Barry Clifford: How Do Good People Turn Bad?

                                                                 Nazis On Parade

How do good people turn bad and some even stay that way? That is if they are good people to begin with for it needs weakness to help the decay and maybe that overrides what good really is about; Knowing the difference between right and might makes the former an easy bed partner to the mind and is life to the soul; the latter is an appeasement to a lesser God and a more dangerous corrupt ideology. Rarer still, is that a good strong person rarely goes bad for within their supports is individuality though it may not mean that they are good either. That is what I believe in general describes the variables at work when we want to use the analogy of the Nazi regime and the Catholic clergy that sets about their work of murder either in a concentration camp or from the apparatus of an inquisition; or what separates a Catholic nun from throwing an infant into a septic tank full of hundreds more babies, and we can only hope they were dead when they went into it; or what makes any person wearing any uniform succumb to the gravest of crimes. Indeed Nazi or Catholics do not have a monopoly on extremism yet all are in uniform of some sort that succumb to the mob mentality. All it needs then is a little bit more stoking.

  

                 The Former Prime Minister And President Of Ireland kissing the A Bishops Ring 

And to allow any of it to exist at all needs a certain token support, even if albeit a reluctant one, along with the belief that they are untouchable and forever un-accountable. When these conditions exist we will have crimes of the worst kind, and that to look at it with moral outrage can only mean that a person was living on a remote island alone without any knowledge or co- existence of any other since they were born.

Recent history alone has proven all of these things to a reasoned person though the defenders of these crimes will tell us it was a different time and circumstance. But time is indifferent to these events, and circumstance does not change in any great measure the variables at work already mentioned. In microcosm you see it in the workplace and all too often in the family home everyday, or waiting in a line like a beggar and allow yourself to be humiliated to get an underpaid job just to keep your head above water so you can feed your child.

Yes, a bad economy helps, a no-way out mindset does too, but the tie that binds is the security of the mob that empowers the weak, the feeble minded and  the downright ugly. Without that support they become a fragile water bug that requires no effort to kill it. The mob in Ireland’s case was a Government theocracy that married religion with politics and wrote it into a constitution. Hitler’s reign was little different in it’s design. It’s execution had many similarities that included concentration camps, and only in Ireland did that mean you had to be a Catholic and a child: 160,000 children alone over a 35 year period in a country that never topped three and a half million people.

The Magdalene Children Prisoners At Work

The Germans were suppose to have been a cultured and en-lightened people since the renaissance and Ireland bragged that they were the Island of scholars for a thousand more and yet nothing could stop their return to the dark ages for almost the entire time of the 20^th century. It could be argued that Germany is at pains still regarding it’s past and was best explained, by a now very different point of view, given by a former German soldier that was once part of the mob from that 2^nd World war: “The American’s can say that they were fighting for freedom, the British theirs. What can we say we were fighting for.” 

It is in stark contrast to a nun from her mob that is one of Ireland’s wealthiest  religious orders who said recently about the Magdalene laundries/prisons that they ran for profit: “It was part of the system and the culture of the time.” 

Barry Clifford