"One man may not kill. If he kills a fellow-creature, he is a murderer. If two, ten, a hundred men do so, they, too, are murderers. But a government or a nation may kill as many men as it chooses, and that will not be murder, but a great and noble action. Only gather the people together on a large scale, and a battle of ten thousand men becomes an innocent action. But precisely how many people must there be to make it so?—that is the question. One man cannot plunder and pillage, but a whole nation can. But precisely how many are needed to make it permissible? Why is it that one man, ten, a hundred, may not break the law of God, but a great number may?"
The quote above is from Leo Tolstoy's book "The Kingdom of God is Within You" First Edition 1894. Tolstoy is quoting a pamphlet written by the American Adin Ballou an American proponent of Christian nonresistance, Christian anarchism, and Christian socialism. Adin Ballou was also an abolitionist and the founder of Hopedale Community. Adin Ballou and William Lloyd Garrison were leaders in the Christian non-resistance movement, which rejected war, capital punishment, and all violent government action. They influenced later champions of non-resistance and nonviolence - Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
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Happy St. Patrick's Day tomorrow.
Hearing this Irish MP talk makes me proud of my Irish heritage.
