By David Lewis
Let us consider the banality of evil.
That which resides, often in hiding, within the everyday. Evil loves a vacuum. And where goodness is not, expect the vacuum to be filled. Once a foothold is established, evil enlists otherwise ordinary people in its agency.
In his book, Ordinary Men, author Christopher Browning details how a reserve police battalion, of mostly middle-aged men from northern Germany, perpetrated the murder of thousands of Jews, as part of Hitler’s Final Solution; even as some of these ordinary men were appalled by what they were doing, by the radical solution of which they were a part. They were, after all, citizens of a prominent nation with centuries-old cultural foundations.
Advanced civilizations, however, are susceptible to human weakness. No one simply went … poof! … to put the Nazis in power and the Holocaust in motion. It emerged from the cataclysm of World War I and the socio-economic desperation that followed. A civilized society became vulnerable, malleable, unstable; ripe to being manipulated and terrorized by socialists (yes, Nazis were socialists) who, with their Brownshirt enforcers, savagely silenced voices of dissent. The magnitude of inhumanity that ensued was unimaginable. It simply could not happen. Until it did.
Do current events echo eerily of Germany’s recent history, wherein emerged contorted definitions of what it meant to be ‘Jewish,’ and those who fit the definition were scapegoated for Germany’s woes, targeted for beatings and public humiliations that intensified exponentially into something unthinkable? Is it even conceivable that we may see eerily echoed notions of ‘whiteness’ and other stigmatizations contrived in America, as tools with which Marxists and other radicals choose scapegoats for their own ideological shortcomings?
One begins to conjure images previously unthinkable. It begins, perhaps, with people who deny the tenets of political groupthink finding themselves suddenly ‘cancelled’ from social and economic discourse—disowned by former friends, colleagues and employers, and denied the ability to earn a decent living. Might we see an entire ethnicity labeled with the scarlet “R” of racism as its defining characteristic? Perhaps roving mobs would randomly enter coffee shops, demanding white patrons give up their seats for black patrons, or get down on their knees, en masse and under duress, to beg forgiveness for their ‘white privilege.’ Could we reach a point where our own government seizes and redistributes white-owned property, as reparation for centuries-old sins of someone’s ancestors?
And after that?
Five years ago, the sight of roving mobs defacing and tearing down monuments to America’s founding fathers and other historic icons, unopposed by law enforcement, was inconceivable. Now, however, this anarchical form of protest, this public humiliation of American culture and iconography, is embedded in our milieu. That is how quickly the unimaginable becomes commonplace.
It is one thing to examine and question an unfortunate legacy of racism that has occupied much of American history; it is quite another to attack hallmarks of our past, to erase our history as if it never existed, to deny the quite enviable legacy of liberty and opportunity that has defined American exceptionalism. But attack, erase and deny are exactly what the mob is doing.
Masquerading under a guise of ‘racial justice’ and ‘mostly peaceful’ protest, be they Black Lives Matter, Antifa, or what have you, they are, in fact, often and brazenly violent; and they will not be satiated by incremental victories such as tearing down statues. They will, instead, become increasingly emboldened, destructive and dangerous; as did the Brownshirts eighty plus years ago. And the ‘racial justice’ they claim to seek will never be achieved, for their claim is a clever deceit. The mob despoiling American cities, monuments and culture is intent on the collapse of western democracy. Their biggest piñata is the United States of America; and they are determined to rip it apart.
Ordinary Americans must act—out of a sense of goodness or justice or pure self-preservation—to denounce the mob’s rallying cry of ‘racism’ and scapegoating of ‘whiteness.’ Otherwise, those same ordinary Americans will enable the mob’s perfidy and its sought after destruction of American liberty, prosperity and democracy. For, as any student of history can tell you, mobs with scapegoats are ugly things, lacking in goodness.
The vacuum into which evil imbues itself.
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