Not sure if this belongs here...but not sure where else it would belong, either. http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/headline/features/3071312 Gaze into alleged murderer's eyes, but can you see the evil? By LEONARD PITTS JR. Knight Ridder Newspapers "Smiling faces show no traces of the evil that lurks within." Did you search for murder in Dennis Rader's eyes? I certainly did. He looked disheveled and disgruntled, as anyone might in a mug shot. But did you see anything else? An unsettling gleam like the one in Charles Manson's eyes? The remote coldness that lurks in Theodore Kaczynski's? Did you see murder in Rader's eyes? It's a judgment call, of course, but I didn't. He looked like Joe Blow's cousin, a fat, balding white guy of late middle age, the kind of person you'd pass a million times on the street without registering that he was there. Hence, the shock that came when police in Wichita, Kan., announced on Feb. 26 that he is BTK — the initials stand for Bind, Torture, Kill — architect of a murder spree that has claimed 10 lives and terrorized Kansans since 1974. Rader, we are told, was the very epitome of ordinary. He was a 59-year-old Boy Scout leader, a married father, council president of the Lutheran Church he has attended for more than 25 years and a compliance inspector for suburban Park City, where he was in charge of, among other things, animal control. And yet, if police are correct, it was all a fraud, his suburban respectability a mask for a killer who hid in plain sight, taunting authorities as he did his bloody work. It's a profile that, I think, brings us face to face with what the writer Hannah Arendt meant when she subtitled her treatise on the Holocaust "a report on the banality of evil." Point being that we tend to think of evil as something outside ourselves, something other than human. We regard it as an exotic, terribly obvious thing that announces itself with devil's horns and malicious leers, something you see coming a mile away. But evil is more ordinary than that. Think of all the perpetrators of the Holocaust whose names were not Hitler, Himmler or Eichmann — ordinary shopkeepers, farmers and housewives who simply averted their eyes, chanted the slogans, allowed themselves to be swept up in fervor and in doing so went along with the extermination of a people. Think of the famous experiment Stanley Milgram conducted in 1963. He told his subjects they were administering electrical shocks to an unseen victim whose "sufferings" — screams and grunts — could be heard on an intercom. Milgram found that most people would keep shocking the unseen person, even administering what they were told were dangerous levels of voltage, if instructed to do so by an individual in authority. Think of Damien Stiffler. He was a 3-year-old in Blythe, Calif. Police say that one day in 2000, his sister and a cousin, ages 6 and 5, got it in their heads to kill him. One of them, they decided, would sit on his legs, while the other would hold a pillow over his face. A willful murder, carried out by children of kindergarten age. Finally, think of Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison in Iraq where ordinary American soldiers became torturers and brutalizers and no one thought to say no. Or even remembered that this was wrong. When we look into Rader's eyes for murder, then, I think what we're really looking for is reassurance, something that says he is different from us somehow, fundamentally foreign in some way to our ordinary lives. The alternative is unsettling, suggesting as it does that humanity is a skin we slip out of all too easily and civilization a conceit in which one would be wise not to repose too much faith. That alternative requires you to wonder what is the difference between him and us, where is the turning point, the dividing line, the border a human being must cross in order to become a monster. You look for answers in Rader's eyes and all you see is Joe Blow staring back at you. And you realize: It would be frightening if you saw murder there. But it's even more frightening that you do not.
Thanks for posting this MM. I took a "History of Evil" class at UH about 5 years ago and we talked about Hannah Arendt and how her theory applied to the Holocaust. One thing the professors (it was team-taught) talked about was how the efficiency of the Final Solution was really made possible by the guys who kept the concentration camp trains running on time. We also read a book called Ordinary Men, which examined the men of a German military unit that was responsible for the massacre of several thousand civilian prisoners in Poland. The author found that none of the men' backgrounds showed any signs of being sadists or unusually cruel. So I think the author of this article has it right that evil is not always so obvious and that it may exist in all of us. We've become so influenced by Hollywood's portrayal of villians that I think we tend to be oblivious when evil doesn't resemble a Dennis Hopper or Christopher Lee character. The History of Evil professors argued that evil will always occur so long as concepts (money, capitalism, communism, etc.) are placed ahead of humanity. Another professor of mine brought up the subject of whether corporations should be held criminally responsible when they allow a potentially fatal product to remain on the market. We read some memos by Ford who did a cost-benfit analysis of recalling the Pinto (which tended to explode when hit from behind) versus the average lawsuit settlement. Ford concluded that it was better for the company to settle the lawsuits than to recall the product. I argued that this was an example of banal evil - the accountant who wrote the memo and the CEO who approved his recommendation were just doing what their jobs required of them. Of course, the side effect were deaths that could have been avoided. Should they be held responsible? I think so.
subatomic -- "ordinary men" is EXACTLY what came to mind when I read this. that was a very, very disturbing book. i would read it at night before going to sleep...and then find i had a hard time sleeping after reading it. i don't want to sound preachy..but this crap really reaffirms my own theology and its concept of the state of humanity.
I'm no philsopher, but I gotta believe evil is in all of us. And I gotta believe it has been here from the beginning. To me, evil is as simple as someone getting away with something. Then they push the envelope. Then they push it some more. before long that envelope was pushed so far the people in middle of it don't even realize what is happening. It seems to me, evil is a gradual thing, that over time builds up to the point where someone finally says, hey, what the **** are you doing? And that is when good recognizes evil.
Very interesting read and some good issues. Its easy to talk condemn killers and those who commit malicious acts but its harder and more important is to question the capacity for evil in all of us. When Columnbine happened I was shocked to discover that in many ways I could understand what drove them to do that. I felt like angry and misunderstood a lot of time when I was in highschool. On the larger level this is why I'm so leery of the utopian rhetoric used to invoke and justify the aggressive stance of this country. While it might be reaping some benefits listening to the rhetoric spouted by our leaders I get a sense that the lives of our enemies and even our own soldiers have become secondary to pursuit of higher ideals. What was once seen as self-defense is now justified as idealism bordering on messianic. While democracy and freedom are great ideals so are equality and justice and how often have the unmitigated pursuit of those ended up bringing misery to many when even life becomes incosequential to the pursuit of such ideals.
Whats awfully sad is that our leaders "pursuit of democracy and freedom" are mostly just cover up for other more tangible goals.
For a long time I believed that GW Bush' rhetoric was just window dressing but I'm beginning to believe that he, if not everyone in the Admin., really believes that. Frankly I'm not sure which I find scarier.
Sishir, don't worry Bush won't let religion or demcoracy or "freedom" come between his gang and the pursuit of corporate profits. This is almost as scary.
