- Washington Free Beacon - https://freebeacon.com -

Banishing 'Evil' from Our Political Lexicon Will Not Stop Evildoers

There's this odd notion that it is childish to describe evil acts as evil. Adults, you see, only recognize shades of gray. Hence the reaction from Basement Troll Twitter when I noted, in a rare moment of pro-Hillary sentiment from a Free Beacon staffer, that she was one of the few people on the left who had been acting like an adult when it came to ISIL and the standoff between Israel and Hamas.

That series of tweets held up especially well in the aftermath of this:

Of course, it's not just the Juicebox wannabe set that dismisses good and evil. Consider this essay in the New York Times by Michael J. Boyle. He wants you to know it's really counterproductive and a moral hazard to describe ISIS as "evil." That's the sort of language that the dumbos in the Bush administration used to describe al Qaeda! Why would the smart folks in the Obama administration stoop to doing the same? Don't they realize that once you describe a group such as ISIS as "evil" you can "inadvertently help its cause"? I mean, why on Earth would you describe a group that does things like this as "evil" or a "cancer":

I'm sorry, but that's evil. Feel free to send your "lol fairy tale morality" tweets my way. Alan Jacobs had the best response to the line of thinking espoused by Boyle and those who agree with him:

Exactly. Knowing evil when one sees it does not preclude the ability to effectively combat that evil nor does it limit your ability to understand evil. The attempt to banish the very concepts of "good" and "evil" from the public square is a catastrophically stupid one, one that indicates a real moral blindness and hinders efforts to stop evildoing more than it helps to end the actions in question. The world undoubtedly contains shades of gray; my bluster the other afternoon about Hiroshima Day notwithstanding, I don't think it's unreasonable to debate whether or not the lives of a million American servicemen (and God only knows how many Japanese servicemen/civilians) killed in island-to-island fighting are more valuable than a hundred thousand Japanese civilians.*

But grays don't preclude black and white. Indeed, they often serve to highlight the contrast. Ending a just war via the application of horrific—and possibly unjust—violence is something worth debating. Labeling "evil" those who would gang rape a 12-year-old and behead a journalist to terrify a nation is not. The only thing worth discussing right now is how to quickly and efficiently wipe that evil from face of the earth.

*In my head right now, Michael Goldfarb is calling me a squish for writing that line. Tough but fair. For the record: I welcome the debate but have no problem with Hiroshima, Dresden, etc. Don't start wars with America if you don't want America to finish them.