Democracies do evil, directly, with malice aforethought, as the US did with slavery and the destruction of Native Americans and Jim Crow, or as a byproduct of terrible policies as we did in Vietnam and Iraq. However, healthy democracies have the moral and legal amplitude for reflection, correction and sometimes even redemption. We are no longer a healthy democracy and have not been so for some time.
Now, as I write this, explicit and intended evil is being done in our name in the deconstruction of the protection of the law and of the very idea of representational democracy by the Supreme Court and the Trump administration.
In the Alligator Alcatraz where human beings with brown skin are being stuffed into cages and deprived of decent food, medicine, the protection of the law.
The State has decreed that those with brown or black skin are “the other,” the anti-human. Its propaganda seeks to strip them down to one dimension and make them into ogres among us.
In ICE, the new American Secret Police are the Shock Troops of the vanguard of whatever horror comes next, our very own Storm Troopers.
In Gaza, where our financial, military and moral support for the slaughter of civilians by Netanyahu and the messianic Israeli right goes on – merciless, murderous, deliberate.
Now, as I write this, I could easily make a list of a dozen other actions that demonstrate an evil intent to do harm to the innocent, both here and abroad.
State evil begins as purposeful and goal oriented, but it too obeys the law of entropy and will decay into a force that is merely blind, as Trumpism will and may be in the process of doing so now. Then it becomes one propelled by appetite and inertia, but as long as it has fuel – lots and lots of money and true believers – it goes on destroying but haphazardly, its only purpose being to use up the fuel until it gives out. I see no end to either its fuel or its believers.
And on days when the volume of awful news slackens, even a bit, enough to allow for a moment of reflection when I try to look back to beginnings and forward to possibilities, I think once more of our malignant innocence. Generation after generation we persist in thinking of ourselves as a Chosen People, an exceptional nation. Has there ever been a democracy more obsessed with personal sin and the sins of others and less honest about our own national sins? Add in our terrible, tragic American amnesia, and I say to myself, “We will forget all this misery deliberately visited upon others by these people and the voters who put them into power.” There may be a limp apology in 100 years, a vow to never again fall so far, but the dead will not rise to receive it, and the living will not care.
