All About E
“Society is willing to tolerate evil behaviour far more than it would ever like to admit to itself.”
I have known four evil people in my life which feels like a lot. Not as many as Primo Levi met in Auschwitz between early 1944 and January 1945. Not as many as linguist Yevegny Polivanov pleaded with on the unrelenting path to Stalin’s executioners in January, 1938. Not as many as Rohingyan author Habiburahman met on his way from his childhood home in western Burma to his present statelessness.
And certainly not as many as all the despots and bullies and apparatchiks who put Levi, Polivanov, Habiburahman and the millions and millions more over humanity’s lifetime into their hells in the first place. (Despots who, in spite of their misdeeds and crimes, mostly survived, or have survived, by the way. Even prospered.)
But, still, I did think initially that, in this supposedly enlightened western bit of the 21st century, in this prosperous, democratic country, that four is a lot for me to have encountered. Then I took a look around me.
The 1950 film “All About Eve” inspired the name of this blog about evil, All About E. Eve, played by Anne Baxter on the right, stops at nothing, hurts anyone, deceives everyone, especially those who trust her, to get the status and heights she believes should be hers.
Lead photo: Margo (Bette Davis) congratulates Eve on her award, gained at awful cost. Film stills, courtesy moviestillsdb.com
Evil is a dark word and one, that until recently, was rarely used but it permeates our history - and our current tastes. Has the public ever been more obsessed with grisly thrillers in paperback, horror films, shockingly explicit tech games, and gripping non-fiction accounts of true crime and war stories, especially about Hitler and his Nazis.
It’s as if, in these areas, we can comfortably give ourselves a hair-raising time – and then go and pat the cat, pretending that, to paraphrase the opening to Love, Actually, a film that is played relentlessly every Christmas so we know its words about “love is all around” off by heart, that evil is, actually, not all around.
Except I believe it is. And I think, given popular tastes, many of us think, or at least suspect, that too.
Not that we often call evil that when we see it; the defamation laws, for a start, are a dampener. So is the fact that it’s a word that we might comfortably use for genocide or serial killers and no-one will look askance but we would hesitate to use it to describe the actions of companies, or politicians, or the obsessed, the pathological and the narcissistic amongst us even though what they do can certainly produce the kind of ripple-out tragedy, death, grief, destruction we associate with criminals, cults or crazed leaders.
The word itself sounds medieval, over-blown, something to be muttered by hooded monks or priests in incense-laden rituals. But what if we did use the word more often? What if we called out evil more often?
Repressed in one’s own country, a refugee in another. It never stops. Habiburahman wrote his memoir with journalist Sophie Ansel. Since 1982, millions of Rohingya have been forced to flee after being left “stateless” by their own government. “The incubation of a genocide” as one reviewer put it.
German-Canadian psychological scientist Julia Shaw, author of Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side (Canongate), is controversial here in that she argues in the conclusion to that book that “I think that neither humans nor actions should be labelled evil.” She continues, “Instead, I cannot help but see a complex ecosystem of decisions, cascades of influences, multi-faceted social factors. I refuse to summarise all of this into a single hateful word ‘evil’.”
Her wish is that we should examine those constructs and work against them, and that is the way to fight evil. That is “knowing the various influences that can contribute to problematic behaviour [from the rise of Hitler to what turns someone into a terrorist to the seemingly inexplicable problem of inert ‘bystander behaviour’] makes us more likely to identify these influences and to stop them from having their full effect”.
That theory deserves to be explored thoroughly and I hope to interview Dr Shaw for this new post. Her book is highly readable, intensively researched and very well argued – but I am not convinced I totally agree with her and I look forward to our discussion.
What does evil look like?
None of the four evil ones who came into my life is a charged criminal. None of them has murdered anyone or been responsible for a death, or not that I know of. None is even perceived by many others to be bad, let alone evil. Each one was or is a senior executive, albeit with carefully sought after and impressive titles that then have allowed them to insinuate themselves into other organisations, other people’s lives.
Remember Iago? One of the great villains of all time, and how well did Shakespeare use him to reveal to audiences all the human weaknesses – vulnerability, blindness, vanity, grandiose hopes, arrogance, prejudice, greed, jealousy - that can come into play when someone or something evil is amongst us and which let them or it flourish.
If you’re very lucky, you will never come across an Iago in real life.
