Does "to be brought off" mean "so that the crimes can be carried out/brought off"?

Forums: English, Esl, Grammar, English As A Second Language
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Context:

Genocidal projects tend not to reflect the rationality of their
perpetrators simply because there are no good reasons to kill peace-
ful people indiscriminately. Even where such crimes have been sec-
ular, they have required the egregious credulity of entire societies to
be brought off. Consider the millions of people who were killed by
Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion. At the
heart of its apparatus of repression and terror lurked a rigid ideol-
ogy, to which generations of men and women were sacrificed. Even
though their beliefs did not reach beyond this world, they were both
cultic and irrational.

-Sam Harris

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Type: Question • Score: 4 • Views: 585 • Replies: 5

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View best answer, chosen by oristarA

@oristarA,

Quote:

Does "to be brought off" mean "so that the crimes can be carried out/brought off"?

Sho nuff.

1 Reply

@layman,

layman wrote:

Quote:
Does "to be brought off" mean "so that the crimes can be carried out/brought off"?

Sho nuff.

Thanks.
But the grammar is not clear for me. Would you like to analyze it grammatically?

1 Reply

@oristarA,

Quote:

Would you like to analyze it grammatically?

I don't do grammar, Oris, sorry. Whenever they took to sentence diagramming in school me and my homey sitting next to me would just play tic-tac-toe. They never knew. Particles, gerbils, propositions, prettyperfects--aint none of them mean nuthin to me.

The "brought off" construction is awkward, no doubt. It's usually put in the speculative future tense.

"I think I can bring it off" =

I think I can make it work. =

I think I can successfully implement this plan.

It's kinda like the expression "bring it on," but different.

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Ori

Are you sure it doesn't say "to be bought off"?

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@layman,

I think it's likely an archaic use of bring that's just become an idiom.

It does imply a degree of difficulty in the undertaking. Bringing something off implies that one might have failed.

Be careful......bringing a person off means that you brought them to orgasm....so don't say I brought him off, for instance. Unless you did, of course, and you wish to announce it! ; )

Pun key, brought is the correct term here, not bought. Also my if you bought off a genocide that would mean you paid people not to do it.

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Does "to be brought off" mean "so that the crimes can be carried out/brought off"?

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