Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the greatest atrocities have been done by regular people, just like you and I. To say, “If I were born in Germany in 1926 I would NOT have been a Nazi!!” is the acme of hubris. We would all like to think we would have been a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but more likely, any one of us would have been a Auschwitz guard. There was after all, only one Bonhoeffer, and many guards. Yet, to say someone definitely would have been a Nazi, is to deny free will. What this tells us of the human condition, and of ourselves, is that we are capable of great evil. That is part of being human. Yet we are also capable of noble acts that transcend our humanity. Both extremes are characterized by a mindset. That mindset is one of questioning our role, or not, in any political and philosophical paradigm.
We all have a spark of the divine in us. Even those who signed on to become SS Totenkopf brigade. We know this because, the communiques sent back from the Baltic States regarding the breakdown of soldiers, tasked with machine gunning innocent people into ditches. Mental fatigue was rampant among those soldiers. Presumably, the worst of the worst, dedicated zealots to the cause of the Master Race. Men recruited from insane asylums to select for psychopathy. Even they would break down at committing such unspeakable acts of cruelty, yet the slaughter went on, because regular people followed the dominant mindset, and few questioned it. Few, except Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and those like him. This shows that even the darkest soul has a glint of light.
Yet even the brightest soul can be tricked into the most heinous of evils. Take the killing fields of Cambodia. Where upon winning the revolution, Pol Pot marched the entire population of Phenom Penn into the rice fields, and began systematically slaughtering people, in an attempt to create utopia… by eliminating the wrong kind of people. In that orgy of inhumanity, little fifteen year old girls, mean angels on any other stage, went down lines of bound men and women, and placed a bread bag over the heads of the victims. One by one, suffocating people, pleading for their lives… as they watched the bread bag get ever closer. Imagine the evil that can darken the soul of a little girl such??? This can only come about when people do not think critically, and morally, about what they are actually doing.
In every case where people become monsters, for the greater good, they have become captured by an idea. An evil idea to be sure, but one that masquerades as good, that holds out the promise of utopia, at the end of a long dark bloody corridor. When Alexander ordered the slaughter of every man woman and child in Persepolis, his greatest crime according to Plutarch, those soldiers who carried out the orders were every bit as guilty as Alexander, for that sin against humanity, because they knew in their hearts they were committing acts of evil. If not for our ability to lie to ourselves, and deny that which we know in our hearts is evil, psychopaths couldn’t raise armies of conquest, revolutions that create Hell on Earth, inquisitions, and every other organized evil… couldn’t happen.
Question everything, not just the dominant paradigm, but those that seek to replace it as well, for it is in those that evil often masquerades as good. Great wickedness always begins with small evils. The death camps didn’t spring up overnight. They began by people believing uncritically and acting in small ways. Those small acts of malevolence slowly grew, to greater and greater crimes, until the concept of death camps became palatable. Eventually, in an attempt at “mercy,” the Death Camps were set up, to “alleviate the suffering” of the Jews in the Ghettos. Social lies compound upon social lies, until everyone has convinced themselves that the greatest good can only come about, by committing the greatest of atrocities. That is how you and I can be tricked into becoming monsters.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
