Progressives believe they are “good” and only looking out for others when in reality, they are micro-totalitarians willing to boss, at the end, others at the end of a gun (re: this). From Café Hayek. Gee, who does this sound like being described?
The officially proclaimed Terror was, however, no random savagery. The approximately ten thousand men and women who were killed were selected quite carefully: if the new national assembly, the Convention, demanded such blood-thirsty policies, if its all-powerful committees sent cartfuls of aristocrats, priests, and assorted opponents to the guillotine, it was, they considered, for a good reason, and no one was more coldly logical, or more blood-chillingly threatening, that Robespierre. The Republic, he explained, was the hope of mankind; if it disappeared, tyranny would prevail forever; thus, in order to preserve liberty, it was necessary to suppress it temporarily. That line of reasoning, for all its self-evident fallacy, has continued to have enormous appeal.
Of course, no one in the throes of a passion to remake society (always, of course, a remaking that is believed to be ‘for the better’) thinks of himself or herself as evil – as prone to commit sanguinary atrocities that history will properly judge to be utterly inexcusable. ’Our goal is so great and good,’ the social engineer with power assures himself or herself, ‘that the executions and tortures of today are justified to create the far more just and fair and equal and truly free (and [fill-in-the-blank]) society that we are now using our power to construct. And anyway, those people being executed and tortured deserve their fates.’





