It's ever fashionable in our political culture to be "hard," to be a "realist," to assert that certain goods, like the containment of Communism, justify whatever means are applied to attain them. We hear the same arguments now, about torture, about how "quaint" it is to believe anything other than that the righteousness of the aim redeems the act, however vicious and despicable that act.
I, of course, believe something else. Not to defend or justify Communism in any way, or those murderers responsible for 09.11: not in the slightest. But we are different, or we want to be. Aren't we? Don't we?
I believe Jones Griffiths' photographs function as a kind of moral litmus test. If you can contemplate them and still assert that what was achieved was fully worth the cost, I can only conclude that a part of you has died, whatever subtle module it is that makes you human.
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