“the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons”

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Hannah Arendt 85
Jewish-American political theorist 1906–1975

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“The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.”

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"No, Not One," The Adelphi (October 1941), p. 7 http://books.google.com/books?id=hdwYAQAAIAAJ&q=%22The+choice+before+human+beings%22&pg=PA7#v=onepage- 8 http://books.google.com/books?id=hdwYAQAAIAAJ&q=%22is+not+as+a+rule+between+good+and+evil+but+between+two+evils%22&pg=PA8#v=onepage
Context: The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world: that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.

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“What was lost sight of was that the evil of the past, whether of slavery or of Jim Crow, was evil not because it was done by whites to blacks, but because it was done by some human beings to other human beings. The purpose of the law was to end evil acts”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

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Context: Suddenly, however, remedies for something called 'racism' became the order of the day. The word itself, like 'sexism', is of recent coinage and will not be found in any older dictionaries. The civil rights movement, premised upon individual rights, suddenly became the black power movement, premised upon group rights. 'Affirmative action' became a euphemism for the baldest kind of racial discrimination. That whites had long enjoyed preference over blacks was now taken to be a justification for blacks having preference over whites. What was lost sight of was that the evil of the past, whether of slavery or of Jim Crow, was evil not because it was done by whites to blacks, but because it was done by some human beings to other human beings. The purpose of the law was to end evil acts, not continue them in the guise of 'affirmative action'.

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