The rule of law or the rule of class?

I read an article the other day in the Montreal newspaper, La Presse (May 13, 2017), about the rule of law. One of their regular columnists, Yves Boisvert, was trying to claim that the recently fired director of the FBI, James Comey, owed his allegiance to the US Constitution, not to that country’s ultra-egotistical president, because the USA is a democratic country, practising the rule of law. Unfortunately for Boisvert, and for Comey, “the rule of law” is really just another overworked expression, used by people who truly believe in the political ideology known as liberalism. Thoroughly convinced liberals contend instead that the rule of law has to be seen as some kind of absolute principle in all, self-proclaimed liberal-democratic countries. They obstinately refuse to recognize that it is in fact just another political slogan, like “the dictatorship of the proletariat” in self-proclaimed communist countries, or “the will of Allah” in the equally self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate.

In the real world, however, also known as “le monde tel qu’il est” (René Lévesque), expressions like “the rule of law” only work whenever some rich and/or powerful person, or group, wants them to work, but not at all whenever such a powerful individual, or group of powerful individuals, prefers to ignore them instead. It simply is not true that no one is above the law. No political document, such as the US Constitution or the Canadian Bill of Rights, whenever or wherever adopted, truly guarantees anything at all, but only possesses the force of persuasion that any particular VIP, or group of VIPs, allows it to possess. In other words, whenever it happens to be in the best political interests of some particular group of dominant people to follow that particular principle. While it it true that some countries apply such formulas more often than do other countries, since no country has ever been truly run by ordinary people, it is impossible to presume that any human institution of any sort will always do the right thing in every case.

Constitutions are always being interpreted differently from one powerful person to another, or even from one particular situation to another, during any given mandate. All over the world, constitutional “guarantees” are sometimes being observed, and sometimes being ignored, depending on which particular event is being analyzed. As many US citizens found out recently, when Donald Trump’s businesses were seen to be profiting from certain foreign emoluments, it turns out that even the article in the US Constitution prohibiting such emoluments has never been applied to any real situation since it was first written down. The written word only means something to people who want it to mean that particular something. It has nothing whatever to do with whether or not a given situation is more or less complicated than any other one. As Machiavelli pointed out several centuries ago, all political situations are always “complicated” by the fact that no VIP wants to be tied down to any predetermined course of action.

Unfortunately, no threshold exists beyond which it is impossible for some dominant individual, or organization, to go. In every case, not just in “failed states” or “straightforward” dictatorships, but also in self-proclaimed democracies, might makes right. The richer and the more powerful someone is, or some private or public organization is, the more that that individual or organization gets to ignore any kind of collective agreement. No matter whether it is just an “ordinary” collective agreement between a trade union and an employer, or a supposedly “much more important” UN Security Council resolution, or even an international climate treaty.

The only people who have to obey the law all the time are those who are too poor, or too powerless, to make their “equality before the law” plea heard in high places. Only “lesser” people cannot get away with ignoring any of the laws, established by their “betters” to keep them in their not-so-high places. For their part, higher-ups can pretty much do whatever they want. In some countries, even ruling-class people may have to maneuver a bit in order to get around theoretical restrictions, but the lesson of history is that they always manage to do so if they try hard enough. The rule of law is a lot like taxation, in that those who run the system can always find a way out of the maze.

This sort of thing is proved over and over again, all over the world, whenever some less fortunate person, or group of people, finds out that they simply do not have the money, or the clout, necessary to take someone to court and thus to obtain some sort of justice. Enormous differences in income or in social status make it impossible for most people to get anywhere near equal consideration in legal disputes. Even in the so-called rich countries, such as Canada or the USA, the vast majority of the population does not have anything like an equal chance, or an equal opportunity, to make their voices heard.

In the field of industrial relations, in particular, collective agreements are quite often ignored, much more often by companies, or by neoliberal governments, than by the unions involved. Some trusting souls try to argue that in certain countries, certain union appeals to the court system, to overturn some employer’s arbitrary decision, sometimes result in damages being awarded to some union. At least, once they have been accepted by a judge to have been in fact contrary to some collective agreement. Such cases, however, are quite rare, and in most of those rare cases, token damages are only awarded after the union has spent an enormous sum of money on litigation. Most of the time as well, such damages are only awarded twenty or thirty years after the litigation began, therefore rendering the final result totally irrelevant to the initial situation. Money makes the world go round, not principle. As the gospel according to Matthew tells it, the more money one has to start with, the more of it one gets later on, and the less one has in the beginning, even that small amount is eventually taken away.

