The statement of Kostas Karamanlis, former Minister of Transport, regarding the Tempi tragedy, and about OPEKEPE:
“I am innocent and I will prove my innocence wherever I am called.”
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Adolf Hitler (shortly before his suicide):
“Everyone deceived me. The German people deserve to be annihilated.”
Stylianos Pattakos, dictator, about Spyros Moustaklis (who was beaten for 45 days until he became incapacitated, a resistance hero):
“We did well!”
Miltiadis Varvitsiotis, former Minister of Shipping, regarding the Pylos shipwreck:
“Trafficking networks earn millions, NGOs and those showing solidarity are accomplices of traffickers. Therefore, Greece bears no responsibility for the actions of the networks that cram people into unsuitable vessels.”
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Morality is not negotiable. It is neither a tool of power nor an alibi for guilt. Whoever bends it to accommodate their actions does not rise—they fall. And as society accepts this distortion, the bar does not merely lower; it disappears.
Then, we no longer have individuals with conscience, but roles without responsibility. History has shown that societies lacking natural morality do not collapse because of their enemies, but because of their silence toward the guilty.
If there are other universes, they may have their own “morality.” No one knows. On our own “dot” planet, however, if any “morality” applies, it is that of Nature. No other.
“Whatever is natural is also moral.”
A simple, clear, comprehensible truth, like all truths of Nature, even for those possessing the most elementary prudence.
Human societies have always suffered from precisely this great illness. They recognized a variety of other sources for morality, apart from that of Nature. And this, in turn, meant that their behaviors were shaped accordingly—namely… unnatural.
The immoral, as the unnatural, abolishes—when it prevails—the most fundamental virtues of ancient Greek wisdom: self-knowledge, moderation, and the capacity for discernment. If these three essential bows are missing from the moral quiver of the individual, all the rest are useless.
In the civilizations of ALL eras, these three supreme virtues were absent from the members of societies. Even in ancient Greek society, they were certainly not self-evident to all. One had to possess the philosophical reflection and ethos of Pythagoras to proclaim before sunset:
“Where did I transgress? What did I do? What of what I ought to have done was left undone?”
If natural morality and its above components are absent, then your morality is elastic. A bar that you move lower or higher, wherever you can manage to clear it.
Such morality and conscience, since they reside in the MIND, shape all your behaviors. And they succeed—without the pain of remorse—in transforming natural morality into SELF-INTEREST.
What suits you, your own sense of justice, your personal viewpoint—these become “moral.”
It thus becomes entirely understandable, with such clarifications, why a bloodthirsty Hitler, a torturer and foolish dictator, and two criminal ministers of bourgeois democracy—who killed the 57 passengers of the train in Tempi and the (almost) 700 migrants in Pylos—devoid of any trace of natural morality, were perfectly at ease with their conscience, and proclaim it through the words cited above.