It is doubtful that anyone — no matter how wise — could, in early 1914, have foreseen what the coming century would bring: mass slaughter in the trenches, Treblinka, the gulag, the atom bomb, the Cambodian genocide, rape camps. . . . The grim list, well-known yet still startling, marches on. Nonetheless, in his new book, “Political Evil,” the noted political theorist Alan Wolfe confidently predicts that the fundamental problem of the still-young 21st century will be political evil. His book ranges from a recapitulation of the familiar debates over Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” to a condemnation of the Bush-Cheney administration’s use of torture. He promises to provide a conceptual elucidation of the problem of political evil and effective ways of alleviating it.
Wolfe seeks to demystify political evil — to bring it “down from the heavens into the world of politics”; he emphasizes the hopeful fact that political evil is manmade, and therefore subject to human solutions. He defines political evil as “the willful, malevolent, and gratuitous death, destruction, and suffering inflicted upon innocent people by the leaders of movements and states in their strategic efforts to achieve realizable objectives.” The word “realizable” causes trouble for Wolfe throughout the book, twisting him into some conceptual pretzels; but even if one accepts this definition, he offers some highly debatable theses. Of those who practice political evil, he writes, “It is the way they seek their goals, not necessarily their goals themselves, that defines them as the moral monsters they are.” Really? The goals of groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq, Somalia’s Shabab, Afghanistan’s Taliban and Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army seem “necessarily” monstrous in themselves.
(Knopf) - ’Political Evil: What It Is and How to Combat It’ by Alan Wolfe
Wolfe focuses on four major categories of political evil: terrorism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the use of torture to fight evil, which he sometimes terms “counterevil.” A variety of actions fall under his rubric; he cites, for instance, both Hamas’s rocket attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent 2008-09 invasion of Gaza as examples of political evil (or counterevil). It is not clear, however, why labeling these events as “evil” brings us any closer to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “A pox on both their houses” might be a reader’s more likely response.
The major disappointment of “Political Evil,” however, is the weakness of Wolfe’s political analyses when he looks to the past and the vagueness into which he descends when he looks at the present or to the future; the book fails exactly where it most needs to succeed. Wolfe devotes a chunk of “Political Evil” to two events: the strife in Darfur and the Balkan wars. In the first case, he argues — as have other political theorists and humanitarian organizations — that the violence in Darfur did not qualify as a genocide. This may be so, though the issue remains far more contentious than Wolfe lets on; but, as he rightly notes, these distinctions do matter, especially when formulating solutions. Yet after establishing that the attacks on Darfurians might have consisted only (only!) of crimes such as mass displacement, starvation and murder — and after denouncing Save Darfur and “other like-minded groups” for what he considers their “highly irresponsible” exaggeration of the crisis — Wolfe simply lets the matter drop. If the Darfurians are not victims of genocide, are they of no interest at all? What is to be done? If so many aid groups and human-rights workers got Darfur wrong, how does Wolfe propose to set it right?
Loading...
Comments