Evil Planners Quotes

The evil plan is most harmful to the planner

He harms himself who does harm to another, and the evil plan is most harmful to the planner.

THE AMERICAN brand of socialism known as the New Deal was made possible by the income tax. But with the advent of income taxation, socialism was unavoidable. There have always been, and perhaps always will be, people who are averse to letting other people alone. Recognizing the human inclination to err, they are impelled by their kindness of heart to overcome this imperfection; invariably they come up with a sure-proof plan that needs only political power to become effective. Political power is the essential ingredient of every one of these plans to improve the human. Since all the ills of mankind, they argue, follow from the exercise of free will, it follows that the only cure for these ills is to suppress free will and to compel the individual to behave in all things as per the perfect pattern devised by these improvers. Compulsion means force; there must be a policeman to see that the individual does not follow his own inclinations. But policemen must live. Since they do not produce a thing by which they can live, others must support them. Hence, the planners must have the means of getting at the production of the very people who are to be improved by the policeman. That means taxes, and the more taxes the greater the number of enforcement agents, and therefore the more comprehensive the plan. No plan can be bigger than its bureaucracy. The income tax is the ideal instrument for the planner.

What is missing—what is foregone—in the typical discussion and analysis of historical or current nuclear policies is the recognition that what is being discussed is dizzyingly insane and immoral: in its almost-incalculable and inconceivable destructiveness and deliberate murderousness, its disproportionality of risked and planned destructiveness to either declared or unacknowledged objectives, the infeasibility of its secretly pursued aims (damage limitation to the United States and allies, “victory” in two-sided nuclear war), its criminality (to a degree that explodes ordinary visions of law, justice, crime), its lack of wisdom or compassion, its sinfulness and evil.

We humans almost universally have a false self-image of our species. We think that monstrous, wicked policies must be, can only be, conceived and directed and carried out by monsters, wicked or evil people, or highly aberrant, clinically “disturbed” people. People not like “us.” That is mistaken. Those who have created a continuing nuclear threat to the existence of humanity have been normal, ordinary politicians, analysts, and military strategists. To them and to their subordinates, Hannah Arendt’s controversial proposition regarding the “banality of evil” I believe applies, though it might better have been stated as the “banality of evildoing, and of most evildoers.

Such is Fascist planning-the planning of those who reject the ideal postulates of Christian civilization and of the older Asiatic civilization which preceded ti and from which it derived-the planning of men whose intentions are avowedly bad. Let us now consider examples of planning by political leaders who accept the ideal postulates, whose intentions are good. The first thing to notice is that none of these men accepts the ideal postulates whole-heartedly. All believe that desirable ends can be achieved by undesirable means. Aiming to reach goals diametrically opposed to those of Fascism, they yet persist in taking the same roads as are taken by the Duces and Fuehrers. They are pacifists, but pacifists who act on the theory that peace can be achieved by means of war; they are reformers and revolutionaries, but reformers who imagine that unfair and arbitrary acts can produce social justice, revolutionaries who persuade themselves that the centralization of power and the enslavement of the masses can result in liberty for all. Revolutionary Russia has the largest army in the world; a secret police, that for ruthless efficiency rivals the German or the Italian; a rigid press censorship; a system of education that, since Stalin "reformed" it, is as authoritarian as Hitler's; an all-embracing system of military training that is applied to women and children as well as men; a dictator as slavishly adored as the man-gods of Rome and Berlin; a bureaucracy, solidly entrenched as the new ruling class and employing the powers of the state to preserve its privileges and protect its vested interests; an oligarchical party which dominates the entire country and within which there is no freedom even for faithful members. (Most ruling castes are democracies so far as their own members are concerned. Not so the Russian Communist Party, in which the Central Executive Committee acting through the Political Department, can override or altogether liquidate any district organization whatsoever.) No opposition is permitted in Russia. But where opposition is made illegal, it automatically goes underground and becomes conspiracy. Hence the treason trials and purges of 1936 and 1937. Large-scale manipulations of the social structure are pushed through against the wishes of the people concerned and with the utmost ruthlessness. (Several million peasants were deliberately starved to death in 1933 by the Soviet planners.) Ruthlessness begets resentment; resentment must be kept down by force. As usual the chief result of violence is the necessity to use more violence. Such then is Soviet planning-well-intentioned, but making use of evil means that are producing results utterly unlike those which the original makers of the revolution intended to produce.

Jesus called the crowd again and said, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand. 15Nothing outside of a person can enter and contaminate a person in God’s sight; rather, the things that come out of a person contaminate the person.” 21“It’s from the inside, from the human heart, that evil thoughts come: sexual sins, thefts, murders, 22adultery, greed, evil actions, deceit, unrestrained immorality, envy, insults, arrogance, and foolishness. 23All these evil things come from the inside and contaminate a person in God’s sight.

I’m pretty sure the designers of some homeschool planners are on a mission to break women like me down and destroy us. No, really, I mean it. If you have ever tried and failed to follow a rigid diet or strict housekeeping routine, you know exactly what I mean. These planners are a special kind of evil.

The anti-American militias that Quds Force had been equipping weren’t just Iraqi freedom fighters. They were a mix of jihadists from around the region. Some of the things that Chase had witnessed these groups do were pure evil. They maimed and killed civilians they thought were cooperating with the Americans. These violent acts were often carried out in public, as a scare tactic, and as a way to demonstrate power.

Among the aphorisms in Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties,