Dostoevsky Knew: It Can Happen Here – WSJ

Dostoevsky recalls that in his novel The Possessed, he showed how even the most innocent hearts can be drawn into committing monstrous deeds and feeling proud to have committed them. And therein lies the real horror: that . . . one can commit the foulest and most villainous act without in the least being a villain! And this happens . . . all over the world, since time began. The possibility of considering oneself and sometimes even being, in fact an honorable person while committing obvious and undeniable villainy, he adds, is a possibility we overlook at our own peril.

A century later, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, contemplating the idealist Russians who joined in torture and the enlightened Western intellectuals who whitewashed it, asked why Shakespeare s villains murdered only a few people while the Bolsheviks killed millions. To answer this question, he reflects, one must grasp that no one thinks of himself as evil. To perform evil deeds a person must discover a justification for his actions, so that he can regard stealing, humiliating and killing as good. Macbeth s self-justifications were feeble, and so conscience restrained him. He had no ideology, Solzhenitsyn observes, nothing like anti-imperialism or decolonization to allay pangs of guilt. Solzhenitsyn concludes: Ideology that is what gives evil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . so that he won t hear reproaches and curses but receive praise and honors.

I have heard commentators worried that cancel culture and suppression of diverse opinions might lead to a soft totalitarianism. If only. We need to recognize that some of those who justify Hamas s atrocities would be ready to perform them against their designated enemies. And unlike Dostoevsky s Turks or today s Hamas, they would have high-tech means at their disposal to extend their reach. I fear that the horrors of the 20th century may prove only a foretaste of much worse in the near future.

via www.wsj.com

You bet it can happen here.

Gary Saul Morson.