A few words about Evil.
Something David Brooks wrote a couple weeks ago stuck in my mind. He was writing a column that laid out what President Bush should have said when he was interviewed by Tim Russert on Meet the Press, opposed to what he did say.
Some liberals have trouble grasping evil, and always think that if we could take care of the handguns or the cruise missiles or the W.M.D., our problems would be ameliorated. But I know the problem lies in the souls of our enemies. Bush on Bush, Take 2 | David Brooks
Some conservatives don't seem to have that problem. They find evil everywhere, ever-close and find it handily. They grasp its presence in the souls of all their enemies. Evil must have a great attractiveness, its great power of pan-explanation make it an easy choice of fools.
Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector for Iraq, has referred to this as the Theocracy of Evil. Saying about it Going beyond mere political ideology, the theocracy of evil encompasses a faith-based value system that embraces a simplistic 'good versus evil' opposition. As Thom Hartmann points in another piece
AlterNet: A Fistful of Kryptonite another way of looking at this is that the more demonic you conceive your enemy, the more heroic you become by defeating him.
There are only three things about evil I could think of off hand. Causing death of thousands of innocent people to make a point is something most people would call an evil act. An earthquake, like the one in Lisbon in 1755, can kill as many, and all people can do is bury the dead and stand the rocks and sticks of their dwellings upright again. Perhaps murmuring as they do so "this was a terrible thing to happen, terrible", but probably not calling it evil. Terror used in this sense, the terrible, is a naming of the sublime. The difference between the evil act and the terrible one is slight. Again think of the Egyptian Airliner that mysteriously flew into the sea a few years ago. Some felt that the pilot did it as an act of terror, many others not. Consider the range: a willful act by the pilot, and accidental act, but through misperformance, Mechanical error - running the gamut from parts fatigue, incomplete inspection, and gross incompetence. When does it pass from tragedy, to reprehensible? The wrong that is done among man is done by man. Evil requires a human author
The more publicly and demonstratively wrong is done, the more likely it will be applauded. There is no pathology of which I am aware that has not been celebrated by mass practice in the cause of some national destiny. There is an archetypal film reel I have seen over and over, whether it's Hitler, Stalin, or one of the Il Sung's - a crowd of school children will crowd round the great man, perhaps sing a song, then one child will step forward shyly and present a bouquet of flowers. Every monster of history has at one time or another been the beloved father of his people, a noble hero of the people, or the little booted baby son of one. Evil, while it exists, will often seem quite pleasing.
Winners write history. Evil, by happenstance, is discovered most often when history is being written. It is said of the other, that they are evil because they inflict suffering without distinction or rationality. They target, with intent, the innocent as well as the combatant and claim that no one is uninvolved in their struggle. Some try to target only the combatant - an elastic concept allowed to expand or contract as needed and do so with explosives and automatic weapons which can neither distinguish between the innocent and guilty or be perfect in their arrival and detonation. The uninvolved who are caught up and broken by the machines are denoted by system term collateral damage . Formally unintended, but always predictably present. It makes little difference to any, and none to the destroyed. Terror is a blunt instrument used towards an end. The label of evil obscures the fact that through its wedge application of power it often achieves almost unnoticed a semblance of its narrow ends. The nominal winners must always take care to remove the pencils from everyone else's hand's or in history evil will be written against their name.
What I see called evil are the actions arrived at through bad opinions. When I hear someone say of another: "he or they only understand and only respect force", I know a bad opinion is forming. Force is obeyed only as necessity as it is applied, and carries no moral obligation in its absence. It is not capable of being respected. Suffering is the lever bar the violent use to turn forcibly the world towards them. It is not sustainable and cannot attain legitimacy. Franz Kafka once volunteered that nothing is more evil than the thought of doing evil.
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