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Naming Evil

by Wayne Lutz
August 19th, 2001

Seven days have elapsed since terror rocked America and the world, and in that short time millions upon millions of words have been written about the attack and its aftermath - indeed, there is virtually no other topic of conversation, opinion writing, news reporting.

All those words are serving, among other things, the cathartic purpose of helping us to decide just where we stand against evil, but they are also serving the secondary purpose of revealing the character of the American soul.

The vast majority of Americans are passing the terrible test honorably - they've seen the face of evil, recognized it for what it is, and demanded of our leaders and, more importantly, of themselves, that evil not be allowed to prevail.

But there is a vocal and persistent contingent of relativists among us who insist that the act of war committed against the United States is our own fault, that we have no one but ourselves to blame.

The reasoning behind that insanity can sometimes become quite convoluted, but in most cases boils down to the simple tenet that we are The United States, and that in and of itself is reason enough.

The United States stands alone in the world as the last true beacon of hope, freedom and prosperity. The people who attack us hate that and wish to destroy us for it. They are products of a world far removed from our own, a world in which liberty is unknown and power is obtained through terror.

But the people who justify the mass-murder of innocents by telling us that we ourselves are to blame were produced right here in our own good-ol' Western culture. They are the products of many years of Hate America First training - the products of a morally relativistic age in which the victim is forgotten in the fatuous rush to understand and forgive the perpetrators of evil.

In fact, to people for whom words like "honor" and "integrity" and "character" are, at best, flexible in meaning and at worst outright obscenities, the concept of evil in itself is foreign to their progressive, enlightened minds. In a world in which good and evil are relative to the observer, absolute good or absolute evil cannot exist, and any act, no matter how heinous, can be excused by any smugly self-righteous observer who is moved to excuse it, effectively masking that observer's true motivation, which, in the case of this terrorist attack, is the end product of his Hate America First indoctrination.

This same denial of the existance of evil is responsible for the recent outpouring of "support" among some leftists for the murderous mom, Andrea Yates, who coldly and systematically drowned her five children. The bodies of those kids were barely cold before the vacuous rush was on to excuse, explain and exonorate Mrs. Yates. In this case the motivation for shifting the blame from the murder to the victims was different, but the method of reasoning, and the denial of the existance of evil, were the same.

George Will wrote in the Washington Times in 1989;

"The ambition of the modern mind is to spare itself a chilling sight, that of the cold blank stare of personal evil. The modern program is squeamishness dressed up as sophistication. Its aim is to make the reality of evil disappear behind a rhetorical gauze of learned garbage..

...A society that flinches from the faces of evil will flinch from the act of punishment."

On September 11th, at the cost of thousands of lives and our unique sense of security, the American people turned on their television sets and were met by the blank stare of evil. To their everlasting credit, the vast majority of them recognized that stare for what it is and had the courage to give it a name.

As for those in this country and around the world who still, even now, even after this, refuse to utter the name of "evil", the character of their own souls is revealed for the rest of us to pity and revile.

©2002 The Tocquevillian Magazine