it’s hard for the human brain to encounter evil in ludicrous form, and still recognise it as such. That’s how it creeps up on you. That’s why you ask how such crimes were allowed to happen in the past. The answer is that it rarely arrives with the intent and identifying hallmarks of a villain. It arrives in the form of broken people, whose power lies in their unquenchable desire to make themselves whole no matter the consequences.
Over the past few weeks, a random kaleidoscope of images has been flashing through my head. Some are characters from movies not seen since childhood. Others are snippets from literature or iconic art. What joins them all is an exaggerated, almost kitschy evil.
These images seem to be standing in for the real carnage my brain is trying to process: the bodies pulled from the rubble in Gaza, a school full of young pupils blown apart in Iran. The more than 1 million people in southern Lebanon expelled en masse from their homes. (Alex in the film of A Clockwork Orange appears, eyes clamped open as liquid is dripped into them, unable to blink away what is scorching his vision.)
What is so bewildering about the cruelty is how it has been allowed to pass, its casualness. Donald Trump hovers above the circus of death and chaos. (Billy, the clown-faced puppet in Saw, pops up rasping, “I want to play a game”.) Trump defies attempts to make his actions cohere with any particular strategy. His wars, killing of innocents, and indeed, the threatening of entire civilisations are reshaping the world, but without him even having orchestrated some master plan. He is animated by little more than momentary impulses and resentments.
Trump’s seeming lack of vision or ideology are misread as attributes that make him somehow less dangerous than the authoritarians of the past who have become the template for what evil looks like. Take the debate over whether Trump can be described as “fascist”. “You can’t be a fascist,” said the Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim, “without in any way meaning to be one.” Trump is inept, inconsistent, “puzzling and exasperating”, but not a fascist, he claims.
Trump also does not adhere to the style or affect of the fascist model: he doesn’t hold rallies, wear uniforms or make fiery speeches from balconies to flag-waving throngs. He hasn’t (entirely yet) overturned the constitution and dismantled democracy. He is an addled comic figure, a man whose very soul is bared in his angry outbursts on social media or in rambling speeches without self-awareness or self-consciousness. He talks about the war on Iran flanked by a gigantic Easter bunny, posts an image of himself as Jesus. He “always chickens out”. (A Wheeler from 1985’s dark fantasy Return to Oz: screeching, giggling, chasing, then wincing and withdrawing when its quarry strikes back.)
But isn’t this what evil is? A projection on to the world not of overbearing and large intent, but smallness and fear? The consequences of violence are secondary to the validation that comes from inflicting it. Trump’s constant self-aggrandisement, his grudges against political adversaries, the fury at being challenged by the press, the revenge he promises to wreak on the Iranian regime. All are ways to erase and avoid what is a permanent terror of humiliation and obsolescence. (Goya’s Saturn, wild-eyed, devours his son.)
It is in that very puniness that insatiable evil lies. In 1931, after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party had surged in the polls, he was interviewed by the US reporter Dorothy Thompson for Cosmopolitan. “When I walked into Adolf Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof hotel,” Thompson recalled, “I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something like 50 seconds, I was quite sure he was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.”
“Think of Benito Mussolini,” wrote the journalist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in the LA Times, “jackbooted, lantern-jawed, squeakily bombastic, posturing from the little balcony of his office on Piazza Venezia in Rome – that remarkably dopey stiff-armed Fascist salute, the absurd oratory. Think of that funny man, that consummate buffoon”, and remember that “just because something is silly doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous”.
We tend to imbue history and all its grave events with a seriousness and coherence that we struggle to apply in the present. And I think that’s because it’s hard for the human brain to encounter evil in ludicrous form, and still recognise it as such. That’s how it creeps up on you….
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Dogs of war / New acronym in Gaza: WCNSF – Wounded Child No Surviving Family
The Legitimization of Evil Will Remain with Israelis Long After the War in Gaza Ends
Psychologists of Evil: Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on the Darkness of the Soul
Udi Greenberg: Freud and the Miseries of Politics
Mukul Kesavan: Photobombing death and the banality of evil / Evil, framed. By SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
The Gulag Archipelago: An Epic of True Evil
Evil: The Crime against Humanity. Hannah Arendt’s confrontation with totalitarianism
Alexandre Koyré: The Political Function of the Modern Lie (1943)
Lying and history: Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war (2009)
After the truth-shower 