Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” said Monty Python, the great British comedy troupe that the BBC now dismisses as unwanted “Oxbridge white blokes.”
In his book The Anatomy of Evil, psychiatrist Michael H. Stone reassures us that:
There are no longer many people who endorse the goals of the Spanish Inquisition, claiming that its victims were the evil ones who got what they deserved.
So the Oxbridge white blokes were right: Even today, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Unfortunately, plenty of people now endorse its claim that their victims are getting what they deserve.
Trump supporters “don’t deserve our empathy,” says a columnist for Salon.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders “should be shunned,” says a columnist for the Washington Post.
Even nominal conservatives get into the act. Working-class American communities “deserve to die,” says a columnist for National Review.
Many Americans feel the same way about leftists, but they’re more cautious about saying so—lest they, themselves, become targets of the New Inquisition.
It’s a “misguided debate over civility in the face of extreme depravity,” says a columnist for Eater.
“Extreme depravity?” Seriously? These are political disagreements, supposedly handled by the democratic process. Nobody’s being sent to Auschwitz. And in point of fact, most news media are biased against the Trump Administration. Watch CNN for 30 minutes and deny it: go ahead and try.
People, get a grip. Please. Please.
We have two choices. We can stop screaming at each other and find a way to work together. Or we can go straight to Civil War II.
If you didn’t learn any history in school, let me clue you in: regardless of what it was about, Civil War I wrought evil in the world.
You think that enforcing immigration law is evil? Making peace with North Korea is evil? Talking to a nuclear-armed country that could incinerate the United States 100 times over is evil?
Wait until you see millions of Americans trying to kill each other, cities destroyed, famine and disease ravaging a formerly prosperous country. American children dying of typhus, cholera, and starvation—when it all could have been avoided. You have no idea of what evil really is. Be thankful you don’t.
You can stop it. Almost nobody wants it, but we will blunder into it unless we pull back from the brink.
America is still a good country. We have disagreements we can resolve. We have problems we can fix. Blowing it all up is evil.
Google has abandoned its original motto, but it was a good one that’s worth remembering:
Don’t be evil.
Photo Credit: YouTube/Monty Python