"Right is its own defense"
About this Quote
"Right is its own defense" sounds like a clean moral proverb until you remember who’s saying it. Brecht, the Marxist dramatist who built whole plays to make audiences distrust tidy moral comfort, is almost certainly handing you a line that can be read two ways at once: as ethical insistence and as a warning about how power launders itself.
On the surface, the phrase elevates righteousness above procedure. If you’re right, you shouldn’t need a lawyer, a press campaign, a permission slip from the state. That’s the seductive version: justice as self-evident, needing no institutional validation. Brecht lived in an era when institutions demanded the opposite. Fascism didn’t just punish dissent; it required dissenters to prove they deserved to exist. In that climate, claiming that "right" defends itself becomes a form of refusal: an anti-bureaucratic spine-stiffener.
But Brecht’s subtext is sharper. "Right" is also what winners call their victory. Regimes, parties, employers, even revolutions invoke their own "rightness" as a shield against scrutiny. The line can mimic the rhetoric of authority: if our cause is right, then any critique is treason, any collateral damage is justified, any court is unnecessary. Brecht’s theater is full of characters who do exactly that, weaponizing morality as a shortcut around accountability.
The quote works because it’s compact enough to be sloganized and ambiguous enough to be dangerous. It dares you to ask: when someone claims the right is self-defending, are they standing up to unjust power or quietly rehearsing the logic that creates it?
On the surface, the phrase elevates righteousness above procedure. If you’re right, you shouldn’t need a lawyer, a press campaign, a permission slip from the state. That’s the seductive version: justice as self-evident, needing no institutional validation. Brecht lived in an era when institutions demanded the opposite. Fascism didn’t just punish dissent; it required dissenters to prove they deserved to exist. In that climate, claiming that "right" defends itself becomes a form of refusal: an anti-bureaucratic spine-stiffener.
But Brecht’s subtext is sharper. "Right" is also what winners call their victory. Regimes, parties, employers, even revolutions invoke their own "rightness" as a shield against scrutiny. The line can mimic the rhetoric of authority: if our cause is right, then any critique is treason, any collateral damage is justified, any court is unnecessary. Brecht’s theater is full of characters who do exactly that, weaponizing morality as a shortcut around accountability.
The quote works because it’s compact enough to be sloganized and ambiguous enough to be dangerous. It dares you to ask: when someone claims the right is self-defending, are they standing up to unjust power or quietly rehearsing the logic that creates it?
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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