But the terrifying thing about this kind of evil – and that is the subject of this blog, “All About E” - is that a small number can spot it, or at least get that something doesn’t feel quite right, almost in an instant.
There’s a discordancy between action and speech, between the expression on someone’s face and what you can see in their eyes. A bit too much geniality, and even bubbliness, not enough follow-through. Or sometimes, an essential chilliness and self-regard that becomes unsettling. There’s a tendency to leave surprise, chaos, hurt, distress, rupture, shock in their wake, even if not many observers ever at first link them to those cataclysmic events. Or blame them. As I once said of one such person: “Their fingers are everywhere and their fingerprints nowhere.”
The insidiousness of evil
Later, usually much later depending on how perceptive other people are – that is, your colleagues or friends or family, or the general public in the case of someone well-known - you’ll see a few more cottoning on to the true nature of the person in their midst and their astonishing capacity to get exactly what they want.
But they still may not say anything; evil people, after all, are scary in the power they work assiduously to accumulate. By the time more people have worked out what might be going on, the evil ones are already well ensconced in their positions and, more crucially, networks. They are difficult to take on and they have made that happen on purpose. So all too often, the truly evil mislead and masquerade and pretend all their lives – and, unless hubris overtakes them and they get too cocky and go too far – they get away with it.
But then there’s another question that, given the ins and outs, and ups and downs, of history and human interaction: is evil always bad? That is, what if you have to use evil to fight evil?
I ask that only because, having once sensed the presence of something that felt unsettlingly like evilness in my life – I shivered to someone I loved after one particularly creepy event staged by a third party that had affected the two of us, “I felt touched by the wings of evil” – I’ve become aware of the sheer hugeness of what the word “evil” might cover, and how it can thus pervade our world. Keep it running even, given that there will always be disagreement on what actions are “evil”.
After that, I started seeing the world differently. And dividing the world into the tiny minority who can sense evil, see it coming, spot it, be chilled by it, outraged by it – and those who are simply blind to it or refuse or are reluctant to admit it’s there, especially if doing that might expose them to risk or disrupt their comfortable lives or threaten a valuable or beneficial friendship, or, even more unsettlingly, their belief or hope system.
Society is willing to tolerate evil behaviour far more than it would ever like to admit to itself.
That led to me asking: so how can evil be combated? And to do so, do you have to borrow and use evil tactics yourself? Can you pursue evil without some evil seeping into yourself? Into your thinking processes, your character? Your soul? I’ve wondered, for reasons that began to nag at me: who fights evil best?
How many times does good triumph over evil?
Evil in the service of good
In May, 2019, digging around in some old papers in an archive, I came across a typewritten speech from American psychologist Donald MacKinnon, given in May 1974. It was about the beginning of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which Franklin Delano Roosevelt established (out of the original Office of the Co-ordinator of Information, COI, which had been created in mid-1941 to combat fifth columnists) after the bombing of Pearl Harbour by the Japanese in December, 1941.
Roosevelt was copying the Brits’ Special Operations Executive (SOE) which had been set up to pursue sabotage, raids, spying, propaganda and perpetrate general mayhem – including killing - behind German enemy lines in Europe. But once OSS was set up, there was a problem. Who would be able to commit these murderous acts?
It’s not widely known but, according to MacKinnon’s 1974 paper – and he joined during the war - the first agents parachuted in behind enemy lines in Occupied Europe in 1942 by the OSS were gang members, misfits and criminals. The thinking was that if you needed people to kill Nazis then you needed people who already knew how to kill. That is, “It takes dirty men to do dirty works,” according to MacKinnon in his address.
“Nobody knew who would make a good spy or an effective guerrilla fighter,” he said. “Consequently, large numbers of misfits were recruited from the very beginning, and this might have continued had it not been for several disastrous operations such as one in Italy for which, on the assumption that it takes dirty men to do dirty works, some OSS men had been recruited directly from the ranks of Murder, Inc. ..”
The psychologists, including MacKinnon, at the fledgling OSS realised a different kind of person was needed: “The need for professional assistance in selection was obvious.”
The assessment became of the “man as whole” and what the OSS psychologists were hunting for was a person who was, post-war, termed the “effective individual”. Someone who was not a criminal or misfit but still capable of killing and/or causing violence. But someone who did all this with a steel nerve, high motivation, and with a moral purpose. Someone who “used whatever intelligence they had” with effectiveness.
