At 1:36 PM -0600 2/18/00, Harold A. Driscoll wrote:
>At 20:52 17-02-00 , Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>>Most people who work for governments are ordinary
>>people and not the facist thugs of your bizare fantasies.
>
>Do ~ordinary people~ take their company helicopter and drop a home-made
>bomb on a building known to be occupied by ten people, about half of them
>children, and when the conflagration is established, order firefighters
>away at gunpoint, until several city blocks have been burnt to the ground?
>
>Do ~ordinary people~ shoot a goat herder doing his job? And then get
>exemption from prosecution?
>
>Do ~ordinary people~ joy-ride on an airplane, ignore altitude restrictions,
>kill twenty people in among the most horrible of imaginable deaths, and
>then deliberately destroy the evidence?
>
>Do ~ordinary people~ target a passenger train in their cross-hairs, watch
>it cross a rail bridge, and then kill (to further their cause)?
>
Yes to all of the above. Ordinary people kindle fires under old women
and tell themselves they're saving the womans soul. Ordinary people
take grain from starving peasants and tell themselves they're
reditributing the wealth of the capitalist exploiters. Oridinary
people shove infants into ovens and tell themselves they're doing it
to build a better world for all.
A mans actions in pursuit of his own greed are limited by his
conscience. But his actions in pursuit of the greater good are
without bounds -- why should individual concepts of 'right' and
'wrong' be permitted to interfere with the good of society as a
whole? If it is proper to ask a man to sacrifice his wealth or his
life for society, asking him to sacrifice his morality is trivial.
The evil that is done in the name of good is many times that of the
evil done in the nameo f evil.
There is great comfort in the delusion that the implementors of every
tyranny from anicent Egypt to modern China were somehow inhuman
monsters. It provides two marvelous forms of cognitive dissonance:
a)Only evil people perform atrocities;I am not an evl
person;therefore, I will never perform an atrocity.
b)Only evil people perform atrocities;I am not an evil
person;therefore, this action I am performing cannot be an atrocity.
>Frankly, at the risk of optimism, I've a lot more confidence in ~ordinary
>people~ that what we've been forced to accept from many government employees.
>
They're the same people.
