@kevo_koma:

Yeah I agree with you on that point, but what I'm saying is what if one of the reasons that its been kept secret is that it would more or less destroy the world and the Gorousei are trying to prevent that.(I realize that this is most likely not the case) After all if we consider that the finding of One piece will coincide with learning about the Void century then the war Whitebeard talked about could very well be what the WG fears(in that it will destroy the world).
The Roger pirates know about the Void century but they chose not to do anything about it(hell they could at the very least told Dragon if they thought that whatever happened back then was so reprehensible) we should ask ourselves why that was.

I don't know whether am making sense, I guess what am trying to say is information(the void century)is power, power that could destroy the world.

@Darkfalcon
Did they no Robin was a child or did they just know that one escaped? Also I think that its possible to pass on information after all they all came from the same Island so the archeologist would know who to trust, hell they could even have written it down, dropped it, someone comes along picks it up becomes curious and the Domino effect begins, I think this is what Akainu figured and he decided to nip it in the bud.
As for Robin her being able to read the poneglyphs is what made her dangerous in the first place(I believe its also the reason Ohara was wiped out in the first place). Think about it this way what if Robin was truly evil and not simply a woman who wants to learn about History she could already cause alot of damage if you assume that she gave or used the weapon Arabasta had.

Oh I've just realized that the higher up marines know that there are people who can decipher locations to weapons of mass destruction and to them it is for the greater good to wipe them out instead of hoping that they don't use this knowledge to plunge the world into chaos.

That's my point. The only way knowledge could destroy the world just by being revealed to the world, and the only reason the World Government would want to suppress it so badly, is because it would reveal something unflattering about the World Government's founding. There is no way information about history being released could actually harm the common man, and so the government has no right to kill innocent people because of it. The scholars might technically be criminals, but because they're only criminals under unjust laws made by the government, they were really innocent people too.

It's true that the government does have the right to keep people from recreating the ancient weapons, but killing all the scholars is not the right way to go about that, and the elder stars' reaction clearly indicates that what scared them the most about Ohara was that the scholars had dug up information on the blank century and not that they were trying to make their own ancient weapons.

Desa, I think you really need to rethink your worldview. Do you seriously believe there is no situation in which doing something illegal can be the morally right thing to do?

@desa:

I don't care about whether you like the current order or not but he killed them for order not for politics.

In this case they are one and the same.

@kevo_koma:

Hmm you are right but you also have to consider that maybe he thought that somehow the archeologist would pass on the information to someone else and set off a domino effect at least that's how I think he reasoned, why deal with chances when you can just blow the problem up.

This does raise an interesting question as to what truly happened in the void century, if we consider that someone as seemingly honorable as Sengoku knows about it and is willing to protect its secret then maybe it isn't as black and white as we might think and considering that there are hints that it will truly bring about a world engulfing war maybe its better if it was secret.

See, I think the thing is that there is no possible scenario where information about what happened in the blank century is worth covering up. That is straight-up just unjustifiable. The absolute worst possibility (for the government) is that the original founders were just power-hungry people who violently, brutally overthrew a legitimate government to gain power (and to be honest, considering how One Piece is written, I don't think the original founders of the government will be portrayed as that evil). If that were true, then there's no reason the people of the One Piece world shouldn't be allowed to know how their government was formed.

I think that there is no reason to ever cover up major historical events no matter how horrible they were. I know this is an extreme example, but imagine if the German government decided to try to erase the Holocaust from their history by murdering anyone who opened a history book. If the government screwed up 800 years ago and they're still screwing up now by killing innocent people, then they don't have the right to rule and they have no right to control the past.

What if there are no legal means because even trying to discuss the issue brings the government down on you? Look at the reaction Saul got from Sengoku when he made a perfectly reasonable statement about the government's poneglyph policy. The government would never have allowed the Oharans to study the poneglyphs, but the world deserves to know what happened in the blank history, so the Oharans had no other option.

He killed them to protect the world government's rule, which is guaranteed to be based on lies considering their reaction to the poneglyphs. How is what I said false?

@desa:

He killed them to preserve order.

If the current order allows a government that kills its own people for no particular reason to exist, is it worth preserving? Are you saying that all revolutions throughout history are inherently evil because they disrupt the status quo?

@desa:

No I'm saying doing forbidden things is bad.

–- Update From New Post Merge ---

I don't give two shit about problem they have with goverment. They are doing what is against the rule Just like the Oharians were doing. You don't like it? Go somewhere else. You cant? Deal with it. They knew are bad what they were doing was. And they were investigating babies not killing them. They needed the real one to show-off.

So are you saying that it's impossible for laws to be unjust? If it's always wrong to break the law, like you say, then that means that all laws must be just, and so all lawmakers must be perfectly just.

@Don:

but Akainu isn`t in his eyes nor in OP-society an evil person.

If the people of the One Piece world knew the full truth of the situation - that Akainu killed innocent people for no other reason but to protect the good name of the World Government - would they still consider him a good person? The thing is that to say Akainu and the leaders of the world government aren't absolute evil is to say that governments have the right to kill their own people whenever they want for whatever reason they make up and that they shouldn't have to face the consequences.

@desa:

For me people who decide to do illegal things are bad. Robin of the hood was bad.

So what you're saying is that it's impossible for a government to be "bad"?

Hopefully there's no problem with me doing this, since Stephen did remove these translations from his site (if you don't want this link here, ask me and I'll remove it), but his translations are still on the Wayback Machine. Personally, I think it would be best to include these in the opening post for now.

http://web.archive.org/web/20090316090432/http://www.mangascreener.com/stephen/onepiece/onepiece.html

@kmohyudin:

A question that have been in my mind for a long time now, and this seems like the right place to discuss it.

If my understanding is correct, there are two types of poneglyphs in existence. Those that contain information, and those that contain location of other poneglyphs. So far, we have only seen poneglyphs containing information of WMD's. We know that they do contain information regarding the true history… then there is that quote from Robin in Skypea that the collective information of all the poneglyphs is the Rio poneglyph... Now... how does information regarding WMD really fit into the whole true history thing??

We can't say for sure, but if Clover's hypothesis applies to all poneglyphs, then the ancient kingdom specifically decided to leave information about the weapons behind because they were used in the conflict between the ancient kingdom and the organization that would become the World Government. I guess the simplest theory would be that the 20 kings or whatever got their hands on a superweapon(s), and the ancient kingdom, realizing their defeat was at hand, started creating the poneglyphs. But who knows if Oda would go that route.

Alternately, the ancient kingdom left that information behind because they felt the superweapons would be necessary for defeating the government created by their enemies in the future, but I can't see One Piece doing something like that.

And in addition to that, his reason for killing Ace (and wanting to kill Luffy) was because they were the sons of criminals. He didn't say "you have to die because you went around beating up Marines" or "you have to die because you broke into and out of Impel Down", but "you have to die because we don't like your dad".

It was the most justified "evil" thing he did, but his intentions were still wrong.