BELIEVE NO EVIL: LESLIE SACKS
April 6, 2010
Believe No Evil Leslie Sacks
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The most painful moments of modern times seem to occur when society’s elites – whether in government, academia, the media or otherwise – choose to believe in the innate goodness of mankind and to turn away from mounting evidence of impending evil.
One may argue that distracted citizens and the uninformed members of our society were not apprised of the evidence that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and the like were so adept at publicizing, at exposing with evident pride and then efficiently executing. There are however mountains of incontestable evidence that during all the major mass slaughters and genocides of the last hundred years, the powers that be in the West had ample evidence of the gas chambers, of the Siberian gulags, of the Cambodian killing fields, of Rwanda and Darfur.
As Michael Ledeen delineates in his recent concise and persuasive book Accomplice to Evil,¹ the short answer to this most unfortunate phenomenon – society’s psychological deficiency – is the same as Baudelaire’s: we comfort ourselves with happy thoughts about human nature, ensuring we fall prey to the Devil’s trick that real, uncompromising evil really does not anymore exist.
Ledeen exposes the core consequence of this self-deception: because people are all construed to be basically the same – all essentially “good†– the perfect society becomes a real possibility within the grasp of some kind of perfectly engineered central authority. And he demonstrates how this conceit has been nurtured by the Enlightenment and by our (i.e. the West’s) success in building a modern and humanistic society.
Of course, almost all of human history (and especially the last century) reconfirms the uncomfortable fact that Man, at his core, is more inclined to allow (or even to do) evil than to do good. Yet we consciously ignore the evidence – it is most unpleasant to interrupt our daily dreams and hopes with the idea that many people and entire cultures can fall prey to evil leaders and subjugate themselves to their murderous commands. We refuse to abandon our enlightened faiths; we turn away again and again from the lessons of history. At our peril we imbue our enemies with reasonableness and a logic they clearly do not possess.
Most pressingly for our country, we see hundreds of thousands in Tehran chanting death to America. We see Mullahs and preachers worldwide call for the destruction of America (the big Satan), Israel (the little Satan) and the West and their replacement with a religiously cleansed Islamic Caliphate.
And yet so many of us refuse to acknowledge the need for a forceful response to Iran. Our media sanitize every reference to terrorism; our allies relentlessly prevaricate – happiness and contentment and cheap oil at all costs. As a civilization, we flinch at the necessity of confronting evil. We willfully ignore the awful truth that, left to their own devices, these radical Jihadists will learn, teach and accumulate weapons of mass destruction until they are able to implement their clearly expressed murderous and (when it comes to the Jews) genocidal intents.
Freedom and democracy, Ledeen goes on to say, does not protect us against such people. Instead, they serve to shield us against these most unpleasant truths until the Islamists, these deeply religious and committed idealists, finally force us to confront them on the battlefield. The evil is within them; the facilitation thereof is within us. We prefer, as did our predecessors, to wait. To wait for Hitler to invade Poland, for Stalin and Mao to massacre tens of millions of their own innocents. To wait for Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah or al Qaeda to acquire and use a nuclear device, to murder thousands (or perhaps hundreds of thousands) of victims.
We wait in our modern comfort because the alternative is too unpleasant to contemplate. We choose to ignore our potential for “outing†evil at every opportunity. We choose anxious complacency instead of confident confrontation. Gandhi would not have traded oil with Tehran. Mother Theresa would not have ignored the protesters rotting in Iran’s prisons. Churchill would not have invited Ahmadinejad to the United Nations.
We have been victims of our psychology for thousands of years; we insist on seeing no evil, hearing no evil. If we choose now to believe in no evil we will, as Santayana aptly noted, be obliged to repeat it. ²
¹ Ledeen, Michael A. Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West. St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2009.
² “He who does not learn from history is condemned to repeat it.†– George Santayana
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Leslie Sacks is an art dealer and gallerist in Los Angeles. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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