Re: How to measure evil

[Gary Kern <gkern@ucr.campus.mci.net>]

Dear Giles & interested parties:

At issue is my statement that "it is possible, of course, for a people
on the defensive to become hardened and commit greater atrocities than a
people on the offensive, but McCarthy does not equal Vyshinsky and Chile
does not equal Czechoslovakia.  It astonishes me that there is still a
desire to push a moral and political equivalency argument in regard to
the Cold War."

In your response you do not challenge the McCarthy/Vyshinsky equation,
for which I am grateful, but do take issue with the Chile/Czechoslovakia
one.  I must confess that your arguments on this score have caused me to
think and make me less certain of my position. I could have made a
stronger argument had I said that Chile does not equal the Baltic
Republics, where thousands of people were arrested and sent to Siberia,
or does not equal Poland, repeatedly ravaged by Soviet forces.  With the
example of Cz, it is true, I was thinking of the 1968 invasion, the
tanks, the replacement of the government, etc., but also the universal
questionnaires that followed and the ironclad grip on the country by the
Soviets for the next 20 years.  But maybe CIA subversion of a
democratically elected government, with a bloody coup and a military
dictatorship, does not noticeably occupy higher moral ground.

A couple of points.  I think body counts, though gruesome, are important
for measuring evil, so long as we hold individual life to be valuable. 
But perhaps a distinction should be made between evil absolutely and
evil historically.  Charles Manson is probably as evil as Hitler in the
absolute sense, but historically he doesn't count.  Stalin and Hitler
probably stand even in the absolute sense, but Stalin dwarfed Hitler's
evil acts.  So duration of evil, body counts, etc. help us to judge
historical phenomena.

Another criterion is whether an act is consistent policy or an
aberration.  The argument used to be made that Stalin was an aberration
of Leninism, just as Stalinists used to argue that Beria, not Stalin,
was responsible for atrocities.  I think the Bolshevik state showed a
marked consistency, so that the invasion of Cz was consistent with its
nature, not an aberration.  I would hope that the CIA destabilization of
Chile would be considered an aberration of US policy, but I cannot be
sure of it.

Clearly it was not a defensive act, though it came from a defensive
mentality.  Enemies become like each other, as we all know.  Perhaps it
was feared that Chile would become a base for subversion, propaganda,
terrorism, but that does not justify a coup.  I do not want to offer up
excuses for the overthrow of Allende.  If I had lost a friend there I
certainly would not take a broad, impersonal view.  I would be enraged
and focused on the evil that occurred.

But insofar as I can step back and be impersonal, I think that, despite
evils on both sides, there was no real moral equivalency:  the Soviet
Union was indeed the Evil Empire.  And because I think the burden of
good was with the USA, though its hat may not have been pure white, I am
dismayed by its subsequent development--the unchecked megacorporation
world of idiotic entertainments and consumerism--after the fall of the
Soviet Union.

Perhaps there is an application of Jünger to one or another point?

GK