Understanding Evil
6th July 2013
One incident summarizes the confusion. A friend I was traveling with became sick. Conveniently, the man we were just about to interview had been a doctor in the war. It turned out he had been a vivisectionist. He organized “medical training” sessions in which the Japanese would take healthy Chinese people, strap them to tables, and practice field surgery on them: bowel resection, limb amputation, and (after shooting them) bullet removal. They did it without anesthesia. Why waste that on Chinese people? This man had abused the most basic premises of what it means to be a doctor. But he was a good doctor to us, helping my friend. We thanked him.
I feel the same way about abortion doctors. What does it take to kill an innocent child, then go home to the wife and kids and maybe watch a little television? There is a reason the that Hippocratic Oath begins with Primum non nocere, ‘First, to do no harm’.
I recently wrote a piece for CNN about a Syrian rebel who carved out a man’s heart and began to eat it. The editor had asked me to explain what could make a man do such a thing. I tried to explain, and many people were outraged by what I wrote. In one way or another, they were all saying: You think when you try to understand why men do evil things, you are going to learn something that might help prevent atrocities in the future. But really you are just excusing the perpetrators, justifying unjustifiable actions. The only thing you need to understand about evil is how to punish it.
And likewise, Islam is an evil religion — a religion that blesses what other religions curse (murder, robbery, deceit when it is profitable, rape, slavery) and more or less says ‘Whatever profits our group is good, whatever disadvantages our group is bad.’ By that standard, there is no moral difference between Islam and National Socialism or Communism.