Populist politicians all over the world, such as Montreal mayor Denis Coderre, honestly seem to believe that even traffic cops “belong to” their VIP employers, not that both low-ranking and high-ranking public officials are all supposed to serve the people together. In any particular situation, such as the disastrous floods that took place recently in and around the city of Montreal, such politicians are always heard proclaiming that “today is not about pointing fingers”, it is only about “coming together for the common good”. In other words, no one over a certain income level, certainly no one in power, is ever supposed to be blamed for anything at all, not today and not tomorrow either. So far as the VIP-serving legal system is concerned, the only people who should ever be held to account for their crimes are the ordinary John Does who always make up the vast majority of every country’s prison population.

In other words, the rule of law almost always turns out to be the rule of social class. This has become increasingly obvious in recent years, the news media in many parts of the world finally catching onto the fact that up-to-date “white-collar crime” has become a whole lot more damaging to society (and to the world economy) than old-fashioned “blue-collar crime”. The media have also started to catch onto the fact that white-collar criminals are much less often caught, or punished in any way, than the blue-collar kind. Some white-collar criminals, such as Bernard Madoff in the USA, have been sent to jail recently, in cases when their victims have included people even more powerful than themselves. But when the white-collar criminal turns out to be a billionaire “pillar of the community”, not to mention the president or the prime minister of some presumably liberal-democratic country, catching a crook suddenly becomes a whole lot more difficult. Even if caught red-handed, putting such a person in jail, especially for a period of time appropriate to the seriousness of the crime, is practically impossible.

Moreover, governments all over the world are constantly ignoring their own laws all the time. Almost every day, some journalist investigating some scandal somewhere or another discovers the existence of some obscure law that everyone had conveniently forgotten about ever since it was adopted. Governments are regularly being called to task for refusing to apply some law that they initially adopted five, ten, twenty or more years ago, in order to gain a lot of political mileage back then. Not actually implementing such laws later on simply means that legislation is often ignored in the same way as election promises are ignored once the election is over. Every day, international treaties are also being signed, without any guarantees that any of their particular clauses will ever be implemented. Big governments, like big businesses, have all been practising the art of “newspeak” (otherwise known as “alternative facts”) ever since they first came into being several millennia ago.

One of the more recent inventions in the long list of methods involving deliberate, official ignorance of the law has been the increasing inefficiency of the legal system in dozens of different countries. The recent trend of settling every possible difference of opinion between VIPs in court, and of corporate defence lawyers coming up with hundreds of increasingly complicated delaying tactics in every case, has bogged the “legal industry” down in totally unrealistic wait times. In Canada, the Supreme Court has come up with equally inapplicable guidelines, designating periods of months or years during which all cases must be decided upon, before being abandoned. Unfortunately, the only discernible outcome of such guidelines has been the freeing of hundreds of probably guilty criminals, including more than a few accused murderers connected to organized crime.

It should not be too difficult to imagine what that sort of thing has done to the already sufficiently undermined, liberal pretensions about the rule of law, not only in Canada but in most other places. This is in addition to all the social laws being ignored by certain immigrant populations, at least within the group of countries that allow any type of immigration to exist. The more tolerant countries often end up allowing such immigrant populations to ignore their own established laws, importing instead “barbarian cultural practices” from abroad such as female excision, forced marriages and the use of both modern and traditional methods to ensure that most families within those immigrant populations end up with thirty or forty percent more boys than girls. Most of those practices are also theoretically illegal in most of the home countries where such practices originate.

Even though, on the face of it, those practices seem to be impervious to social divisions within those communities, a deeper understanding of the social realities within such populations reveals that they are all symptoms of ultra-severe control over subject populations. Control ingrained for centuries in those selfsame populations by ultra-conservative VIPs who make Donald Trump look like a rank amateur by comparison. What initially seems to be an exception to the rule of social class triumphing over the rule of law, turns out to be merely the world’s most extreme example of that same VIP domination.

To be sure, the world might seem be a much better place in which to live if the rule of law really did triumph over the rule of class. Unfortunately, it does no one any good whatsoever to pretend that it really does.

