2017-08-23

Quote Of The Day: Evildoers

"...The imagination and the spiritual strength if Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short of a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evil doer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: By invoking Christianity; the conquerers of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis; by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, not passed over, nor suppressed. How then, so we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? Ans was that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago p 174.

I think we all know which ideology he's referring to.

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