Right Here, Right Now | The Origins of Evil

by A. E. O'Neill

[Originally published January 6, 2003 at ignorance.tv]

Screenwriter Menno Mayjes ("The Color Purple" and "Empire of the Sun") made his directorial debut recently with "Max," a loosely fact-based yet fictional account of a young Hitler and his relationship with a Jewish art dealer, played by John Cusack. The movie opened to mixed reviews but long before its release the script had gained notoriety and a few powerful opponents; the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Defense League were publicly denouncing the film before shooting had even begun.

Abraham Foxman, the national director of the former, felt that such explorations into the character of a man we unequivocally judge to be evil can scarcely avoid trivializing or sensationalizing such sensitive subject matter. He wonders why we feel a "need or desire to make this monster human."

Why indeed? We live in a time when nightly programming offers us the rise and fall of the Go-Go's on Behind the Music and all the intimate details of the life of Richard Simmons on the latest installment of "Biography." Why, then, wouldn't we want to explore the inner world of one of the most of noteworthy, albeit despicable, men in history?

Is there a line we must cross, somewhere along the way from the killer next door to the modern incarnation of Evil, where morbid curiosity ends and denial, for self-preservation's sake, begins? For better or worse, we have no compunctions about expressing our fascination with the goriest, creepiest details of crimes committed by serial killers and hit men, as evidenced by the endless A&E specials on the Mafia, and we rarely recoil in horror before hearing every last gruesome detail of the latest domestic dispute gone wrong, as evidenced by the many Discovery Channel shows like "Secrets of Forensic Science" and "Medical Detectives."

A man who suddenly snaps, caving under the pressure of debt, frustration and fear, kills his wife and kids and then turns the gun on himself, we are still willing to accept as "human," despite his devastating lapse of human reasoning and knowledge of right from wrong. We can accept this because we know that no matter how intrigued we are by the evils that man is capable of, and no matter how often we indulge that morbid curiosity, we know we are not being asked to understand him or condone his actions, much less forgive them.

We can justify this very human compulsion to explore the dark side of our natures by a scientific, even psychiatric rationale; it is far better for us to study it secondhand than to deny its existence altogether and court the dire consequences of repressing our baser urges completely. This justification, psychologically sound though it may be, wears thin as the body count rises. It's alright, if a tad macabre, to linger over the tale of the Manson murders, taking undisguised interest in his wild-eyed ravings and his fearless, hippie-maiden followers, but just a tad less acceptable to be caught scrutinizing the deep discontent that led Timothy McVeigh to Oklahoma City.

If we leap ahead on the "monster" meter, into the realm of our Hitlers, our Stalins, our Idi Amins, we find an almost absolute denial of that "morbid curiosity," we find groups like the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors protesting art exhibits and denouncing books, unwilling to accept even the most scholarly examination of the man behind the monster.

It may be comforting to draw a line around that entity and the horrors of his legacy, extracting them from what we know of the human experience with all the precision and certainty that our detachment affords us, but we can't excise Hitler from the human race any more than we can resurrect the dead in whose memory we condemn him. As monstrous as his beliefs and actions were, and as far from anything in our human experience he may have been, biologically, he was human.

The fact is that biologically — literally - all of our history's despised dictators, crazed killers and reviled conquerors were as human as we are. The desire to believe that an entire species' classification separates us from the thoughts and deeds of mass murderers is, undoubtedly, something that helps to keep us sane and civilized in the face of what we call evil. It's only natural to want to forget the worst that we, as humans, are capable of, but, as the Baltimore Holocaust Memorial ironically advises, "Those who do not remember the past are destined to repeat it."

Which means we must remember that, not so long ago, a madman's words were persuasive enough to compel millions of people just like us to commit truly evil acts. If we are to learn anything from the dark chapters in our history, we won't do it by relegating evil men to mythical status and denying that their terrible power came from a very human source. Our history is filled with men like Hitler and it is almost irresistibly comforting, but also far too easy, to deny that we have anything in common with them. We must seek to understand the origins of what we call evil or our future will be filled with them as well. If we can't begin to address, or even acknowledge, that responsibility, we can do little to prevent - much less defeat - evil, without resorting to it ourselves.