The OSS, the precursor to the CIA, clearly believed it was possible to fight evil with good. That is, they would clearly be doing evil things – murder, destruction, creating misery - but it wouldn’t be bad.
Off the rails…
This eventually worked well for the free western world in World War II but it’s likely that many evil things are set in motion by that very same thinking. I’m not talking about Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Speck, Charles Manson, Charles Cullen, Ivan Milat and the serial killers of this world who, I am pretty sure, know exactly how evil they are and that no good will come of it. Let’s begin instead with the hysterical love affair the German people dived into with Adolf Hitler. It took off in 1933 and raged from 1938 to 1945, leaving over 50 million dead, and 30 million displaced.
When, in May 1945, Magda Goebbels committed suicide alongside her husband, after the pair of them had murdered their children as the Third Reich collapsed, she left behind a letter: “Our glorious idea is ruined, and with it everything beautiful, admirable, noble and good that I have known in my life. The world that will come after the Fuhrer and National Socialism won't be worth living in, so I have taken the children with me. They are too good for the life that will come after us …”
In 2006, a photograph album surfaced when an ageing former United States army officer, clearing his possessions, offered it to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. He had kept it since June 1945, when he had found it in an abandoned apartment in Frankfurt after the war. He wrote to the museum saying that, according to a story in the New Yorker, it seemed to depict “activities in around Auschwitz, Poland”.
No-one could be sure why the photos, which showed German soldiers and young women in bucolic surroundings enjoying themselves, eating blueberries, singing along to an accordion, had been kept in an album or by who. Or who they showed.
Careful piecing together by experts came to a conclusion: these were personnel, soldiers, commandants, administrative staff from Auschwitz and they were taken by one of the camp’s officers. The happy photos had been taken as they took recreational time off from their ghastly duties of gassing, shooting, cremating, torturing, bullying, beating over a million Jews, dissidents and others sent to the camp between 1940 and 1945, deemed by Hitler and his Nazis to be subhuman. Dr Josef Mengele, who experimented painfully, fatally, on live prisoners, including children, is in one of the photographs, smiling away.
An archivist from the Memorial Museum, Rebecca Erbelding, told the New Yorker: “They haven’t got red eyes and horns. They don’t look like people you would dislike.”
Did these men or women think their evil was bad? Or in a good cause? Magda Goebbels would make you think they believed the latter – which is enough reason to give up on the idea of the essential goodness of humanity. But one of the interviewees in the New Yorker piece says that many of the doctors who worked at Auschwitz used alcohol in order to function. That told him – and tells us - that at least some participants knew what they were doing was evil. So, some hope after all.
What if we benefit from evil…
Right now, we have the rise of China and its many human rights abuses and its leader for life Xi Jinping’s contempt for the west and for democracy, human rights and freedom of speech. But Chinese nationalists, overwhelmingly young and belonging to the generations that have most benefited from China’s economic rise, are committed to his policies and approach and are prepared to stridently defend them to the rest of the world. That’s in spite of a million Uighurs committed to detention camps; in spite of the arrest and imprisonment of human rights lawyers; in spite of the increasingly intrusive surveillance strategies designed to keep citizens toeing the ruthless party line …
What becomes clear to me – but I am so interested in discovering what other people think – is that if people can see that there is some advantage to themselves in the evil that they do or live with, then it is evil for good.
In his book Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945, Florian Huber details how skilfully Hitler and his elite had infused Germany with a sense of national community that, if you were part of it (as opposed to being a Jew, a communist, a gypsy, gay or dissident), was a heady and alluring experience. People felt needed, as if they belonged. There were organisations for everyone, from war victims to teachers and doctors. Huber writes: “If certain unreasonable demands were also part and parcel of the system, they paled into insignificance besides such advantages.”
With the end of WW2, Austrian film-maker Billy Wilder, movie star Marlene Dietrich and writer Thomas Mann’s children Klaus and Erika, were among a number of expatriates who were encouraged by the United States government to go back to a shattered and disgraced Germany to see what they could do to rebuild it, especially its culture so that such a thing as Nazism could never happen again. They were joined by a host of other American and British journalists, artists, musicians and writers including Lee Miller, Martha Gelhorn, John Dos Passos, W.H.Auden, Stephen Spender, Rebecca West and publisher Victor Gollancz. (Thomas Mann went back in 1949, having published his novel Dr Faustus, an allegory for Germany’s embrace of Hitler, in 1947.)
