Plato and Iraq

The mind of the youth is forever in states of acceptance and openness, taking ideas and images into their minds and forming opinions. The concept of understanding justice versus injustice, as defined by Plato, becomes then an increasingly consuming challenge when faced with images which are of Ð''evil actions.' The idea behind this concept becomes a point of great controversy nowadays, dealing with censorship issues, while maintaining "justice is the greatest good."

Justice has to be the main focus of any society, without it the mechanics of the city simply fall into a state of atrophied or worse, anarchy. The main problem with the concept of justice is distinguishing it from its polar, injustice, and then reinforcing those guidelines throughout the society. Plato's theory for prevalent justice deals with the youth, and more importantly images and stories in which they are faced. Plato argues that great care must be taken when presenting such stories with Ð''(evil) images' to children (youth) because "whatever opinions are taken into the mind at that age are wont to prove indelible and unalterable." However, theses images to a degree are a necessity to understand the virtue of justice and distinguish between injustices, but the need to competent decisions on what is allowable is greatly required for Plato's overall utopian ideal, "persuading them that no citizen ever quarreled with his fellow citizen and that the very idea of it is an impiety." 2

Plato's idea of censorship is very realistic even for the current day, yet in itself would spark a great deal of controversy. Not long ago America dealt with the incident at Abu Ghraib and the associated photos and video footage of the occurrences that took place there. The surfacing of these articles placed the nation in a very tight situation; it now seems in a position to uphold justice even at the expense of itself. Publication and mass media of what took place in the prison remains paramount to the ideology behind the idea of justice. This places the United States in a situation where it is morally obligated to report to its citizens the injustices that took place in Abu Ghraib, however due to the "high prurient value" in the photos some degree of censorship is required in order to prevent degradation of societal values. These pictures in themselves reflect poorly on the United States as a whole, especially in our stance of other nations. These pictures, in the scope of the previously discussed ideas of youth and justice, have the ability to create unalterable impressions

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