The U.S. Refuses to See Evil

It is often said that America has no sense of tragedy, which is to say, no sense of the existence of intractable human evil. The classic works of American literature are filled with examples of this characteristic blindness. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the young minister Arthur Dimmesdale cannot see that Roger Chillingworth, the man he has allowed into his confidence, hates his guts and is trying to destroy him. In Herman Melville's novella Benito Cereno, Capt. Amasa Delano boards a ship that has been taken over by its cargo of slaves, who disguise what they have done by keeping the deposed officers under tight control. Despite numerous telltale signs, Capt. Delano's "singularly undistrustful good nature" prevents him from seeing that the men he thinks are in command are actually prisoners.

Perhaps as a result of our relatively benign and peaceful history, many Americans seem unable to accept that some problems are woefully resistant to ready solutions. According to the liberal mind-set prevalent today, conflicts arise only from a pathological need to "have an enemy," to feel superior to the "other," and therefore to separate the world into "us" and "them." Denying that real differences exist, this kind of thinking avoids making judgments by resolutely seeing both sides in a conflict as morally equivalent, with neither party closer to or farther from the truth, and with all disputes between them amenable to solution if only the participants would sit down and talk.

For one horrible example of this refusal to discriminate, President Clinton in 1998 sent Jesse Jackson to encourage the elected president of Sierra Leone, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, to "reach out," negotiate and share power with Foday Sankoh, the insurgent leader whose followers had routinely recruited children to murder their parents, and who had cut off the arms of thousands of men, women and children. Within a year, Sankoh used the powers he had garnered under the U.S.-brokered agreement to make hostages of the 500 UN peacekeepers who were supposed to oversee it, while his revolutionary forces continued to menace parts of the countryside.

In the Mideast, too, Clinton was convinced that he could bring about a final settlement?and pick up a Nobel Prize?just by getting the two sides to the peace table. He tried to force the Spring (as he put it in his first inaugural address), but unfortunately the Spring proved quite resistant. Instead of responding in kind to Ehud Barak's unprecedented offers, which Clinton himself had urged, Yasir Arafat abandoned the negotiations and set off a new intifada instead. The peace talks thus ushered in the worst violence the Middle East has seen in decades.

Yet the need to maintain the pose of moral equivalency persists, as does the reverence for the peace process. In the name of Allah and with the promise of paradise, teenaged boys are prepared for their murderous suicides by being buried alive almost to the point of suffocation, yet human rights inspectors are "troubled" by the involvement of young people?Israeli soldiers, Palestinian protesters?on both sides of the conflict. Seventy-five percent of Palestinians support one horrendous suicide bombing after another and many glorify the perpetrators as martyrs, but the Mitchell report speaks of "reaffirm[ing] mutual commitments" and "resum[ing] negotiations"?instead of asking how a populace that endorses such acts can be made ready for self-government and a place in the community of nations.

Before the most recent suicide bombing, which killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded a third, roadblocks in northern Gaza had been lifted; after it, they were reimposed. Whose fault was that? What country can expose its citizens to the proximity of people who do such things, or who are unable or unwilling to stop those who do them? Yet each such response by Israel is seen only as part of a morally neutral "cycle of violence" in which both sides are equally at fault.

I am not saying that the Palestinian people are indelibly evil or that they have no legitimate rights and grievances. Nevertheless, the suicide bombings, of which dozens more are reported to be in the offing, are an unspeakable infamy that should be absolutely off the chart?persistently, consistently, vociferously, repeatedly condemned and repudiated. Yet the overriding imperative to be evenhanded means refusing to see these atrocities for the abomination they are, and thus means effectively siding with the evil.

Just as seeing evil is the only way to resist it, the refusal to see it is a sure way to cultivate it. In a recent article in The New York Times, the actress Julianne Moore discussed the final scene of Roman Polanski's film, Rosemary's Baby, in which the young woman who has been forced to give birth to the devil's own child begins to care for him by gently rocking his cradle. This show of mesmeric mother-love toward the newborn fiend, this utter surrender to the little bundle of evil incarnate, Miss Moore found "complex," "ambiguous" and "gray."

Yes, that's America, all right, where even the devil wears shades of gray.