“Evil” is an imprecise concept. As Theo Horesh pointed out in his book, “The Holocausts We All Deny,” we tend to label actions as evil when we cannot understand why any human being would carry out heinous acts. But labeling something as evil often has the effect of cordoning off those heinous acts, essentially putting them into a non-human category, thereby unintentionally hiding the human dimension. However, this does not mean that we can’t label something as evil.
What Trump version 2 has been doing fits Horesh’s definition of evil. For Horesh, particular acts are evil if they are meant to “break its victims physically or mentally.” (p.147) Whether it is masked men (and increasingly women) who kidnap people off the street and send them to a foreign gulag, or whether it is propaganda put out by the Department of Homeland Security that portrays their utopian vision of an immigrant-free country (echoing the Nazi dream of a Judenrein Europe), those actions are meant to break us physically and mentally. We’re horrified because they have broken long-standing norms. This administration and its enablers are political serial killers. They think and act like serial killers. They live in a fictitious world of their own making. They use power to kill their victims. In their fictitious world, they see themselves as saviors fighting off fictitious demons: Globalists, CRT, DEI, Antifa, and so on.
Knowing that this is what they are doing, that they are trying to break us, that they are trying to force us to accept their fictions as real, this knowledge should be a major source of our strength and resistance. We see through their game. We see what they are trying to do. Their magic tricks won’t work, can’t work, because we know how and why they’re done. We are no longer naive. This applies not only to the current administration but to the entire political system. We now know that the Electoral College was never meant to save us in 2016. We now know that the Supreme Court has reverted to its former self, namely, the protection of wealth and property. We now know that the philosopher G. Carlin was correct when he said that it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. Now, the alarm clock is ringing. People are starting to wake up. They are no longer asleep.
P.S. In Ron Rosenbaum’s “Explaining Hitler,” he writes in the Afterword that there is a tendency to try to see some of the good things (good things??!!) that had occurred during the Holocaust, the most obvious example being Steven Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List. He writes, “As someone put it, Spielberg made a movie about one Christian saving 400 Jews instead of a movie about a continent of Christians killing 6 million.” Rosenbaum continues. “The Holocaust wasn’t It’s a Wonderful Life, an event to be exploited for heartwarming anecdotes. Life was not beautiful and human nature, if anything, exceeded all imaginable expectations of evil’s limitlessness.The lesson of the Holocaust should be to question whether there are any limits to human evil.” (p.412)
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