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Quote by Neil Sheehan

“There are Calleys in every army. What makes them dangerous is a set of circumstances in which their homicidal aberrations can run amok. The laws of war say that it is the responsibility of the highest leadership to do all in its power to prevent such circumstances from occurring.”

Quote by Neil Sheehan

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Neil Sheehan
Neil Sheehan

Neil Sheehan is an American journalist born on October 27, 1936. He is renowned for his coverage of the Vietnam War, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. more

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“A fascist regime could imprison, despoil, and even kill its inhabitants at will and without limitation. All else pales before that radical transformation in the relation of citizens to public power. It follows almost as an anticlimax that fascist regimes contained no mechanisms by which citizens could choose representatives or otherwise influence policy. Parliaments lost power, elections were replaced by yesno plebiscites and ceremonies of affirmation, and leaders were given almost unlimited dictatorial powers. Fascists claimed that the division and decline of their communities had been caused by electoral politics and especially by the Left’s preparations for class warfare and proletarian dictatorship. Communities so afflicted, the fascists taught, could not be unified by the play of naturally harmonious human interests, as the liberals had believed. They had to be unified by state action, using persuasion and organization if possible, using force if necessary. The job required what the French sociologist Émile Durkheim called “mechanical solidarity” rather than “organic solidarity.” Fascist regimes thus contained multiple agencies for shaping and molding the citizenry into an integrated community of disciplined, hardened fighters. The fascist state was particularly attentive to the formation of youth, jealously attempting to retain a monopoly of this function (a matter that brought fascist regimes and the Catholic Church into frequent conflict).”

FascismSolidarityRule Of LawInculcation
Book:The Anatomy of Fascism
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“Women are infantilized, demeaned, deprived of dignity, denied their rights, and all in the name of the rule of law. The elite approach followed within the courtrooms often asserts supremacy while excluding the poor, women, children, Dalits, tribals, and other subaltern groups. In itself, a court cannot change the law, yet, the court has the power to interpret and implement the given law in a sensitive manner while upholding the constitutional spirit and values, and that is what a litigant expects and society hopes for. However, this is not happening.”

LawRule Of LawJustice SystemVictimsLitigation
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“When the pendulum swings and it reaches an extreme on either side, you're going to get a totalitarianism, no matter what it starts out calling itself because once people with extreme ideologies actually get some power - although they may have come in on this will make everything wonderful, except we have to get rid of those people, and there's always a those people that have to be gotten rid of - and then that doesn't happen, and they've got some power. And they quite enjoy it, and they wish to retain it. So the American experiment, one of the hallmarks of it was peaceful transfer of power. That is what we consider, you know, one of the absolute key elements of an open liberal democracy. And when you see that starting to be shut down and going away, rule of law goes out the window, another kind of law replaces it, which is joined at the hip with whoever's running the thing. And if you get on the bad side of that, you're kind of doomed because you're not going to get a fair trial, and you're probably going to get a bullet in the back of the neck.”

AmericaPowerDemocracyTotalitarianismRule Of LawAmerican Experiment
Author:Margaret Atwood
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