Devaluing Evil

 

Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Hess, Himmler, Bormann, and Speer. These are names that belong in and should be reserved for the category Demonic Evil. To any student of history, they personify the evil that man is capable of inflicting on his fellow man. The use of their names should be reserved for the purpose of condemning catastrophic acts of barbarism. Any other use devalues evil.

So when politicians casually use their names to describe their opponents they are doing a great disservice to humanity. They are reducing the concept of pure malevolent evil to a middle school insult, “Your mother wears combat boots!”  Democrats do it to Republicans, Republicans do it to Democrats, and they both rise up in faux righteous indignation in an effort to score political points when it happens.

Stop it now! Both parties demean themselves. We are now three generations removed from the Holocaust, to our children it’s a chapter in their history books and when we fling these demonic names at political opponents whose only evil is that they disagree with our pet policy prescriptions, what are our children to think? Will they wonder if the magnitude of the events of WW 2 has been blown out of proportion because of the casual use of these evil names?