Dostoevsky Knew: It Can Happen Here

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.

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Article URL : https://www.wsj.com/articles/doestoevsky-knew-it-can-happen-here-hamas-palestine-progressive-radicalism-a7d196d6