Do not blame others for their unspeakable brutality.
By Richard Cohen
As Hannah Arendt foresaw, we are once again up against the question of
evil. An American photojournalist, James Foley, was presented to the
camera and methodically decapitated. The instrument was not the ax
reserved for royalty or the whooshing blade prompted by that reformer
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, but an ordinary looking knife.
Death would be neither swift nor painless. This, somewhere in the bleached desert, was pure evil.
I used to not believe in evil. When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet
Union “the evil empire,” I thought it was a dandy phrase but also a
confession of ignorance. The Soviet Union was bad, I conceded, but not
for no reason. It was bad because it was insecure, occupying the flat,
inviting, Eurasian plain, and because it had a different system of
government that it dearly wanted to protect.
Reagan had it right, though. The Soviet Union was evil.
Now we are facing a different type of evil. The Islamic State, in whose name Foley was beheaded, murders with abandon.
It seems to love death the way the fascists once did. It is Sunni, so
it massacres Shiites. It is radical Sunni, so it eliminates apostates.
It is Muslim, so it kills Yazidis, a minority with a religion of its
own, and takes, as plunder, their women as concubines. Men are laid in a
ditch and shot in graves of their own making.
The Nazis are back — differently dressed, speaking a different language
and murdering ostensibly for different reasons, but actually for the
same — intolerance, hatred, excitement and just because they can.
It is both futile and tasteless to lay off blame on others — the West,
the colonialists of old or the persistent Zionists — or to somehow find
guilt in the actions of the rich or powerful because they are rich or
powerful. You can blame the victim. You can even kill him.
In the weekend Financial Times newspaper, the British writer Martin
Amis tackled the question that obsessed Arendt and so many others — the
nature of evil and its ultimate personification, Hitler. Amis mentions
some historians who have attempted to understand Hitler and settles
finally on Primo Levi, the great Italian writer of the Holocaust who was
sent to Auschwitz.
It was there, when a guard “brutally snatched” away an icicle Levi had
broken off to slake his thirst, that he asked in his poor German, “ Warum? ” The guard replied, “ Hier ist kein warum ” — there is no why here. There was no why in all of Auschwitz.
Amis, too, has looked for the why. His latest novel, “The Zone of
Interest,” is about the Holocaust, and he too cannot find a core of
reason or explanation in the events that change our understanding of who
we are. All fall short. It’s as if they bump up against the camp’s
electrified fence and, with a hideous sound, are evaporated.
Amis leads us to Levi’s book “The Truce” and a passage he had not seen
before. Levi had made his peace with not understanding. Levi wrote:
“Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what
happened, because to understand is almost to justify.”
You see this happening now. The atrocities of the Islamic State are
attributed to the Iraq War and what it did to the region. In the current
edition of Foreign Affairs, John J. Mearsheimer, a University of
Chicago political scientist, attributes Vladimir Putin’s bad behavior to
the West’s bad strategy. “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,”
it is titled. Putin is almost entirely effect. Everyone else is cause.
Putin is certainly no Hitler (or Stalin). But the category of evil remains useful. It assigns agency where it belongs.
The decapitation of Foley and the depredations of the Islamic State are
evil returned, evil that can be understood only as beyond
understanding. It needs to be eliminated. More than Foley was killed
that day in the desert. So was the why.
+++++
Unfortunately, there will never be enough beheaded children for some moonbats like Russell Brand to ever understand the magnitude of the evil that is ISIS/ISIL/IS and related Islamofascist groups:
Amis leads us to Levi’s book “The Truce” and a passage he had not seen before. Levi had made his peace with not understanding. Levi wrote: “Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify.”
ReplyDeleteThe part that's knotted up for me may untie above. When a prog explains why someone does something evil, they are also often tacitly arguing that the existence of an explanation at all absolves people of their behavior. People commit crimes for reasons, they say -- therefore, it's not the person committing the crime who's at fault, it's Society that's at fault for allowing the reasons to persist. Explaining and absolving often go hand and hand for them.
Maybe it's a habit of mind that comes from fighting for materialism, for determinism in particular (for no free will). The people talking about "evil" as something other than an illusion constructed by evolution are always on the other side of the argument -- and they're simpletons.
For a person with that habit of mind, having that habitual association of explanation and absolution, explaining the "why" of the Holocaust would be tantamount to absolving the people directly responsible for it, or maybe even less palatable, tantamount to blaming everyone else for allowing it to happen. But, no -- this time, having a clear conviction of the indefinableness of it, they want no part of the blame and no part in absolution -- and poof, "evil" is born.
Sort of like a pack-mule. To carry certain people and their evil deeds away.
Fascinating, Soph. :)
I think we can probably answer nearly every question we can ask about the Holocaust, about ISIS, about even evil. And those explanations aren't excuses and hold no inherent absolution.
/thinking out-loud