Engaging Good and Evil Citizens: Edmund Burke’s Warning

I recalled something supposedly said by Burke or Carlyle and, instead of locating the book in which I had just seen the common slick expression, I went to Google and searched for a piece of it. There I found two useful articles by Martin Porter. They should provide amusement as well as disabusement. And here is the error which I have been spared: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,’ was attributed to Edmund Burke. Burke never said it and yet it has been repeated in many forms and myriad times, and could be considered for a principal slogan of this book Canaan: Fifty-first State of America. It is true in our context if only because there are so many good men and women who dare not engage themselves, will not, cannot, know not how, and are engaged with other evils, or advance their own propositions. But, too, we should realize that there are many ‘evil men and women’ who are on my side and many more of them might  join me if they were to read Canaan. Israelis, Americans, and Palestinians of all kinds (and so too the world at large) will be tumbled upside down before they straighten up and fly right. Yet, here is a genuine quotation from Burke (adduced by Porter), that is more inclined to humble me than to inspire me: “No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

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