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Word Gems exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Use Evil to fight Evil?
(Reuters) May 2, 2011: The U.S. special forces team that hunted down Osama bin Laden was under orders to kill the al Qaeda mastermind, not capture him, a U.S. national security official told Reuters. "This was a kill operation," the official said, making clear there was no desire to try to capture bin Laden alive in Pakistan. Was this a good day for America? Are we safer now? Should we cheer as at a football game? Are we proud of ourselves? Can we maintain our traditional sense of justice and national righteousness with an official policy of "kill and no surrender"? I don't think our Founding Mother, Abigail Adams, would be impressed: Abigail Adams, July 1784: Travelling by carriage to London, the future First Lady witnessed a robbery, the 20-year-old perpetrator captured: "...and we saw the poor wretch gastly and horible, brought along on foot, his horse rode by a person who took him." Put-off by the dark spirit of the attending British mob, Abigail's merciful heart responded: "Tho every robber may deserve Death, yet to exult over the wretched is what our Country is not accustomed to. Long may it be free of such villainies and long may it preserve a commisiration for the wretched."
Dorian Gray Is this what America is about - "kill and no surrender" policies for "wretches"? But the world is filled with wretches - shall we kill them all? - until we gaze upon Dorian Gray's portrait to discover the final wretch. I am reminded of JFK's warning: "There is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation, if our traditions do not survive with it." As the years pass, as politics becomes more vicious, as our civil liberties become diminished in socialism with mindless deference to Dear Leaders, more and more we employ Evil to deal with Evil. And if, by these checkered methods, our survival for a time is seemingly won, shall we recognize ourselves at the end? Shall we be worth saving? JFK had his doubts. Friedrich Nietzsche: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." Robert J. Little: "A seared conscience is one whose warning voice has been suppressed and perverted habitually, so that eventually instead of serving as a guide, it only confirms the person in his premeditatedly evil course." Desmahis: "We cannot do evil to others without doing it to ourselves." Sophocles: All concerns of men go wrong when they wish to cure evil with evil… The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter. Norman MacDonald: “A great cause of evil in the world is that men seldom think themselves criminal if they offer the same injustice to others that has been successfully practiced on themselves... Do not imagine that the good you intend will balance the evil you perform.” James L. Farmer, Jr.: Evil societies always kill their consciences. Sallust: A good man would prefer to be defeated than to defeat justice by evil means. Theodore Roosevelt: No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience. Lucius Annaeus Seneca: Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure. William Penn: A good End cannot sanctify evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it. Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated. There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of consciousness and external reality. When you are in the grip of a mind-set such as "war," your perceptions become extremely selective as well as distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and then misinterpret it. Ayn Rand: In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. Michael Gruber: The problem with evil people is that they can see only evil in others. It is one of the worst curses of being evil, that you can no longer experience good. Sophocles: If you try to cure evil with evil, you will add more pain to your fate. Nixon: And I have always maintained what they were doing, what we were all doing, was not criminal. Look, when you're in office, you gotta do a lot of things sometimes that are not always, in the strictest sense of the law, legal, but you do them because they're in the greater interests of the nation! Frost: Right. Wait, just so I understand correctly, are you really saying that in certain situations, the President can decide whether it's in the best interests of the nation and then do something illegal? Nixon: I'm saying that when the President does it, that means it's not illegal. Editor's note: Nixon was a saint compared to what's going on today; at least Nixon had some sense of love of country.
a word of solace... Margaret Peterson Haddix: Governments will rise, and governments will fall, and man will do evil to man, and all we can do is turn our hearts to good.
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