What we can plainly see

Seeing through the banality of evil. Is there hope?

Something about what’s going on all over the world struck me the other day. It’s been less than the lifetime of a person born before the Holocaust that has taken some people in the world from “never again” to Holocaust denial to actual Holocaust-affirming. I wish I could write about something less dark and foreboding, but this is where my head is at right now. If I don’t spew it out on my keyboard, it will rattle around in there attracting cobwebs and other attic-dwelling creatures that make my skin crawl, so I won’t discuss them here. Instead, let’s chat about Nazis.

“Albeit Macht Frei”: Entrance to Auschwitz

There’s some things most of us can agree on, historically speaking, no matter where we are on the current political spectrum. Examples are not hard to find.

It is evil to ship an entire race of people in cattle cars, separate children from their parents, reserve the healthiest to be worked to death, and send the rest directly to showers that are actually gas chambers adjacent to crematoria, after the dead have had their gold teeth, hair, jewelry, shoes, and clothes relieved from their corpses.

Such extravagant displays of evil are rarely seen in history, at least at that scale. It may be more a function of technology and society that accounts for the cold efficiency of the Nazi death camps. The Trail of Tears that emptied Georgia and Tennessee of Native Americans was quite well organized, but lacked the exquisite timing of rail cars. It also had the advantage of the United States’ possession of millions of square miles of mostly uninhabited land in the west, where ethnic cleansing became more of a matter of continual resettlement instead of a “final solution.”

Not to defend Nazis, but had the Slavic nations been less densely populated, and had Stalin been less defiant in his defense of the Soviet Union’s territorial integrity, perhaps Europe’s Jews might have faced a similar fate living in reservations—ghettoes—as today’s American Indians. As it was, the people who perpetrated the “final solution” were not in appearance monsters. Reporter Hannah Arendt, covering the Jerusalem trial of Adolph Eichmann for the New Yorker, remarked that the “deeds were monstrous, but the doer ... was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.” The “man in the glass booth” was “nicht einmal unheimlich — not even sinister.”

Nazis like Reinhard Heydrich, who came up with the plan for the “final solution,” were not dealing with an existential threat, or a religious epiphany. They were logisticians dealing with a surplus of people who were deemed by their superiors and their party to be undesirable and therefore to be eliminated. As Arendt coined the phrase, these people represented the “banality of evil.” In 1947, the Washington Post quoted Stalin: “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” Stalin may have been referring to the Holodomor, where the Soviet Union’s collectivization of agriculture resulted in the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s, as they were forced to farm and not allowed any of the harvest.

The Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot starved and murdered up to 3 million Cambodians between April, 1975 through January, 1979, when Vietnam finally ended their reign of terror. The “Killing Fields” movie in 1984 brought this genocide into the American public conscience.

The U.S.-led attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11 directly killed around 400,000 people, and has led to deaths likely numbering up to 4.5 million. These people died to satisfy Americans’ sense of justice for 2,977 victims of the terrorist acts in 2001. Iraq is back in the orbit of Iran’s religious extremist rulers, without a “strong man” to oppose them. Afghanistan is back in the hands of the Taliban, but in reality Afghanistan is ungovernable by a central authority. The local chieftains have always done as they pleased, making whatever deals were favorable to them with whatever power that asserted so-called “national authority” there.

The chieftains also made deals with whoever was the current opposition. So when the Russians came in, the U.S. supported the mujahadeen under the Reagan Doctrine. When the Russians left, those rebels became the Taliban and led to the growth of terrorist groups like the one led by Osama bin Laden. Little has changed in the day to day evil experienced by Afghans. Little has changed in the day to day evil experienced by Iraqis.

It’s depressing to think this way. But there’s more.

During every war to eliminate the State of Israel, which became the de facto government in British Palestine when the British struck their colors on May 14, 1948, hundreds of thousands of Arabs who were living in the war zone were told to leave by both sides, to get out of the way of the armies trying to kill each other. Most of the refugees were told they would inherit the land Jews were living in when the combined Arab armies were successful in driving the Jews out. Now if the newly-formed IDF had lost its war of independence, would the Arabs have completed the Nazi “final solution” on the inhabitants—many of which had just survived the Holocaust?