Fake facts forever

Trump adviser Kelly-Anne Conway’s recent “invention” of alternative facts is not much of a discovery, since fake facts have been around just about forever. For at least the past 6000 years, since the first urban-based civilizations started setting up shop all over the world, ideological controversies have broken out between the aristocratic rulers of succeeding dynasties and rival empires. As well as between those same secular rulers and the equally aristocratic power bases constructed by the priestly elites controlling each succeeding religion, embedded within each one of those empires.

Over the centuries, those rivalries have generated millions of conflicting messages constantly being sent out, in every form of iconographic communication known to exist during each succeeding period of history, to firmly impress on every subject population just how much more glorious each ruler “obviously” was when compared with each real or potential challenger. In every part of the world, history has been invented, and re-invented, over and over again, the wealth and the power of each succeeding empire and religion always depending on its capacity to convince millions of ordinary people that the universe itself was created precisely so that each competing group of rulers could always demonstrate, beyond the shadow of any popular doubt, just how incredibly appropriate its control of everything important in their lives really was. As Percy Shelley pointed out so succinctly in his poem, “Ozymandias”, each succeeding message from each ruler was nothing but an enormous ego-projection, always based on constructed “facts” that did not really prove what they were intended to prove.

As far back as ancient Greece, more than 2500 years ago, the founders of rationalist philosophy first began attacking the foundations of all this official narcissism by emphasizing the colossal differences between natural, material explanations of reality and the faith-based anthropomorphism of traditional Greek mythology. This led directly to the well-known ideological showdown between Socrates and the Athenian rulers, who forced that early philosopher to drink poison as punishment for his alleged “moral corruption” of Athenian youth. A similar confrontation also took place many centuries later between the Italian Renaissance scientist, Galileo Galilei, and the equally powerful inquisitors of the Catholic Church. Not to mention the “monkey-trial” condemnation of American schoolteacher, John Scopes, for having illegally taught Darwin’s theory of evolution to high-school students in Tennessee back in 1925.

Science and religion have therefore been presenting alternative sets of facts for thousands of years, with more and more civilizations gradually joining in to add their own contributions to that ongoing war between competing visions of reality. Starting out in the physical sciences, this same conflict also eventually spread to most of the social sciences, non-scientific secular ideologies soon receiving the same skeptical treatment from the scientific community that all the world’s religious mythologies had previously received. In the scientific presentation of reality, no particular facts are accepted as such unless initial hypotheses, based on William of Ockham’s practice of presenting the simplest possible hypotheses first, are tested over and over again by independent researchers all over the world. All of them, or almost all of them, as a family of researchers, have to reach similar conclusions after confronting each successive hypothesis with multiple interrogations grounded in the observation of nature and the duplication of extremely well-prepared experiments. Only then do some of those proposed facts become real facts, at least until the next scientific revolution, instead of fake ones.

On the other hand, in religious discourse, or in any other unfounded ideological interpretations of presumed reality, true believers are expected to accept such outlandish concepts as, for example, the virgin birth of the son of God (Christianity), or as a second example, the “sui generis” formation of public virtue arising spontaneously out of private vice, “as if by an invisible hand” (Adam Smith). In all such cases, unnatural concepts like those ones are always given or revealed by some “higher power”, without any of those lazy people having to use the much more laborious scientific method. For its part, religious belief is based entirely on faith, which means, as Martin Luther explained it, the voluntary renunciation of human reason common to all truly religious communities. It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone that political concepts such as Conway’s “alternative facts” have a tendency to crop up nowadays especially in regions of the world most afflicted by the presence of large concentrations of religious fundamentalists, offering literal interpretations of sacred writings, such as the Bible Belt in the USA and similar areas of “rural idiocy” inside dozens of other countries.

Faith is also the main ingredient involved in the ideological concoctions of such secular religions as Adam Smith’s economic liberalism (founded back in the eighteenth century) and its current offspring, known as neoliberalism. In spite of its universal pretensions, most of today’s economic “science”, like “Christian science” or “Islamic science”, is still almost exclusively based on attempting to “prove” an assumption that is scientifically impossible to prove, like economic liberalism’s contention that the world’s largest accumulations of capital were gathered together in a humanitarian attempt to provide jobs for the unemployed! Rather than to admit that profit maximization and capital accumulation in reality have a lot more to do with the cynical erection of Ozymandian phallic symbols of egotistical, brand-name power, such as Donald Trump’s ubiquitous towers.

