Word: evilness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...takeaway is no less disturbing: humanity's threshold for cruelty is, like everything else, situational. We seem wired to follow orders, even when they're harmful to others. In her chilling portrayal of Nazi middle-manager Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt famously excoriated this impulse as "the banality of evil." Evil is way too strong a word for the conduct of this study's participants, but it seems clear that despite all of humanity's horror shows over the past decades, we aren't getting the message...
...Jewish victims were civilians with families. They had no army, let alone guns, and were often betrayed by their local government. The vast majority had no chance to fight and nothing to fight with and probably thought they would live to see their families again, not knowing what evil awaited them. Calling them or any defenseless people "passive victims" - even to refute such a notion - is ignorant, rude and insulting. It would have been more accurate and thoughtful to have said that some Jews found a way to fight back, and did. Richard Allen Cohen, CHICAGO...
...Mumbai Attacks Another heinous act of terrorism has been committed in India [The World, Dec. 8]. It is disgusting to observe that our political leaders, instead of rising above political lines in the fight against this common evil and cooperating in the investigations, indulge in political oneupmanship with an eye on the forthcoming elections. A great tragedy, apart from the loss of a large number of innocent lives, is the killing of the chief of the Anti-Terrorism Squad, Hemant Karkare. He was heading up the investigations into earlier bomb blasts and had started to reveal some startling information...
...President-elect has asked to pray at his Inauguration, about homosexuality. "I'm no homophobic guy," Warren said. His proof? He has dined with gays; he has a church "full of people who are caring for gays who are dying of AIDS"; he believes that "in the hierarchy of evil ... homosexuality is not the worst sin." So gays get to eat - sometimes even with Rick Warren! Then they get to die of AIDS - possibly under the care of Rick Warren's congregants. And when they go to hell, they won't be quite as far down in Satan...
...Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower...