Words. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It is a painful thing how slowly I read. It is because of my slow reading ability coupled with the subject matter that has caused me to be only half-way through the book I’ve been reading forever, The Gulag Archipelago. This is one messed up book and not one I can simply read for all that long without missing the weightiness of the prose. After spending any time at all reading this important work, denying the existence of evil, pure evil, quickly becomes impossible. The twentieth century was soaked in blood. Drenched. Flowing from most continents in tremendous volume. Like a well spun spider’s web, the individual stories of atrocities seem endless as they are interconnected. How does one describe evil in 2020? Hyperbole has become common vernacular, and we are all less safe because of it.
This strange exploration of evil has landed in the early twentieth century. One of the chapters I just read today documented some accounts of the plight of women in Stalin’s Gulags. Horrific. My next book will likely be on Unit 731, and it is gut wrenching stuff. Things that will elicit a physical reaction at the description of depravity to which man will sink. Human vivisection without the simple mercy of anesthetic for example. Schindler’s List popped up on my Netflix account, so I went through that 3 hours of documented horror for good measure today. While watching I recalled walking through the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem a few months back observing the crushing progression from ghetto to concentration camp to extermination performed on many by the Nazis.
One of the worst things that will come from the past 5 years will be our collective inability to describe evil. Racist now means “jerk”. Nazi now means, “someone with whom I disagree politically”. To highlight this absurdity, I will recall a story I read in Jerusalem. As the Nazis were rounding up Jews in Poland and moving them into the ghettos, it was not uncommon for them to pick up toddlers by the ankles and slam their skulls into concrete walls then fling their lifeless bodies down on the sidewalk in front of their mothers. One example of endless, and in 2020 akin to voting for someone with an “R” after their name. No difference whatsoever. The Japanese were performing unspeakable atrocities on innocent Chinese. Removing the stomach and connecting the esophagus directly to the small intestine and subjecting “logs” as they were called to such extreme frostbite as to wait until their limbs sounded like a bit of wood when struck with a hammer to see how much the body could take in preparation for fighting the Red Army in the frigid northern latitudes. Because I’m aware it is 2020, it must be said that this list of evil is not meant to constitute the entirety of all the evil that has ever been. Simply what I’m reading now. I’m sure Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting would have me read other things, and I will eventually.
But then again, history has never, ever, repeated itself, so not being able to accurately describe evil shouldn’t be an issue. I’m sure that it won’t be.
Throne Time 