Aleksander Solzhenitsyn: “Ideology — that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification…”

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek justification for his actions….

Ideology — that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed.

— Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

From The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation,vol. 1 (New York: Harperperennial, 1976) 173, 174.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Russian novelist, historian, and the 1970 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite having served as a decorated captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, experienced arrest then imprisonment in 1945 for having written private letters criticizing Joseph Stalin. Solzhenitsyn then spent eight years in the Soviet labor camps followed by three years of exile in Kazakhstan. He described the disasters that befell Russia after the Revolution with the reiteration of a saying he remembered from childhood: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”