Jolie Rouge

Evil and the Anarchy-Repression Continuum
Jay Bryant
August 24, 2004



There is something liberals don't get about civil liberty, and that conservatives have done a poor job of explaining.

Let's try and sort it out, by starting with the concept of law enforcement and its relationship to liberty.

We need think only a few seconds to realize that all law enforcement infringes to some extent on the liberty of innocent people. You pay taxes for the salary and expenses of the first cop hired, and the minute you do so, you have given up the liberty to spend that money in some other way. From that point on, in a thousand ways, it can be shown to be necessary for the innocent to sacrifice something in order for the policeman to his job. You may be required to drive only on the right hand side of the road. You may be required to give up your free time to serve on jury duty, or testify in court. You may be required to show identification in order to cash a check,or enter a building. You may have to pass through a metal detector in order to board an airplane.

How much of this loss of liberty is to be permitted? Where is the line to be drawn on the continuum between anarchy and repression? This is the constant task of public policy.

Let us now pause to consider my selection of the word "repression" in the above paragraph. I'm not happy with it, because it seems too strong, but it is the best option I have. As I mean it, it describes a society where civil liberties have been overly "repressed" in the interest of advancing domestic tranquility and the common welfare. I've never been to Singapore, but as itis often described, it would seem to me a repressive society.

In the end, defining the golden mean between anarchy and repression is a subjective exercise. I, for example, would not willingly live in one of those communities where an active homeowners' association is empowered to restrict my freedom in regard to things like landscaping, siding, fencing, etc. You, on the other hand, may find such "laws" perfectly acceptable in the interest of creating an orderly and pleasant neighborhood.


I've spent all this time on the meaning of "repression" in order to distinguish it from what it is not. It may well describe present-day Singapore, or even present-day America. But it does not describe the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Ba'athist Iraq or Taliban Afghanistan.

The continuum that runs through seat belt laws, capital punishment and the designation of captives in the War on Terrorism as "detainees" rather than "prisoners" does not go there.

There's a discontinuity. Some other factor is needed beyond the incrementalism of the anarchy-repression continuum. Otherwise you do not get to the Gulag, the gas chambers or the mass graves of Iraq. And that factor is what liberals miss because, well, because they don't believe in it.

That factor is evil – specifically, evil intent on the part of national leaders. A leader who seeks a better life for the people may define that goal in a way that moves up or down the continuum. But that's not what Hitler, Stalin or Saddam was trying to do.

They were not overly harsh on people suspected of crimes, or treason. They invented those charges against utterly innocent people in order to terrorize, bolster their power, serve some ideological objective or feed their blood lust. They were, in a word, evil.

Robert Conquest writes of Neville Chamberlain that he "could not conceive of anyone whose attitudes were not more or less within the limits of those prevalent in the Midlands." Churchill, on the other hand, was not deceived by Hitler, not because he was more intelligent, but because he had "a knowledge of history, and of evil" (my emphasis).

Now, you may argue that a society that moves too far toward repression will make itself more likely to fall under the sway of evil leaders. Perhaps, but I have racked my brain and can find no example in all of human history which supports that proposition, although one can make a case for movement in the opposite direction, and cite both the Bolsheviks and Nazis.


Please understand, I am not making a case for repression here. I believe myself to favor a nation farther toward anarchy than most other people I know. But when threatened by evil, I am prepared to make sacrifices, including such things as airline metal detectors, even though I am not really convinced they do much good. You must fight evil, or succumb to it. You cannot negotiate with it, as the failure of Chamberlain and so very many subsequent western liberals demonstrates. The only legitimate reasons ever to negotiate with an evil leader are to perpetrate trickery or stall for time.

But if you attempt serious negotiation – you get this and he gets that – with a Brezhnev, Milosevic or Osama, you may as well engage in plea-bargaining with Charles Manson.

Whatever you give up is a dead loss.

The leading modern authority on evil, author and Time Magazine writer Lance Morrow, notes that "many people do not believe evil exists," and echoes Conquest in saying, "The children of the Enlightenment sometimes have an inadequate understanding of the possibilities of the Endarkenment."

He believes it is "fatuous" to deny the existence of evil, cautioning also against tossing the word around irresponsibly. I agree; neither John Kerry nor George W. Bush is evil, no matter how many faults you may find in one, the other or both.

For Morrow, evil has "a wandering, fluid quality," which "seeks its opportunities and settles in like a parasite."

Did it settle in the Third Reich? Of course. In the Soviet Union? Read Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer-winning Gulag and tell me it did not. In al-Qaeda? How else to explain 9/11? Among the RUF of Sierra Leone? Ask the children whose limbs they hacked off.

There was an Evil Empire, and there is today an Axis of Evil. And we face, moreover, no danger of becoming evil incrementally. The continuum we are on doesn't go there.

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Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?