Israel Centeno

I. The Promised Paradise

Paradise on earth always demands payment in advance, and the bill is usually settled with the blood of those who will never live to see it.

Heaven imposed by decree soon requires police, dossiers, and graves.

Every utopia begins by dreaming of a new human being. Its nightmare begins when it must decide what to do with human beings as they are.

Once the future matters more than the person standing before us, sacrificing the innocent begins to look like a reasonable investment.

II. The Tragic Irony of the Twentieth Century

Technology promised to relieve suffering. It also gave suffering an assembly line, a railway timetable, and a statistical office.

Dostoevsky feared that if God were erased, everything might become permissible. The twentieth century discovered something even more sinister: in the name of Humanity, everything could be permitted as well.

The twentieth century did not suffer from a lack of ideals. It suffered from an excess of executioners convinced that they were not killing human beings but removing diseases from history.

We were taught to imagine history as an inevitable march toward progress. Almost no one asked why the trains returned empty.

III. Delusion and the Accounting of Terror

Some tyrannies are remembered for the camps they built. Others began much earlier, when they taught an entire people to lower their voices.

Before counting the dead, we must count the silences. Terror begins while there still appears to be peace and every closed door may conceal a witness.

Totalitarianism reaches perfection when the executioner ceases to feel guilty and begins to think of himself as a physician.

Long before Hitler set Europe ablaze, Stalin had already turned famine, deportation, and purges into ordinary instruments of government. Great massacres do not always begin with a war; some begin with a form.

The tyrant does not believe himself cruel. He believes himself necessary. That may be the most dangerous form of political madness.

Every ideology that loves humanity while despising the human being before it has already chosen its first victims.

Political hell does not begin when hope is lost. It begins when someone claims the right to decide who must die so that others may enter paradise.

Israel Centeno