I Cannot Be Silent

The following is an excerpt from Leo Tolstoy's "I Cannot Be Silent", an essay he wrote in 1908 in response to the drastic number of death sentences (something relatively unheard of in Russia prior to 1906) that were being carried out. Try replacing the word "revolutionary" with "terrorist" as you read it...

Even if no one knew what ought to be done to pacify "the people" -- the whole people... -- if no one knew this, it would still be evident that to pacify the people one ought not do do what only increases its irritation. Yet that is just what you are doing.

What you are doing, you do, not for the people but for yourselves, to retain the position you occupy, a position you consider advantageous but which is really a most pitiful and abominable one. So do not say that you do it for the people; that is not true! All the abominations you do are done for yourselves, for your own covetous, ambitious, vain, vindictive, personal ends, in order to continue for a little longer in the depravity in which you live and which seems to you desirable.

However much you may declare that all you do is done for the good of the people, men are beginning to understand you and despise you more and more, and to regard your measures of restraint and suppression not as you wish them to be regarded -- as the action of some kind of higher collective Being, the government -- but as the personal evil deeds of individual and evil self-seekers.

Then again you say: "The revolutionaries began all this, not we, and their terrible crimes can only be suppressed by firm measures" (so you call your crimes) "on the part of the government."

You say the atrocities committed by the revolutionaries are terrible.

I do not dispute it. I will add that besides being terrible they are stupid, and -- like your own actions -- fall beside the mark. Yet however terrible and stupid may be their actions -- all those bombs and tunnellings, those revolting murders and thefts of money -- still all these deeds do not come anywhere near the criminality and stupidity of the deeds you commit.

They are doing it just the same as you and for the same motives. They are in the same (I would say "comic" were its consequences not so terrible) delusion that men, having formed for themselves a plan of what in their opinion is the desirable and proper arrangement of society, have the right and possibility of arranging other people's lives according to that plan. The delusion is the same. These methods are violence of all kinds -- including taking life. And the excuse is that an evil deed committed for the benefit of many ceases to be immoral, and that therefore without offending against moral law, one may lie, rob, and kill whenever this tends to the realization of that supposed good condition for the many which we imagine that we know and can foresee, and which we wish to establish.

You government people call the acts of the revolutionaries "atrocities" and "great crimes"; but the revolutionaries have done and are doing nothing that you have not done, and done to an incomparably greater extent. They only do what you do; you keep spies, practise deception, and spread printed lies, and so do they. You take people's property by all sorts of violent means and use it as you consider best, and they do the same. You execute those whom you think dangerous, and so do they.

So you certainly cannot blame the revolutionaries while you employ the same immoral means as they do for the attainment of your aim. All that you can adduce for your own justification, they can equally adduce for theirs; not to mention that you do much evil that they do not commit, such as squandering the wealth of the nation, preparing for war, making war, subduing and oppressing foreign nationalities, and much else.