A clear mark of evil

I recently came across a photo I can't find again. It was of a young child having his picture taken in Auschwitz (could have been any death camp or killing field of any socialist hell of the 20th century). He looked understandably scared and in a state of not understanding what was happening to him. God knows what he'd been through up to that moment.

Here's what it brought to mind. People who can carry out such evil, day after day, whatever coercion, whatever is motivating them, and can *continue* doing it even to children...are truly evil. A person with any good in them would break at that point. But that is a true mark of evil. To desire to harm children. A real symbol of innocence in this world (forget original sin, compared to adult humans (or even adolescent humans) an infant, a toddler, or a child appear as innocence in this world).

It seems, also, that the evil of the last hundred years alone took special pleasure in harming children. In seeing them suffer. In seeing their eyes imploring the adults around them for protection and denying it. In torturing them. In bringing horror into their young world and vision. This is the mark of true evil. It exists.

Our instincts are to protect young ones, and to be able to do harm to them as they are looking up to us for protection is about a clear a mark of evil as can be thought of.

Someone with any good in them at all would break at the point of doing evil to a child. Would willingly commit suicide in an act of rebellion against the evil power controlling and coercing the events he or she were caught up in.

Prior to that photo I saw a photo of two little girls born conjoined at the head. The smile (the bubbling joy) on the face of the one facing the camera destroyed me. She didn't know it wasn't supposed to be like this. She just got born. She was alive. Everything was new. But that face. The joy, the innocence. That is the face that evil can look at and want to harm. That is true evil, and it exists.

I followed the photo and found out they were successfully separated by surgeons at UCLA Medical Center and survived. That's another thing, a theme for another time...the length that will be gone to to save a life while evil is busy killing in other parts of the world as if life was worth nothing.

And, no, I'm not a moral ignoramus who can't discern between necessary acts of war and raw acts of evil.