Crime

In the remarks by Ambassador Joseph A. Mussomeli to the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, that refer to the Cambodian Genocide, I found a timeless reference to Thomas Merton and his view on the individuals responsible for Nazi war crimes: "labeling the killers as insane or inherently evil wrongly permit us the comfort of believing that normal people, ordinarily decent people, could never commit these crimes. That it is only the insane and the cruel that could do so. But the real horror of these crimes, as Merton pointed out, is that most perpetrators are neither insane nor pathologically cruel people.".

Humans generally do what they perceive as correct at a certain point in time. The idea that the ends justifies the means has wide application outside of Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, but is mainly described as a tool for politicians because a lack of integrity can compensate for a lack of skill with diplomacy and leadership. The Lex Talionis, despite being the world's oldest law, was able to limit the power of amoral behavior, but that limit is now absent in current times. So, the notion that the victor writes history and controls reality ("The victor will never be asked if he told the truth." - Adolf Hitler) has become persistent support for amoral reasoning.

Self-sacrifice is one act that can always be recognized in unadulterated history, since the act itself can have long standing impact on human relationships. Victor Frankle recognized self-sacrifice by saying "The best of us did not survive", when he recounted fellow prisoner deaths in the concentration camp due to starvation. Humility can provide direction that represents God's will, actualized as self-sacrifice and a transcendence of basic survival instinct. I think Victor Frankle was one of the prisoners that sacrificed self for the greater good (Ad maiorem Dei gloriam) by his research and writing, not just the prisoners that died due to starvation because they had offered their food to other prisoners.