I used to find in arguments about Iraq that I knew right away when someone didn’t know what they were talking about. The dead giveaway would always b… - Christopher Hitchens

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I used to find in arguments about Iraq that I knew right away when someone didn’t know what they were talking about. The dead giveaway would always be when they would say, "Alright, I agree, Saddam Hussein is a bad guy." I said, "That means you don’t know anything about him, if that’s what you think. You don’t know what it would be like to be sitting at home wondering where your daughter was and finding out because the police came round and, banging on the door, handed you a video, while they stood there, of her being raped by their colleagues, just to show you who was boss." The word evil … I think does need a bit of justification. Many people think that to even use the word evil is sort of naïve, or morally too judgmental, or … too simplistic. And yet it’s somehow a word without which we cannot do. Hannah Arendt, in her study of totalitarianism, borrowed from Immanuel Kant the concept of radical evil, of evil that’s so evil that in the end it destroys itself. It’s so committed to evil, it’s so committed to hatred and cruelty, that it becomes suicidal. My definition of it is the surplus value that’s generated by totalitarianism. It means you do more violence, more cruelty than you absolutely have to to stay in power. You’ve already made your point. You’ve done everything you need to do to make people realize that you’re in power, but you somehow can’t stop. There has to be a special appetite. There must be special prisons for rape. There must be special graves, mass graves, just for children. There must be the desire to see how far you can go. And even if you know this will, in the end, bring retribution, it’s worth it, in some sense, for its own sake. Maybe that’s the only redeeming thing about it. Maybe the irrationality is the one saving grace of it, but at any rate, it’s not a word, it seems, that we can abolish from our vocabulary.