Marquis de Sade's optimism

Reading in "The Crimes of Love" (my translation from French):

"Is there being foolish enough to believe that anyone breaking any law of society will be left in peace by the people?

Is it not in the interest of humanity to destroy anyone who interferes with their rights, or is detrimental to their existence?

Position or wealth can sometimes provide the evanescent glow of success, however, such reign will be short!

Recognized and exposed, he will soon become a subject of public hatred and contempt; will he then find apologists, or supporters ready to cheer him in the fall?

Nobody will want to admit to knowing him, since he will not have anything to offer. Everyone will abandon him as superfluous ballast; misfortune will fall upon him from all sides, he will cry in shame and misery, and will soon die in despair."

Who would have thought that Marquis de Sade could be such an optimist?

Citizen resistance

Most of us are familiar with the term citizen's arrest:

A citizen's arrest is an arrest made by a person who is not a sworn law enforcement official. In common law jurisdictions, the practice dates back to medieval England and the English common law, when sheriffs encouraged ordinary citizens to help apprehend law breakers.

Despite the title, the arresting person does not usually have to be a citizen of the country where he is acting, as they are usually designated as any person with arrest powers. Source: Wikipedia

Stuart Littlewood argues that citizen-delivered justice can go a lot further:

Genocidal tyrants, corrupt leaders and bloodthirsty heads of state hankering for global domination and wishing to keep the world in turmoil once again infest the planet. They are often born and nurtured in the Western democracies the world is told to admire but which are now so corrupt they disgust many right-thinking people. These menaces can’t be brought to justice in the normal way, so it’s a job for a revived and revamped Assassination Bureau.

Military commanders in the resistance and bomb-making freedom fighters are not the issue. The people of the world need an instrument to eradicate the low life in high places that threatens humanity. They need to dispatch those who deal in mega-deaths, who meddle massively where they have no business, who create injustice and who make life miserable for millions. We all have our wish list. I’ll wager the same target names keep reappearing.

Think of it: a socially-responsible international public riddance service ready to do business with any member of the public who feels himself at war with these evil forces and can put a good case for a slaying before the bureau chief and his panel. I see long queues forming to enlist the bureau’s help in eliminating the world’s tormentors. For them there is no hiding place. Riddance requests have to be accompanied by a suitable “intelligence finding”, of course.

The work of an Assassination Bureau would be perfectly “legal” and “legitimate”, and most certainly “necessary”. It would simply follow the precedent set by America and Israel. SOURCE

No long ago I toyed with the very same idea for a thriller novel. Yet again life proves much more interesting than fiction. The movement to take charge of our own wellbeing is growing. We can no longer leave it up to those who claim to speak and act on our behalf but time and again prove to be the very enemy they vow to defend us from.

The soul that Lucifer ate

The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department
Inspector General’s report released this week was that agents
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a “War
Crimes” file, documenting torture they had witnessed at the
Guantánamo Bay US prison camp, before being ordered by
the administration to stop writing their reports.

The report makes it absolutely clear that torture was ordered
and planned in detail at the highest levels of the government—including
the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon and
the Justice Department. Attempts to stop it on legal or pragmatic
grounds by individuals within the government were systematically
suppressed, and evidence of this criminal activity covered up. SOURCE

As terrible as the actions of this junta are what interests me is what hides in the heads of persons responsible for these atrocities. Do they realize they are committing immoral acts or do they consider them intricately human? Were they Good people who at some point turned Evil? Or were they always Evil (is there even such thing as Evil if the acts they are committing are part of what we the humans are, as history would suggest)?

Philip Zimbardo in The Lucifer Effect: In this book, I summarize more than 30 years of research on factors that can create a "perfect storm" which leads good people to engage in evil actions. This transformation of human character is what I call the "Lucifer Effect," named after God's favorite angel, Lucifer, who fell from grace and ultimately became Satan.

How does a normal kid who grows up in a well to do Western society turn Evil? Is there any difference between growing up in a permanent war zone such as Afghanistan were there exists no living memory of peace, and that of a small town USA? Apparently not. Is Philip Zimbardo right? Good people transform into Lucifers regardless of where they come from or whatever their growing up conditions? I'd like to see how this transformation took place in the case of someone like C Rice, D Rumsfeld, J Bolton etc, step by step. Perhaps some day a new Truman Capote will visit them in jail and take their brains apart for the rest of us to see what's inside, but I wonder if such a vivisection would be complete without a priest or a specialist of the soul? Maybe it's the soul that is the answer - some people simply do not have it.

The Lucifer in you

Heard an interesting interview with Philip Zimbardo on the radio. In 1971 Zimbardo ran the Stanford Prison Experiment, where randomly chosen students were put in jail: half were to play the roles of prisoners and the other half the roles of guards. The experiment had to be shot down because the guards turned into sadistic torturers...

In his new book The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo argues that everyone harbors a Satan in them, the good example being the model US soldiers from Abu Ghraib who turned evil, just like God’s favorite angel Lucifer...