malice, part III; or the banality of evil

The news of late has me in a funk, though if one knows where to look it is far from all bad. But the narrative filtered through our mainline press is nothing if not consistent: the deceivers and fools of the present Administration have led us to disaster; as in Vietnam a generation ago, our young soldiers are dying for a cause ill-defined at best; and as Abu Ghraib demonstrates, the pretense of bringing democracy to Iraq was never more than a sham.

I strongly contest each of those claims. But at times like tonight, it is difficult to escape the sense of swimming upstream against a torrent generated by those who see in George W. Bush a foe more lethal than any shadowy Islamist network, and who will do anything within their considerable power to prevent his reelection.

The other day, while taking a break by the Al-Hamra Hotel pool, fringed with the usual cast of tattooed defence contractors, I was accosted by an American magazine journalist of serious accomplishment and impeccable liberal credentials.

She had been disturbed by my argument that Iraqis were better off than they had been under Saddam and I was now — there was no choice about this — going to have to justify my bizarre and dangerous views. I’ll spare you most of the details because you know the script — no WMD, no ‘imminent threat’ (though the point was to deal with Saddam before such a threat could emerge), a diversion from the hunt for bin Laden, enraging the Arab world. Etcetera.

But then she came to the point. Not only had she ‘known’ the Iraq war would fail but she considered it essential that it did so because this would ensure that the ‘evil’ George W. Bush would no longer be running her country. Her editors back on the East Coast were giggling, she said, over what a disaster Iraq had turned out to be. ‘Lots of us talk about how awful it would be if this worked out.’ Startled by her candour, I asked whether thousands more dead Iraqis would be a good thing.

She nodded and mumbled something about Bush needing to go. By this logic, I ventured, another September 11 on, say, September 11 would be perfect for pushing up John Kerry’s poll numbers. ‘Well, that’s different — that would be Americans,’ she said, haltingly. ‘I guess I’m a bit of an isolationist.’ That’s one way of putting it.

[Link via InstaPundit; registration required.]

Of such stuff our mainline press is made. And there is but one word to describe the mindset that sees the death of innocents as desirable for a political end:

Evil.

Yet this evil does not wear the same face as that displayed in the slaughter of a hostage while the camera rolls, or in the burning and dismemberment of civilians whose final sin was in taking a wrong turn. Rather, it is an evil practiced by those who no longer believe in evil, except perhaps as manifested by reactionaries who dare impede the march of Progress. It is an evil that flourishes in postmodernist groupthink, that is prosperous and self-satisfied, that pursues soft power in its lust for social control. It is, in Hannah Arendt's memorable formulation, an evil utterly banal.

Not that such banality renders it any less vile.