Evil: Misunderstood or Malevolent?

The martial spirit of Europe has greatly diminished since the close of the world wars. The foreshadowing of later decline was presciently illustrated in the Munich agreement of 1938. Neville Chamberlin was tragically emblematic of the desire for “peace” at any cost.

The rapid defeat of the French forces by the Germans in WWII demonstrated how the debilitating disarmament resolutions pushed by the inter-war French intelligentsia did nothing but weaken the French’s former military prowess.

However, the misguided faith in negotiations and settlements was not merely a European phenomenon. The naiveté, bordering on negligence, of FDR’s view of Joseph Stalin put even Chamberlin to shame. To dine with, talk to, and generally associate with a man like Stalin for weeks at a time and fail to grasp the ideologically fueled inhumanity of this monster ranks among FDR’s greatest failures, which is quite a distinction.

The fundamental problem is not a lack of psychological awareness or empirical evidence of the evil committed by these regimes of terror. Even Thomas Jefferson fell prey to the charms of Utopian hopes in his initial view of the French Revolution. The deficiency lies in the Progressive mind itself. If humanity is fundamentally good, then the vast majority of conflicts must be misunderstandings.

These dictators could not really want the wholesale destruction or appropriation of other nations! Progressives never realize the reality of evil before the genocide or war occurs, but they always have a ready answer for their misapprehensions: the people in question were insane. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, all these men had some type of malformation which allowed them to sublimate their humanity.

The conservative agrees that there is a deformity; however, he is not so sanguine as to suppose it anything so benign as a physical defect. No. The sad truth is a malformation of worldview, of ideology is the genesis of these atrocities. The N.I.C.E. of C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength well exemplifies how far more wickedness can be justified in terms of a new humanitarianism than through the acquisitive motives of the kings of yesteryear.

The soul of Western Civilization is on the line in this area as in others. If the new ghastly regimes that will confront us in the 21^st century are to be perpetually psychoanalyzed out of the category of perfidy then we will have lost the fight before it ever began.