As Hannah Arendt foresaw, we are once again up against the question of evil. An American photojournalist, James Foley, was presented to the camera and decapitated. The instrument was not the ax reserved for royalty or the whooshing blade prompted by that reformer Joseph-Ignace Guillotin but an ordinary-looking knife. Death would be neither swift nor painless. This, somewhere in the bleached desert, was pure evil.
I used to not believe in evil. When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union “the evil empire,” I thought it was a dandy phrase but also a confession of ignorance. The word itself connotes something or someone diabolical — bad for the sake of bad. The Soviet Union was bad, I conceded, but not for no reason. It was bad because it was insecure, occupying the flat, inviting, Eurasian plain, and because it had a different system of government that it dearly wanted to protect. Reagan had it right, though. The Soviet Union was evil.
Now we are facing a different type of evil. The Islamic State, in whose name Foley was beheaded, murders with abandon. It seems to love death the way the fascists once did. It is Sunni, so it massacres Shiites. It is radical Sunni, so it eliminates apostates. It is Muslim, so it kills Yazidis, a minority with a religion of its own, and takes as plunder their women as concubines. Men are shot in graves of their own making.
The Nazis are back — differently dressed, speaking a different language and murdering ostensibly for different reasons but actually for the same: intolerance, hatred, excitement and just because they can. The Islamic State’s behavior is beyond explication, not reacting as some suggest to the war in Iraq — although in time it will try to settle some scores with the United States — but murdering and torturing and enslaving because this is what it wants to do. It is both futile and tasteless to lay off blame on others — the West, the colonialists of old or the persistent Zionists — or to somehow find guilt in the actions of the rich or powerful because they are rich or powerful. You can blame the victim. You can even kill him.
In the weekend Financial Times newspaper, the British writer Martin Amis tackled the question that obsessed Arendt and so many others — the nature of evil and its ultimate personification, Hitler. Amis mentioned some historians who have attempted to understand Hitler — none of them succeeded — and settled finally on Primo Levi, the great Italian writer of the Holocaust who was sent to Auschwitz. It was there, when a guard “brutally snatched” away an icicle Levi had broken off to slake his thirst, that he asked in his poor German, “ Warum? ” The guard replied, “ Hier ist kein warum ” — there is no why here. There was no why in all of Auschwitz.
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