True believers in religious fiction, and other non-scientific alternative facts, are constantly being trotted out to provide enormous doses of competing varieties of ideological opium, in order to help unscrupulous political rulers control hundreds of millions of ordinary people, and keep them “in their place” socially speaking. Nowadays, all the world’s most important concentrations of wealth and power are always run by extremely “radicalized”, professional propagandists whose single-minded dedication to profit maximization and state power help “maintain order”, and ensure that democracy in any real sense is never allowed to take power and privilege away from those who are convinced that only they truly deserve to dominate others. Alternative facts are absolutely necessary, therefore, if one’s goal is to present authoritarian and/or totalitarian regimes as being somehow synonymous with freedom from social constraint and the tranquil practice of individual human rights uncorrupted by collectivist chimeras. Even in theoretically socialist and communist countries, such chimeras are only supposed to be gobbled up by ordinary working people, not by their “more intelligent”, elitist rulers.

A good example of “alternative facts” being used nowadays, “even” by anti-Trump forces in the USA, was the recent attempt by liberal scribes in that country to provide a diplomatic justification, to explain why American leaders over the past forty years avoided accusing the People’s Republic of China of committing highly successful currency manipulation. According to the liberal media, the USA’s laissez-faire attitude toward Chinese economic policy in the past was only adopted in order to help that country enter peacefully into the “international community”, led by the USA, and therefore to contribute greatly to world economic and political progress. The real reason for that deliberate policy vacuum, however, had nothing to do with promoting democracy or development. It was done simply to encourage the use of cheap foreign labour, making thousands of billions of dollars more money for unpatriotic American investors, by reversing the tendency that US workers had developed before the Chinese onslaught, towards improving their overall wages and working conditions. As Calvin Coolidge pointed out back in the 1920s, “the business of America is business”, it has nothing to do with making the world a better place in which to live for “inferior” people. In the real world, neither the liberal-Democratic nor the conservative-Republican tendencies within American politics are genuinely concerned with democracy as such, but only with its usefulness as a manipulative slogan to help out their respective friends in the business community.

I got my own introduction to the use of alternative facts 50 years ago, in April of 1967, when I was arrested along with several other people, for trying to burn a US flag during an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in Toronto. When my arrest came to trial, the police attempted to present the burning of that flag as a crime, not because there was any law in Canada about committing such a symbolic deed. Instead, their take was that burning that foreign flag could have become a public danger, setting fire to the flowers growing in the concrete bins the city had planted in the median separating the four lanes of traffic on University Avenue, next to the US consulate! Which only goes to show, just like in the previous example, that the reasons why people in power claim to be doing whatever they are doing are not always terribly convincing, in spite of their self-proclaimed tendency to describe themselves as generally more intelligent than everyone else. Nowadays, Donald Trump has been coming up with dozens of similar explanations for his own erratic behaviour, that are not any closer to reality than the arguments invented by the Toronto police force during the incredibly violent Vietnam War, most of whose millions of victims were killed from the air by US forces.

Which does not necessarily mean that people opposed to the current domination of most of the world by private capitalism are always less inclined to use alternative facts in their own propaganda. I just finished reading a recently-published book by Gilles Morand, L’époque était rouge: Militer au Québec pour un avenir radieux dans un parti marxiste-léniniste, about the five years he spent as a young man in Quebec during the late 1970s and early 1980s trying to help build the Workers’ Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), before it fell apart shortly thereafter. He was one of several hundred young people lured into one of the tiny ultra-communist groups in Quebec during that period, some of whom sincerely thought that they could actually bring about a radiant new future for the Canadian working-class. Most of them ended up following the teachings of such people as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, while others accepted the first three guys, but substituted Trotsky for both Stalin and Mao. None of those groups ever got anywhere near their intended goals, their main effect on the history of Quebec probably being to slightly diminish the nationalist influence of the Parti Québécois prior to and during the 1980 referendum on Quebec sovereignty.