If Egypt, Syria and Jordan had won in 1968, would they have pushed the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea? If they had won (they nearly did) in 1973, would they have slaughtered every Jew in Israel? I don’t know, but I would not doubt it. The depths of evil, when it becomes banal, at scale, is unfathomable.

The evil of 10/7 was not banal. It was personal, up close, in the way a rapist harms his victim. The killing was not the result of some logistical plan, where besuited planners are neither “demonic nor monstrous.” The events of 10/7 were both demonic and monstrous in the extreme.

What Israel is doing to Gaza falls into the “man in the glass booth” more than the “mom, I killed 10 Jews!” category. Israel, like Hamas, meticulously planned its operation. But it did not let IDF soldiers commit wanton butchery. That doesn’t mean there were not instances of butchery: it’s war, and not just war, but a war of personal vengeance. Most Israelis know someone who was either killed or kidnapped on 10/7. The scale of that event was a dozen times worse, sociologically speaking, than the events of 9/11 to the U.S. population.

Israelis know, going back to my original thought, that “never again” is no longer the chant of the world regarding the Holocaust. It’s now more likely “drop dead, Jew.” When your whole country and culture is Jewish, that’s not a comforting thought about the nature of humanity, or the “arc of the moral universe” that “bends toward justice” as Dr. Martin Luther King said.

If history is any judge, which obviously it is, the arc of the moral universe, because morality is uniquely a human thing, bends toward perversity, and the banality of evil.

Furthermore, there is no bottom to the pit of evil. The bigger the evil, the more banal, and these things become mere statistics rather than the wet work of evil people doing horrible things to other human beings. The children stolen from Ukraine while Russian artillery and missiles pound cites into rubble is evil, but the news shows only the billions of dollars it is costing America and Europe to stop the tide from completely submerging Ukraine into another Holodomor.

There is no reason to believe that the protests taking place at college campuses in America are anything but a call for genocide against Jews. As New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu said, they are “100% antisemitism.” And there’s no reason to believe that once the colleges, should they dare, decide to pursue “BDS” (boycott, divest, sanction) policies against Israel, these policies won’t extend to dismissing Jewish staff, or barring Jewish students. Of course, those things are illegal in America, but there are ways of accomplishing illegal things without violating the law. In other words, Jews know where we are not welcome.

By the way, this is how it started in post Weimar Germany.

It’s not unthinkable that American Jews might face the same choices made by German Jews, living comfortably in Berlin in 1933: Leave or face the consequences of staying, even if you love the country you live in. That’s the evil that people pursue in their hearts, expressed as first protest, then policy, then logistics.

If that was all there was to say, I’d tell you to break out the hard stuff—preferably whiskey, neat. Or head to the hills with all the AR-15s, scopes and ammunition your Chevy Z-71 can carry. But fortunately, my thought the other day, as dark as it is, leads to a bigger truth.

The “arc of the moral universe” is not in the hands of humanity. We did not invent physics, or astronomy. We study those things because they already exist. Similarly, we did not invent morality, or justice. We practice these things because they have already been set out for us.

Every Christian knows this story.

In Genesis chapter 3, the woman was deceived by the serpent, who at that time apparently had legs and was pleasing to behold. The serpent was the living incarnation of satan, the enemy of human souls. The woman ate of something forbidden, the knowledge of good and evil, thus opening the human heart to evil, which has become the guiding path of all our actions since. God saw the end from the beginning and spoke a curse over the serpent.

And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall bruise your head,
And you shall bruise His heel.

Note that “Seed” is capitalized when referring to the woman, but not when referring to the serpent. The seed of the serpent is sin. The Seed of the woman is Jesus Christ, the first fruits of the New Covenant, and the one who was bruised by the seed of the enemy. Jesus never sinned, yet was punished for all the rest of us, who did sin.

Now let me lead you in a thought experiment. We know, because we can plainly see, the evil abounding in this world. Left to our own devices, we will descend from evil to evil, limited only by our own penchant for self-preservation, and our calculating minds realizing that at a certain point, there is no advantage in self-dealing, so we must assume a “good” disposition for our own survival. But a chain is only as strong as the weakest link; nuclear weapons, drones, space, artificial intelligence, and worldwide networks are a stronger chain than whatever innate “goodness” we can assume about the human heart. Technology has handed us the keys to the knowledge of good and evil, at scale. Don’t be shocked when most of it is devoted to evil.

