"To us, everything is permitted"

 "We reject the old systems of morality and 'humanity' invented by the bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit the 'lower classes.'  Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute because it rests on a new ideal.  Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence.  To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles . . . Blood?  Let blood flow like water!  Let blood stain forever the black pirate’s flag flown by the bourgeoisie, and let our flag be blood-red forever!  For only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves forever from the return of those jackals!"

     "an editorial . . . in the first [(August 1919)] issue of Krasnyi mech (The Red sword), the newspaper of the Kyiv Cheka."  Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Karel Bartošek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The black book of communism:  crimes, terror, repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1999), 102.  I was put onto this by Rémi Brague, Moderately modern, trans. Paul Seaton (South Bend, IN:  St. Augustine’s Press, 2019), 233.