Before you arrest anybody, ask yourself what your real motives are. Are you doing it to protect society? To take revenge? Or to seek the moral reform of your arrestee?
And before you declare war on anybody, ask yourself whether you are contributing to the protection of society from evil, as you are being told. Or are you responding to your humanitarian instincts to protect your enemy’s victims, in which case the purity of your motive may blind you to the dangers of unexpected consequences.
In either case you may not be aware that you are being duped by those whose real reason is merely to establish, maintain or expand their power, one way or another.
In retrospect, even the best thinkers occasionally lapsed.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the patron saint of our conception of liberty, John Stuart Mill, thought that despotism “was a legitimate mode of dealing with barbarians” provided “the end be their improvement.” In the era of colonialism the concept of the white man’s burden was by no means far-fetched.
Nor is it today.
The title of a book by the English activist Richard Seymour in which he examines in unsparing detail the conduct of well-meaning supporters of foreign interventions by Western powers in recent years has the title The Liberal Defence of Murder.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Quousque tandem patientia abutere nostras patentia.
A lot of the motivation behind Quebec’s move to deprive women who wear veils of many public services is to ‘free’ them from male oppression – even if the women themselves consider that the decision to wear the veil was their own.
Enormous oppression has been visited on people because of their ‘false consciousness’ of what they thought they wanted – but someone else knew what they ‘really’ wanted and made the choice for them, i.e. compelled them to change.