As Morand himself points out in his book, Marxism-Leninism was only a pipe-dream in North America, even during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the subsequent liberal-communist alliance during the latter phase (1941-1945) of the Second World War. Nevertheless, militants like him did manage in a few cases to get themselves elected, sometimes openly, into positions of trade-union leadership among select groups of real workers, even during his period of militancy. In his case, it seems that he actually managed to contribute to a successful union campaign for job-site safety in a munitions plant in the city of Valleyfield, well-known at the time for frequent explosions that killed several workers. For awhile, according to his account, the workers managed to force the company to drastically change its extremely unsafe practices that had caused those explosions. Later on, however, the collapse in union militancy throughout North America during the rise of neoliberalism (starting in 1979 and continuing to this day), that also contributed to a decline in the already-weak popular support for socialism and communism, resulted in the subsequent return of traditionally lax company attitudes toward on-the-job safety.

I remember reading several newspaper reports back then about how industrial safety was strengthened in Quebec throughout the 1980s, but I strongly suspect that any decline in industrial accidents and deaths during recent decades, in any of those industries, was caused instead by the closing down of most of the important factories in Quebec, and in the rest of the Western world, because of delocalization and de-industrialization. Nowadays, after several decades of neoliberalism, on-the-job deaths are definitely on the rise again in Quebec and in most other places. Many new deaths are also being caused by increasingly unsafe conditions in the transportation of dangerous chemicals, as in the 2013 deaths of 47 citizens in the village of Lac-Mégantic, when a petroleum train left unattended wiped out most of the downtown core. As was the case in Valleyfield almost forty years ago, most company officials and their government allies are blaming that “accident” on negligent workers, rather than on their own corporate negligence.

Government and company promises to re-route the train tracks around the village, rather than right through it, have been totally ignored since that horrendous event and it certainly does not look at this point in time that anything will ever be done, anywhere, to prevent any future “incidents” of this kind. Union militancy in Quebec may still be slightly greater than elsewhere in North America, but it remains a shadow of its former self. Part of the problem, as in most of the other continents, is in the much greater efficiency of today’s “alternative facts” in inducing everyone to accept their fate, most of the time, without getting terribly upset about supposedly “inevitable” accidents, or any other negative events. The problem with that attitude is, as it always has been, that most of the world’s “accidents”, including “ordinary” car accidents, happen for a reason. Quite often, they are nothing but “accidents waiting to happen”, caused by “collective” (i. e., official) negligence much more often than by individual negligence.

To be sure, a large part of the forty-year decline in on-the-job militancy, in most parts of the world, was also caused by the tremendous hypocrisy of totalitarian communism. The Leninist “dictatorship of the proletariat” has always been just another slogan invented by professional liars every bit as cynical as Donald Trump, long before he or his favourite groupie, Kelly-Ann Conway, were ever born. None of the Leninist governments in the world have ever been anything but State-capitalist caricatures of private capitalism, government bureaucrats simply replacing the private bureaucrats of “regular” capitalism, and behaving just as badly toward the 99.99% of the population who do not belong to the privileged minority.

I visited the incredibly beautiful city of Prague recently as a tourist and went to their “Museum of Communism”, set up not so long ago by an ultra-right-wing American political science professor whose ludicrous display of primitive anti-communism was just as insanely one-sided as the equally dumb-ass, pro-Soviet propaganda that the Czech communist regime was displaying during its period of totalitarian power. Neither the official communist point of view presented in the displays, nor the official anti-communist point of view written on the side panels in that museum, would help any intelligent person figure out why anyone in his or her right mind could ever be so asinine as to support either one of those two completely unrealistic systems of belief.

How are we supposed to choose between the Bhopal “accident” of 1984, in an American chemical factory situated in India, and the Chernobyl “accident” of 1986, in a nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine? In what way has the world improved since the fall of totalitarian communism, if similar “accidents” are still killing thousands of people in countries like Bangladesh, which specializes in making textile products for Western companies? As if this was not already a big enough problem, in tragically real terms even more than in the illicit use of propaganda, it has also been complicated a bit further recently by Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, getting into the act. Her own line of clothing, produced in the same incredibly hypocritical, Third World sweatshop conditions as the clothing lines of all the other foreign producers, turns out to be in total contrast with her own stated goal of trying to help salaried women “liberate” themselves from their own self-imposed wardrobe limitations. She does not seem to be terribly worried about the rather more serious “shopping issues” of the severely underpaid women she exploits every day.

