on evil

am reading lots of books about terrible things people have done. i'm interested in that sort of thing because i'm interested in pacifism, and pacifism as i understand it falls apart if violence and evil and that sort of thing exists in a vacuum, unprovoked. and so wherever people have done something awful, i'm trying to find the awfulness done to them that led to it.

justice these days is based on the idea of deterrence. there are lots of intrinsically bad people out there, goes the thinking, and if you don't threaten them with punishment, and punish them when they're bad, then they'll kill everyone. the contempt for so-called "appeasement" in the run-up to world war two is rooted in this stuff. it's why we "arm for peace."

i've got this pie in the sky idea that pacifist resistance destroys peoples' will to do bad things. that if many are willing to die, offering up no physical resistance, not even some righteous self defense, that violence and oppression of the baddies cannot but wilt and die, that the badness needs and feeds off of the threat of their violent deaths.

so this calls for an examination of somebody like adolf eichmann. i mean, he wasn't on the front lines of the war, but he did lots of terrible stuff as a bureaucrat. the guy believed he was doing the right thing. eichmann in jerusalem talks a lot about the collaborationist jewish councils, who were trying to minimize harm, but ultimately made things a lot worse.