European nation-states, even those that did not participate in Anglo-American wars and occupations, facilitated extrajudicial execution, torture and rendition, which were originally sanctioned in the name of reason, freedom and democracy.
Thus, Stalin had sanctioned in the name of the central committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) the most brutal violation of socialist legality, torture and oppression, which led as we have seen to the slandering and to the self-accusation of innocent people.
This violence was sanctioned in the name of the American people with patriotic rhetoric of necessity and self-defense by both the Bush and the Obama administrations.
And of course this Faust makes a complicated pact with Mephistopheles, which effectively reveals the devil as the instrument not only of desire but of a God who will sanction anything in the name of desire.
*Political, because they were in rebellion against the state and therefore the people of New York, whose officials followed the public will in imprisoning them under less-than-decent conditions, then interpreted that will to sanction their murder in the name of law and order.
The president said he would veto any new sanctions on Iran, in the name of national security.
War is simply organized, state sanctioned cruelty encouraged in the name of patriotism.
This argument weakened the sanction for autocratic rule (in the name of the emperor) and produced a theoretical basis for the growing democratic movement.
The tendencies of theism that most concern Hume, however, are its intolerance and opposition to liberty, its distorted moral standard, and its willingness to sanction the "greatest crimes" in the name of piety and devotion (NHR, 14.7).
