From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Dostoevsky Knew: It Can Happen Here   
   By Gary Saul Morson, Oct. 18, 2023, WSJ   
   As I read about Harvard students demonstrating in favor of Hamas and educated   
   people proclaiming that “decolonization” should be pursued “by any means   
   necessary,” I thought of Dostoevsky’s reaction, a century and a half ago,   
   to atrocities    
   committed by the Ottomans as they suppressed uprisings among their Slavic   
   subjects. This was a case, apparently unknown to today’s “decolonizers,”   
   in which a Muslim empire persecuted colonized Christians.   
      
   The European press was then filled with reports that now seem familiar. Whole   
   families were wiped out; women raped and tortured; living people humiliated   
   and corpses abused; children slowly murdered before their parents’ eyes;   
   and, in one case that    
   particularly shocked Dostoevsky, a young child forced to watch her father   
   being flayed alive “completely.” The child, Dostoevsky reported, was being   
   cared for in Russia, where she repeatedly fainted as she recalled what she   
   witnessed.   
      
   If it seems that only uncivilized people could be such sadists, Dostoevsky   
   cautions, know that the same thing could happen among civilized Europeans as   
   well. “For the moment it is still against the law,” he writes, “but were   
   it to depend on us,    
   perhaps, nothing would stop us despite all our civilization.”   
      
   For the time being, “people are simply intimidated by some sort of habit,”   
   Dostoevsky continues, but if some progressive expert were to come up with a   
   theory showing that sometimes flaying skins can benefit the right cause   
   because “the end    
   justifies any means,” and if that expert were to express his view “using   
   the appropriate style,” then, “believe me,” there would be respectable   
   people among us “willing to carry out the idea.” Despite our   
   sophistication and professions of    
   compassion, “all that’s needed is for some new fad to appear and people   
   would be instantly transformed.” Not everyone, of course, but the number of   
   adherents of the new fad would grow while others would be afraid, or   
   embarrassed, to cling to old    
   ideas. And then, “where would we find ourselves: among the flayed or among   
   the flayers?”   
      
   After 9/11, it turned out that terrorists were often well-off and   
   well-educated. Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky   
   recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the   
   name of the highest principles—“and    
   this after Rousseau and Voltaire!” We know, as Dostoevsky could only   
   suppose, that during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured in   
   the most degrading way possible; and that during the collectivization of   
   agriculture, millions more were    
   deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to   
   enforce the famine and take bits of food away from bloated children. In the   
   West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of   
   socialism and anti-   
   imperialism.   
      
   Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past   
   because the same dynamic can occur in any place at any time that allows the   
   dark side of human nature to show itself, clad in the language of whatever   
   passes for progressive and    
   enlightened. “Believe me,” Dostoevsky addresses his readers, “the most   
   complete aberration of human hearts and minds is always possible.”   
      
   It is a terrible mistake to imagine that thuggish deeds are performed only by   
   thugs. Recalling his own early career as a revolutionist, Dostoevsky maintains   
   that his group, which could readily have performed the most terrible acts, was   
   composed of    
   sophisticated people with the Russian equivalent of Ivy League educations. But   
   despite regarding themselves as a cultured elite—or perhaps because they   
   did—few “of us . . . could resist that well-known cycle of ideas and   
   concepts that had taken    
   such a firm hold on young society.” Then it was “theoretical socialism,”   
   but it could have been anything, and there is no good reason to “think that   
   even murder . . . would have stopped us—not all of us, of course, but at   
   least some of us . . .    
   surrounded by doctrines that had captured our souls.”   
      
   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 “   
   nti-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.   
      
   Mr. Morson is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern   
   University.   
      
      
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