"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.

"What good do these perverse confessions do that never result in absolution? They can only inoculate us with a paralyzing poison."

"à quoi ces confessions perverses qui ne débouchent jamais sur une absolution?  Elles ne peuvent que nos inoculer un poison paralysant."

     Rémi Brague, Moderately modern, trans. Paul Seaton (South Bend, IN:  St. Augustine's Press, 2019), 254.  I.e. keep us from "becom[ing] the past of our future":  "respect for the past in no way inhibits preparing for the future.  On the contrary, it is what permits there to be a future.  Why so?  Because we must know that we have been the future of our past, in order to become the past of our future [(Il faut savoir que nous avons été l'avenir de notre passé pour pouvoir être le passé de notre avenir)]" (252).  I have taken the French not from Modérément moderne, but from a different version of this chapter posted online.  Apparently there is more on these "perverse confessions . . . that [can] never result in absolution" in Curing mad truths:  medieval wisdom for the modern age.