All too many left with their hopes crushed as Lara Feigel relates in The Bitter Taste of Victory – In The Ruins of the Reich. For a start, many Germans refused to feel guilty. A survey done in West Germany in 1951, Feigel reports, found that just 5 per cent of participants “admitted feeling any guilt towards the Jews”. Then, with the start of the Cold War, the process of denazification launched by the various Allied governments stopped, in favour of the realpolitik of making Germany strong again, a bulwark against the Soviet Union.
Martha Gelhorn thought the Germans “incurable” and, writes Feigel, the writer and reporter told a friend 25 years later that she still had not recovered from the disillusionment with humanity acquired during her day in Dachau on May 3, 1945.
“Dachau, and all I afterwards saw: Belsen etc, changed my life or my personality. Like a water-shed I have never been the same since. It’s exactly like mixing paint. Black, real true, solid black, was then introduced, and I have never again come back to some state of hope or innocence or gaiety which I had before.”
The responsibility of the reasonable person
Talking with a friend over dinner, I defined evil as something that happens when someone purposely seeks to do harm – any harm - to someone-else (or any other sentient being). It can be for all sorts of reasons but still, it’s evil. The intent to do damage is there.
But where does that leave the big corporations, the banks, the complaisant consultancies and regulatory authorities whose actions and negligence have, as we have seen reported again and again, caused massive hurt, damage, distress, death, grief? No-one in those banks or corporations and organisations or authorities set out, every morning as they got dressed for work, to do harm to another person. But you could say that any other reasonable person could examine their actions – now, or then - and say, that a reasonable person would assume such actions would lead to exactly those things.
Now, that leads to an interesting question. Are companies like Boeing, responsible for the 737 Max disasters, reasonable? Are they staffed by reasonable beings?
And if, given the consequences of their actions – 346 dead in the case of Boeing and its poorly conceived and marketed aircraft, perhaps 3460 people profoundly and irretrievably affected if we allow a conservative ten grief-stricken people per victim - they can no longer be judged reasonable, because of their actions and behaviour in the pursuit of profit and market dominance, what are they instead? Are they evil after all?
Should we be calling out such actions as evil, or at least driven by evil, far more than we do? What are we frightened of? Being accused of judgmentalism? Of having the kind of mind frame that led to the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, the burnings at the stake in the 16th century? The very word evil seems and sounds evil.
Evil takes up its lodging slowly
Another friend wrote to me recently, after his teenager had attempted to seriously harm themselves. What my friend and his partner had mistaken for adolescent moodiness was severe depression and now they were being treated. The entire family was in shock and the parents full of remorse and self-blame. But, my friend wrote, “It creeps up on you … this miserable frightening thing has crept in while we were looking the other way.”
I had once written something very similar about evil. That it can slip into our lives in the most innocuous ways. It very often takes up lodging without us even knowing it has made an entry. Then it nests, while we go about our daily business, innocent of what is breeding over weeks, months, sometimes years, oblivious to the havoc and pain and tragedy looming ahead of us.
That surely applies to almost every scenario I can think of where someone has been brought undone by the evil perpetrated by someone-else, whether an unsuspecting bank customer taking out an insurance policy that the bank, on spurious and unethical grounds, will later refuse to pay out on, or someone buying their first home, an apartment, only to discover ten years later it is now unliveable, virtually worthless, because of shoddy building work and even shoddier regulations that have neglected the fair rights of the home-owner, or a Jewish child born in France around the same time Hitler started his Hitler Youth in 1926.
“I cling on to Dad as we watch 14 men hobble along, feet chained …” writes Habiburahman in his memoir. Photograph by Sophie Ansel, courtesy Scribe.
Or the Rohingyan Habiburahman, playing as a three year old toddler in 1982 unaware of the terrifying impact of a new law in Burma which stipulated that, as Habiburahman writes in his memoir, with journalist Sophie Ansel, First, They Erased Our Name, “to retain Burmese citizenship, you must belong to one of the 135 recognised ethnic groups which form part of eight ‘national races’. The Rohingya are not among them … We no longer exist.”
