EVIL

When I was teaching high school in the mid-00's, I showed a film to my class called "Max." It starred John Cusack as a jewish art dealer in Munich named Max Rothman and Noah Taylor as a young Adolf Hitler, who was an aspiring artist.

I mention it here because my friends Russ, Seth and I were having a discussion about Evil yesterday. There are a lot of people tossing around that term right now. The film does a masterful job tearing away the facade of “evil” as a thing that Evil People indulge in, showing us that we all live with a narrative that justifies why we do what we do, why we believe what we believe.

If you watch the film, you will find yourself feeling sorry for Adolf Hitler. And what will THAT do to your day?

The Nazis had a narrative that said that the Aryan “race” was created as human perfection and that the corruptive forces of the races, and especially the Jewish race, had tarnished this perfection and were the root of all that is flawed in this world. If that is what you believed, in your core, then you could, possibly, find a justification for ridding the world of such evil. And once committed to such a justified and righteous idea, the dehumanization of the purveyors of this evil would be a rather short journey to take and one that could easily be justified.

What the movie does is show us the true cause of what we call “evil.” Shame, fear, rejection, self-loathing, poverty. The Nazis rose to power because Germany was in shambles after World War I and its people were starving and without identity. The Great War had utterly destroyed any sense of pride in their culture or heritage and the understandable punishments handed out thereafter by the rest of Europe continued the cycle of shame and embarrassment. And while there was humility by some in Germany, the Nazi ideology provided a different narrative, one that appealed to the sense of unfairness that so many, including Adolf Hitler, felt and just sparked that sense that perhaps they, the German people, were the true victims in all of this chaos. And something had to be done.

And all of this gave way to another War, even greater than the first. And gave birth to the most dominant “evil narrative” the world has ever had: the Nazis and Adolf Hitler, the very face of Evil itself. And yet, even after all of that, we know that evil still persists in the world. Not a single bullet has stopped it from continuing.

The great spiritual truth is that if you want to fight evil, you don’t go to war. You find a community struggling with poverty and you work within that community to feed the people, clothe the people and bring economic help and opportunities for bettering their situation. In other words, you show compassion. Jesus, Buddha, Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr, they all taught this same principle.

Once the Nazis had risen to power, the world had to fight back. They were left with no alternative and we can say that it was a noble cause. But the true evil was war itself, that “solution” that inflicts generations with traumatic legacies that are still being felt to this day by the great grandchildren of the Greatest Generation.

On this day before Halloween, in this crazy year of 2020, let us remember that every act of kindness and compassion we show, even to ourselves, is an act that rids the world of Evil.

And you never had to fire a shot.

-DGT