Hitler and Satan: Separated at Birth?

I am part of those forces which ceaselessly plot evil and eternally create good.

     -- the Archdemon Mephsitopholes, to Faust

A couple of hot news items on the Evil Personified front this week. 

The first is the impact of the Kony 2012 video.  I haven't seen it myself, as the internet is kind of sketchy over here.  Kony is the head of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army who have been busy killing, raping and pillaging in Central Africa for a good 25 years now.  He's one of your more colorful warlords, given to making children hack their parents to death, and claiming magical powers. 

He's in the Idi Amin school of warlords.  Most ruthless dictators like to maintain a veneer of civility and  moderation--Assad, Mao.  When asked to stop torturing people, the response will be "Me?  Torture people? Noooooo."  But Idi Amin was all "But I like torturing people!  Almost as much as I enjoy eating them. "

Also in the news:  the Norwegian subhuman who killed some 77 kids in cold blood was charged last week.  You may recall that he dressed up as a cop and went to an island filled with kids at some summer camp for liberals and pretty much hunted them all down.  Stupid looking fellow.  Apparently used to protect the weaker kids in his school from bullies.  Go figure.  I expect his last words will be "The horror! The horror!"

I apologize in advance if I am not giving Evil Personified its solemn due.  I really have to learn to be more serious when discussing Evil.  I'm bad for Hitler jokes too.

When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban were Evil Incarnate.  They liked to kill civilians, enslave women and burn schools.  Still do.  They gave Osama bin Laden a place from which to run his terrorist activities, including launching his horrific attack on civilians in New York.  But we've been in Afghanistan over ten years now.  And Evil continues its relentless march with or without the Taliban.  F-15s do not seem to kill it.

The Taliban here in Afghanistan have not died like Absolute Evil should--that is with a big boom and 10,000 Bonus Points.  They are just lying there. Very still.   Playing possum with us. The West is bored.  Meanwhile there is new and interesting Evil running around in Iran and Uganda.

I don't really understand the Dark Continent.  I guess I see it as a place of suffering and starvation and plague.  Life consists mostly of trying to get enough to eat and fleeing marauding hordes.  It fills me with a sense of helplessness because it never changes.  One of earliest memories is listening to George Harrison's  1973 Concert for Bangladesh. (Yeah, my parents were big-time hippies.  Had Jesus Christ Superstar racked on the turntable all the time, too.  I still know every word.)  Then there was Bob Geldoff's LiveAid in 1985.  And here we are twenty-five years later.  Having a receptacle in which to put all the Evil of Africa fulfills a need for us, but eliminating Kony will not extinguish evil from Africa.

That's not to say I begrudge the effort.  It would be pretty cynical to ride a guy who wants something done about a sadist who victimizes children with such impunity. 

The only thing that bothers me is that we, by all this attention, exalt Kony to some apotheosis of Evil.  Deify him.  When a wasp stung my daughter a couple of summers ago, I squished it. I didn't torture it, or handcuff it and asked it why it went around stinging cute little girls who never did it any harm.  I just killed it so it wouldn't sting again, and then went back to my book.

Evil is banal. You never learn anything from its perpetrators when you ask them "Why?  Why?  Why?"  They never have an answer.  No insight into the nature of their wickedness.  They seem as perplexed as the one asking the question.  I've always found that quite odd.   And the perpetrators never seem equal to the chaos and misery they've caused.

Voltaire said Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer.  "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." (Hey, we're bilingual over here at Mindfingers!)  The same, it seems, applies to the devil.  We have a need to personify evil.  The Christians at least admit as much.   All their evil is in one convenient package--Lucifer, the Fallen Angel. 

Secular types talk a big game about moral relativity, but when their moral sensitivities are outraged, they want to package and personify evil too, albeit in human form, instead of divine. 

Take Hitler for instance.

Hitler has become that invented, secular Satan.  it's impolite to even mention his name in civil company.  Express any sympathy with his ideas and you'll wind up in legal hot water--shades of the old blasphemy laws.

But when we vest all the vileness of Nazi Germany in Adolf Hitler, we forget the true lesson of the Holocaust--that it was brought about by a million smaller evils, from guard at Dachau who was "just following orders" to the woman who quietly closed her blinds when the Gestapo came for her neighbor.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer imprisoned for eight years in  Stalin gulag, knew something about evil.  He said the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.