The calculated murders of pregnant actor Sharon Tate, her three friends and another unfortunate visitor to the property in 1969 are now back in front of people’s minds because of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. The trail that led to those horrific deaths started with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson taking a shine to an aspiring musician and commune leader Charles Manson. He later introduced him to a record-producing friend Terry Melcher who then lived at the address where Tate was later butchered. Melcher declined to sign Manson.
The cult leader is supposed to have ordered the murders not because he still believed Melcher lived at that address – he had visited the home a couple of times and had been told Melcher had moved - but, according to one of the killers, Susan Atkins, “to instil fear” into him.
The 1974 book about the Manson murders, Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi, the Los Angeles prosecutor in the case, is still, reportedly, the best-selling true crime book in the western world. The events haunt people and surely part of that is because of the series of tragic coincidences that led to five happy people being in the wrong place.
(After writing that last sentence, I went downstairs and shut and locked the French doors to my garden which I had left open because of the sunshine-y day. Can’t ever quite forget a clever puff I once read on a thriller’s book jacket: that evil doesn’t find us; we invite it in.)
The historian Antony Beevor said in a 2015 interview with another historian that “I’m afraid the whole nature of evil is something we are all fascinated by”.
In the above, I’ve raised several questions which I am keen to explore more. Is evil always bad? To fight evil, will you necessarily have to do some evil things yourself? What is the real definition of evil? Is it about causing harm on purpose, or is that definition too broad? How could it be better defined?
Why didn’t anyone do anything?
When I was about nine, I watched the life-changing documentary Mein Kampf, with its scarifying footage from the concentration camps. I’m not sure what my parents were thinking the night they took me to the drive-in to see it from the back seat but it left me asking in childish amazement: why didn’t anyone do anything?
I tested out the idea of this blog, All About E, on several people and was surprised to discover that there was instant interest. I had expected at least a few to recoil. I was especially interested – and yes, perturbed - to see how enthusiastic were the younger people, the ones in their 20s. Evil as a concept was not something that crossed my mind much in my 20s, back in the 1970s. It was a phenomenon I regarded as belonging to history, and the recent history of WW2, but now we were into sunlight. So, there has been an awakening since those innocent , sheltered days. And the reasons for that will also be worth exploring.
Hence I’ve gone ahead with this blog. It won’t be about judgements – do not bring your hell-bearing predictions here - nor do I want it to become a repository for stories of atrocities. What I want to do, and I hope people will participate and email me; see contact details on this website - is to explore the nature of evil; what it is; who do we fairly classify as evil; how do we decide what is evil? What historic forces drive it at different times and nurture it, how we can spot it, and how it can be overcome, beaten down, driven out.
It’s amazing and confronting how many times someone says in my hearing of someone who has penetrated their personal life and done damage, caused hurt: “that person is evil.”
In the last scene of Othello, as Iago is confronted with his villainy, he vows:
“Demand me nothing: what you know,
You know:
From this time forth I never will speak word.”
The good Emilia, whose own death at the hands of her husband, Iago, is only seconds away has already vowed of what he has wrought:
“Twill out, ‘twill out: I peace!
No, I will speak as liberal as the north:
Le heaven and men and devils, let them all,
All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.”
Or as Sydney-based journalist Adele Ferguson closes the acknowledgements in her 2019 book, paraphrasing the famous quote: “Banking Bad is living proof of that old adage that evil can only prosper when good people fail to act.”
And why do we act? Let’s remember this. It’s because in spite of all the horror and miseries, the floods of foolishness and vanity and weakness that let evil flourish, and the power of evil to destroy what is good and should be cherished and respected, we have a world that is also full of wonder and a world that can be even more wonderful.
That is why we need to act. To show we believe in the human spirit.
I should point out now that in the 1960s, a new generation of young Germans demanded angrily to know more about what their parents had done during the war, what people then prominent in German politics and society, had been doing, and why the Allies, preoccupied by the Cold War, had allowed Nazis to stay in, or gain, positions of authority. That movement, driven by outrage at evil, permitted the development of Germany as it is today: “the reasonable and unassailable dominant force in the European Union” as Feigel writes in her conclusion.
And director and writer Billy Wilder, demoralised by his experiences in post-War Germany, still gave this line to his main character, C.R. MacNamara, a Coca-Cola executive, in his 1961 comedy, One, Two, Three, set in cold war Berlin: “Look at it this way, kid,” MacNamara says to a young German communist, “Any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare and Stripe toothpaste can’t be all bad.”
Next instalment: drinking the tears of orphans
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