and we are what we did, others deciding that moral to their own satisfaction later, that morality not being to them what we do/did but what they decide among themselves according to themselves. Forget the judgments of history: Immoral people will reign in immoral times and condemn the Just. Those who are moral live accordingly and live without concern for the judgments of those who come later, regardless.
Does it mean we are trapped in a personal vacuum of personal morality? Not if we act according to Reason, intuition, and tradition. If we think, then we are able to save ourselves perhaps from immorality. Mistakes? We'll make a few. And the authority we base our moral actions on? That decides it for us. That's personal. Sartre writes of it nicely, writing that we choose our own moral authorities to obey. He takes at least some of the foundation for such thought from, of all people, Heidegger. We live anyway, and we must do our best.
At the Combat Zone the point is to bring forth examples of moral questions in action. There's no theology here; not a philosophy to follow. No ideology informs these posts. A thesis, yes.
Below is some of a piece from Latvia, close to Lithuania geographically and culturally, historically and morally. In fact, it's hardly different from anyplace. The same moral questions are pervasive no matter where we are or the times. A Lett is tried for crimes against Humanity in the story below for siding with a group now out of favor, and he seems to have been a particularly brutal bastard on the face of it. You, in a position perhaps similar sometime, will have to make decisions that will define you as a moral person. Times will change around you and today's friends might become tomorrow's prosecutors. Today's right might seem to be tomorrow's crimes against Humanity. How will you know today that this is good and that isn't? What, if anything, will you do today?
Latvian seeks £4million compensation after being jailed for killing Nazi sympathisers in World War Two
Daily Mail Reporter; 26th June 2008
More than 60 years after the end of World War Two, a man is to be judged by Europe's highest court on whether he was right or wrong to kill Nazi sympathisers collaborating with Hitler.
Latvian Vasiliy Kononov, 85, is claiming compensation of £4 million for being convicted and sentenced to six years imprisonment by his own country in 2001 for the unlawful killing of civilians who had betrayed a partisan group to the Germans.
Kononov, a guerrilla attached to the Soviet Red Army, helped kill the civilian collaborators after tricking them into admitting they had handed the partisans over to the Nazis.
Years later courts in Latvia found him guilty of crimes against humanity.
But Kononov is claiming that he acted correctly in killing the nine civilians in a Latvian village in 1944, because at the time he was legitimately fighting with the Red Army, and on the side of the Allies including Britain, to repel the Nazis from the Baltic state.
He also claims that he is the victim of political correctness in modern day Latvia, a European Union country where the State now openly defends those who fought for the Nazis against the Soviet army in the Second World War.
The Latvians argue the Soviets were seen as the greater threat to the country's independence, and this justified siding with Hitler.
The verdict from the European Court of Human Rights, due next month, will effectively re-open the issue of war crimes during the Second World War as established under the Nuremberg trials, by deciding whether a man can be punished for fighting against the Nazis.
In March, 1944 he was assigned to discover the fate of a partisan group of 12 men led by a Major Chugunov who disappeared near the village of Maliye Baty after being betrayed by villagers in the pay of the Nazis.
Disguised in a Nazi greatcoat, Kononov talked to villagers who boasted how they had betrayed the partisans.
Then Kononov and his men held a war court that convicted the villagers. The villagers were given a written judgement sentencing them to death.
Most were shot, although a man, and two women were in a building that Kononov set on fire and died in the flames.
In all, nine people were killed, including a child, which Kononov admitted was a mistake.
[....]The case brings into focus Latvia's contempt for the former Soviet Union after over four decades of occupation, with Kononov being cast as a Stalinist thug massacring civilians.
It hinges on whether the highly decorated former guerilla can be classified as a Soviet occupier of Latvia or as a Latvian citizen fighting the Nazi invaders.
'The Latvian courts agree that Kononov was a member of an anti-Hitler coalition, they do not dispute that,' said Joffe.
'They also agree that those villagers were in collaboration with Nazis.
'Yet they claim that Kononov was representing Soviet occupiers and killed the civilians who were acting according to the laws of that time.
'But this is nonsense. He is a native Latvian, he was fighting for his country.
'And according to the rules of war, people taking guns from invaders in exchange for food and protection were not civilians anymore, but collaborators.
'This process is purely political like other things Latvia has been doing recently - such as reburying Nazis as heroes, and organising monuments and eternal flames at Nazi cemeteries.'
Kononov, now 85, said : 'I have never doubted that I was fighting for the right thing.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk
In the Modernity we share we have "rules of engagement" and legitimate control over who does what and where and when. We don't lawfully act as individuals in combat but act under direction of authority of our nations and governments. We have a duty, legal and moral, to refuse to act on orders immoral and illegal, known to most at least at an intuitive level: that we don't set fire to buildings with people inside, and that we don't shoot children. That part shouldn't be too hard to figure. But we kid ourselves in thinking it's all an easy story to discover the sense of. In the comfort of the moment the horror is difficult to grasp, and it's very easy to condemn. Cold sobriety demands that after the fact we do judge coldly and soberly and act accordingly. Individuals who commit crimes against civilians must be punished for those crimes, regardless of their motives and the urgencies of the times. It's a price actors pay for life. No one is perfect, and even the best commit wrongs that require punishment. It's a price one might willingly pay for the terrible mercy of "later still."
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