Prelude to Evil

I’ve had occasion lately to consider the nature of evil. I’ve been the victim of a crime, as have several close family members, and I’ve pondered what would motivate a perfect stranger to hurt another person.  I understand the concept of stealing.  I understand the concept of killing for self-defense, and of killing or beating someone because you hate them in particular or stand to benefit somehow from their death.  But I don’t understand what would move someone to participate in the systematic murder or oppression of a stranger or a group of strangers.

The people in the photo look pleasant enough – just young people having a good time, fooling around and mugging for the camera.  It isn’t until you look closely at their uniforms that you see they are Nazis. 

The people in the photo aren’t that different from those in the WWII photos my grandmother took during the war.  She was a volunteer in a POW camp while my grandfather and most of the rest of the men in the family fought overseas.  Of course, German POWs were treated well.  My grandmother even spent her own money buying paint and art supplies for a German POW; he thanked her by gifting her with a painting that’s a treasured part of our family history.  That soldier was an ordinary German citizen, and according to my grandmother, a nice guy.  He certainly knew that Jews were rounded up and their property confiscated.  He knew they were “relocated” although I don’t know whether he was aware they were being systematically murdered.  But let’s assume he didn’t know they were being killed.  He had to know about the Nuremburg laws.  Millions of Germans surely knew at least that much, but they went along with it.  Why?

Jim Tonkovich addressed the question in this article:

“In the university,” writes Joseph E. Davis in the latest issue of Culture, the magazine of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, “the concepts of good and evil have largely disappeared.  This is not to say that scholars avoid normative issues; they don’t.  What they avoid is any reflection on what the good actually is.”

… According to Arendt, Eichmann was responsible for organizing the transportation of millions of Jewish men, women, and children to their deaths not because he hated Jews or had an evil essence. Rather, he was responsible for these evils because he never reflected on the moral character of his actions.

Failure to reflect on the moral character of his actions led directly to Eichmann’s unspeakable crimes.  The same is true of the young women enjoying blueberries who were complicit in the horror.  And the same is true of Hoecker who was married with two children, enjoyed gardening, worked in a bank after the war, and in all the photos seems to be friendly, positive, and hardworking.  His moral failure went beyond working at a death camp.  His great sin was thoughtlessness—the lack of moral reflection on his life and actions—that allowed him to work at a death camp in the first place.

A failure to reflect on the moral character of our actions… we tend to assume, of course, that we are correct and to reject information that would discredit our views.  I go round and round with my far-leftist brother on this one.  I don’t want to argue politics with him because we’re not even working with the same dataset anymore and I don’t know how to reconcile that.  I would call him a good man, a smart man, and I believe he means well.  Yet what I call facts and truth are quite different from what he calls facts and truth.  If we can’t agree that up is up and down is down, there’s little use discussing the effects of gravity.

Consider recent commenter “FunMe” here on this blog, whose comments are quite typical of what leftists are saying all over the internet:

Once Obama gets elected US President next week, I look forward to 2009 when he brings back the FAIRNESS DOCTRINE and we can get rid of the Fox Noise type spokespeople like West. … Your camp has destroyed our DEMOCRACY … but you go right ahead, keep drinking the KKKool.

FunMe wants to see the Orwellian “Fairness Doctrine” brought back.  Back in the day when news was primarily delivered via the public airwaves and by newspapers, back when we only had three or four TV channels and far fewer radio stations to choose from, the FCC was permitted to regulate free speech.

However, in the case of Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241 (1974), Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote (for a unanimous court), “Government-enforced right of access inescapably dampens the vigor and limits the variety of public debate.”

And the FCC later stated,

“the intrusion by government into the content of programming occasioned by the enforcement of [the Fairness Doctrine] restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters … [and] actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists,” and suggested that, due to the many media voices in the marketplace, the doctrine be deemed unconstitutional.

Why would people want to bring it back?  Because it dampens the vigor and limits the variety of public debate.  Because it limits the journalistic freedom of broadcasters.  FunMe was not embarrassed to proclaim that the purpose of the Fairness Doctrine was to shut down opposing views as aired by “Fox Noise.”  And it will not stop with the Fairness Doctrine.   John McCain shamefully attacked free speech with McCain-Feingold, and Democrats promise to do even more.  FunMe proposes to limit free speech; the FIRST amendment and a pillar of the republic, then accuses Republicans of having destroyed democracy (though lists no examples of how) and finally contradicts her own argument by celebrating how she’s going to vote in the democracy that the Republicans have destroyed! A failure to reflect, indeed!  Does she really understand what she’s saying, and what she’s proposing?  Did John McCain and Russ Feingold?  Did Hillary Clinton?

Between the Fairness Doctrine, the speech codes on college campuses, the refusal to pass the Online Freedom of Speech Act, the infamous “card check” which abolishes employees’ right to privately vote whether or not to join a union, attempts to block members of Congress from posting on the internet,, “free speech cages” at the Democratic convention, thuggery, censorship, and “Truth Squads,” I don’t even recognize the Democratic Party anymore.  This is not what “liberal” used to mean.  Once I was a liberal, in the classical sense of the word, and in many ways I remain so today.  And if people could get past the “my team uber alles” attitude and really reflect on the goals and actions of those they’re supporting instead of the soaring, empty rhetoric, I think they’d leave the Democratic party just like I left the Republican party when it stopped representing me.  At least, I hope they would.

The question isn’t whether the free speech restrictions in an Obama administration will be a precursor to future Nuremberg-style laws.  I do believe that free speech will be the first thing to go, but not the last.  However, that is not to say I subscribe to the Truther whackos’ view that the gubmint has built concentration camps for dissenters. But that’s really not the point.  The point I’m clumsily attempting to make is that both the Nuremberg laws and laws which restrict free political speech are objectively evil and should be stopped… and that there is something in each of us which doesn’t want to recognize evil for what it is, if that evil can clear the path to a much desired goal.

Yet we must reflect on the moral character of the decisions we’re making if America will continue to be a force for good in the world.  The organization best suited for discussions on good and evil is the church.  I agree with Pastor Joe McKeever – we do NOT need to bring politics into the church.  But the larger questions of good and evil, freedom, sin, and repentence are well within the purview of the church.  And once someone is a resident of the Kingdom, that reflection will necessarily – eventually – take place.  The majority of Americans profess Christianity, but it’s clear we don’t practice it.  If we did, the world would be a very different place.  So politics aside, now is the time to focus on discipleship, sanctification, and evangelizing.  If we do those things, the rest will take care of itself.