The thought experiment is that if there’s such terrible evil evident in the world and throughout history, what could counter that to make MLK’s statement true? How could there be a moral arc of the universe that actually bends toward justice?

Billy Graham, the famous evangelist, once related a story of his being invited to meet with Konrad Adenauer, who served as Chancellor of [West] Germany from 1949 through 1963.

When I walked in, I expected to meet a tall, stiff, formal man who might even be embarrassed if I brought up the subject of religion. After the greeting, the Chancellor suddenly turned to me and said, “Mr. Graham, what is the most important thing in the world?” Before I could answer, he had answered his own question. He said, “The resurrection of Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ is alive, then there is hope for the world. If Jesus Christ is in the grave, then I don’t see the slightest glimmer of hope on the horizon.” Then he amazed me by saying that he believed that the resurrection of Christ was one of the best-attested facts of history. He said, “When I leave office, I intend to spend the rest of my life gathering scientific proof of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

Though the resurrection of Jesus Christ is documented better than the existence of Socrates or Plato, or many of the best known historical facts of the ancient world, we do not see it plainly. We do not see it because nobody else before or since has been brutally murdered, put in a tomb, and arose from death after three days.

We people are really good at declaring things impossible. We are really good at looking at our own species and willfully putting aside the evil of our hearts, about which the Bible says in Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?” We lie to ourselves that mankind is basically good, because we are good to our mothers, and our kids, most of the time at least.

We ignore the stories of people who murder their mothers for money, or strangle their kids, or shoot their families before shooting themselves. We ignore them, and write them off as edge cases, because such things are impossible to normal people. But most people who do these evil things—their neighbors and coworkers tell us—appear normal up to the day they do them. It would seem that “normal” is only by appearance. We cannot know what is in the hearts of others, and we lie to ourselves about what is in our own.

If we are so deceived about the evil of our nature, and what is so plainly seen in the world, it’s not difficult to understand that something even greater than that evil, God incarnate and Jesus Christ returning, would be hidden from our minds. Read Romans chapter 1; Paul understood this.

As dark as this world is today—and it’s pretty dark—there is one hope for something bigger than the evil we see every day and throughout history. The resurrection of Jesus Christ, if it is true, is the one, and singular, guarantee that no matter what depths of evil humanity sink into, there is one who is infinitely greater, and infinitely good. He proved it by His conquest over the one thing that we have no power to beat: death itself.

Adenauer was right. “If Jesus Christ is in the grave, then I don’t see the slightest glimmer of hope on the horizon.” This is from a man who spent the Nazi years living on the run; his home, financial security, and safety were taken from him because he was a political opponent of the party in power. Adenauer got his pension and payment for his home in 1937—even under the Nazis, law-abiding bureaucrats and courts functioned—but was then jailed after the assassination attempt on Hitler and nearly sent to a death camp.

He could have easily said that it was the efforts of men: the Brits, Americans, free French, Poles, and Soviets who fought and defeated the Nazis, that were the hope of the world. Adenauer could have placed his hope in NATO, as one of its founders. He could have placed his trust in the armies of the west against the threat of communism. As Chancellor, Adenauer advocated for amnesty for all former Nazis, and opposed the Nuremberg trials. He opposed prosecution of political crimes for merely being a Nazi, of whom he was one of the most vocal opponents who lived through the war.

It’s almost as if Adenauer had been given binoculars that could look far into the future, and he could see today from the early 1960s. (By the way, Adenauer never really left office; though he resigned as Chancellor at 87, he was a member of the Bundestag until his death, at 91 years old, in 1967. His last words were reportedly “there’s nothin’ to weep about.”) I should like to have met him, but our generations barely touched.

There is hope, but not in mankind. Those hopes are misplaced and based on the deception of our hearts and minds. Yet, imagine this: if the evil in this world is so pervasive, deep, and able to plunge millions into poverty, starvation, war, and an early grave; then how much greater is God, who overcame all of it.

I will leave you with this quote from John chapter 16, where Jesus foretold his own death and the scattering of His disciples.

These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”