The total contrast between ideology and reality not only applies to all the propaganda debates between private capitalism and state capitalism, it also applies just as much to the current propaganda exchanges between “Eastern” and Western varieties of neofascism. The National Front party, for example, is once again threatening to take over the French Republic with its incredibly unrealistic claims to help reverse the neoliberal, globalization trend in the European Union by re-imposing an old-fashioned, “united Gaullist” vision of an exclusively Western-Christian France. Apparently, they intend to achieve that goal by simply expelling all the corrupting immigrants from the Muslim countries and Eastern Europe (especially the Roms). Neofascism is indeed a lot worse than neoliberalism, but neoliberalism is definitely part of the problem, because it has succeeded quite admirably in making neofascism popular again.

Which plays quite nicely into the hands of the radical Islamic denunciation of Western ethnocentrism, promoted by such movements as “Les indigènes de la République” in France, who do not think that “racialized minorities” such as Muslims or Black people living in the West should have to live up to the same standards as their White, European-origin, counterparts. They think that Black women, for example, should be “allowed” by White feminists to spend a lot more money on beauty products because White racists have always thought that Blacks could never be beautiful. They also claim that Muslim women in the West should not be criticized for wearing symbols of female oppression, such as the hijab, because they are only wearing such garments to push back against White-racist rejection of their Islamic culture. The same organization also believes that it is quite all right to accuse the cartoonist victims of Islamic terrorism at Charlie Hebdo as “Zionists”, to condemn all forms of “deviant” sexuality, and to oppose inter-racial marriages for reasons of cultural preservation.

In reality, those reactionary people are simply using “reverse racism” to slightly disguise their own “Eastern” forms of neofascism. Even White judges in Western countries, for example in the Canadian province of Ontario, are also (astonishingly) guilty of the selfsame “reverse racism”. Especially when they deliberately give lighter sentences to wife-beaters and to spouse murderers of Black or of indigenous origins, than to Whites convicted of similar crimes, in order to “compensate” for the negative effects of White racism on minority males.

In the final analysis, all the competing ideologies mentioned in this text, such as religion, neoliberalism, State capitalism and neofascism, are merely non-scientific manifestations of competing varieties of philosophical idealism. Each “ideal” world-view tries to substitute invented (manufactured) facts for natural (material) facts, always trying to impose its projected will or wish fulfilment not only on reality, but also on all the other, competing visions. Ideological history then becomes nothing else than a kind of vector analysis of the relative strengths of all those competing forces, at any particular place or time. According to each one of those ideologies, the best possible situation that professional ideologues can provoke is when the perceived contrast is greatest between material reality and idealistic projection, provided that the latter wins the day in spite of everything.

An example of such a “perfect” confrontation would be showing of a group of jihadists preparing to cut off an innocent “unbeliever’s” head, while forcing their victim to recite the verses in the Koran that proclaim that Islam is one hundred percent opposed to the massacre of innocent people. The violent contrast between what is really happening, Islamists deliberately killing an innocent person, and their religious projection of its idealistic opposite, “this is for Allah and not just to make us feel like dominant males”, then becomes the highest possible realization of “alternative facts”, for that particular ideology. Much in the same way as what happens when a rapist’s lawyer succeeds in getting him off by arguing that the victim “provoked” the rape by wearing a short skirt, or something to that effect.

What is important to the fabricator of fake facts is total success in imposing his or her will on reality. Not only must the victim be successfully victimized, but he or she must be seen to be “enjoying” or “agreeing with” his or her own victimization. This is what the psychopathic behaviour of every successful ideologue depends on, getting each individual and society as a whole to accept the turning of reality on its head as being “normal”, and to condemn material reality itself as being the pathological interpretation of events, instead. Total victory for passionate untruth.

People should therefore be proud of such abominations as ethnic imperialism, religious fundamentalism, capitalist exploitation, tax evasion, elitist “communism”, neoliberalism, neofascism, "reverse" racism, sexist “equality”, and all the other different kinds of alternative facts, rather than being proud of their undying opposition to any of those things. All the theoretically opposite varieties of reactionary behaviour have precisely the same roots, which is to say doing the most violence possible to the largest possible number of innocent people, with the added pleasure of getting them to admit that their suffering is, after all, only for their own good. Which is why apologists for evil always run around proclaiming that everyone is equally guilty of every sin, and not just the obvious perpetrators.