Every Generation is Tested by Great Evil

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Article is 2 years old, but still rings so true today.​

townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20020807.shtml
Every generation is tested by great evil
by Dennis Prager
August 7, 2002

would appear that every generation confronts a major moral test. A great evil presents itself as a good, and the world that is not victimized by that evil is tested: Can it recognize the evil and confront it?

The pattern is eerily and depressingly repetitive.
  1. The evil takes hold.
  2. The evil has myriad defenders even among otherwise decent people.
  3. The evil is vanquished after destroying an uncountable number of lives.
  4. After the evil is vanquished, there is virtually unanimous agreement that it was indeed evil.
We can identify four examples that have confronted Americans and other Westerners in the last two centuries.

One was slavery and racism. A great number of Americans and others saw little wrong with slavery. How did even some otherwise decent people defend such an obvious evil? They believed that skin color determined a person’s worth and destiny. To almost all Americans today, including the children of those who believed in racism, this belief is as bizarre as it is evil.

A second example was Communism. Many people living in free societies actually believed that Communism was a moral good. No matter how many millions of innocent people Communist regimes murdered, no matter how much Communism deprived people of elementary human rights, many people living outside Communism could not call it evil. Recall the uproar President Ronald Reagan provoked when he labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Yet, within just a few years of Communism’s fall, it was hard to find any Westerner – outside of universities where Communism had always had its greatest support – who did not routinely call Communism evil.

A third example was Nazism. As difficult as it is to imagine now, even Nazism had many admirers in free countries. These people saw the economic turnaround made by Germany under Hitler and either ignored, belittled or sympathized with its totalitarianism and antisemitism. Because Nazism only held power for 12 years, as opposed to Communism’s much longer history, it had little time to engender the widespread support that Communism did. Nazism was finally vanquished, but only after murdering two out of every three Jews in Europe and many millions of other innocents. And since its fall, Nazism has almost universally become synonymous with evil.

The fourth example is taking place at this moment…

Continued below–
 
–Continued from above

The fourth example is taking place at this moment, and it precisely repeats the pattern of the other three. There is a great evil, and many in the West either defend it or excuse its totalitarianism and antisemitism. It is Islamic extremism. Afghanistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Palestinian society have created totalitarian regimes that, in each or all cases, have terribly oppressed women; enslaved and slaughtered a million blacks who refuse to be subjugated to Islamic totalitarianism; use religious police to whip men who drink alcohol; torture Christians who live or work there; have developed a unique theology of cruelty in which God is depicted as a provider of scores of young women to all Muslims who blow themselves up while murdering Jews and Americans; and, like Nazism, it has made Jew-hatred its centerpiece. And throughout much of the Muslim Middle East, girls are murdered by fathers and brothers in “honor killings” if they are so much as perceived as having spent time with a male unapproved by the family.

It should not be difficult to call all this evil, but just as with the previous evils, many Western voices not only defend these regimes and doctrines, they reserve their condemnations only for those who oppose the evil. Apologists like best-selling author Karen Armstrong, the professors of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), professors in other fields, the leftist European and American press – all these deny Islamic evils. Just as their predecessors blamed America for the Cold War with Communism, and dismissed anti-Communists as “war mongers” and “fascists,” today’s deniers of evil blame America and Israel for Islamic terror and label terror’s opponents “bigots,” “Islamophobes” and, of course, “war mongers.”

Hopefully, this particular evil will be eradicated before it slaughters even more innocents. But the history of evil offers little optimism. Instead we are once again subjected to the spectacle of people living in splendor apologizing for the greatest cruelty of their time. When you see this, you understand why God “regretted that he made man on earth.”

townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20020807.shtml
 
Jay74 http://forums.catholic-questions.org/images/statusicon_cad/user_offline.gif vbmenu_register(“postmenu_342072”, true);
Senior Member

You said the following are evil:
  1. Slavery and Racism
  2. Communism
  3. Nazism
  4. Islamic Extremism
You are absolutely wrong! There were slaves duing Jesus’ time, Jesus said to treat your slaves well. And the other three, in themselves are not evil.

For something to be evil, it has have been instigated by the Evil One. Sorry but you are wrong.
 
You are absolutely wrong! There were slaves duing Jesus’ time, Jesus said to treat your slaves well. And the other three, in themselves are not evil.
Click to expand...
Nazism is surely inherently evil. Inspired by hatred, developed with hate, sustained by hatred, and finally extinguished with hatred still lingering thereafter. It is an ideology of narcissism and HATE. Nothing is more evil than that. Adolf Hitler was Satan’s servant, whether he knew it or not. Slavery is pretty evil too, Apostle Paul clearly does not condone it (1 Cor. 7: 21). It was seen merely as a necessary evil of the times, but nonetheless evil.

I would agree with you Jay, Islamic extremism IS evil. But does that justify an evil war against them? No. It doesn’t. Afghanistan? Just. Iraq? Hasty, poorly planned, unauthorized, sloppily executed; plain BAD.

By the way, what is the official Vatican position (if any) on the current War against Iraq?
 
Yes but the US government is guilty of the same Evil. Yet people are unready to accept it. We do have abortion and we are constantly at war. The budget is out of control and we are 3-6 trillion dollars in debt. The economy is out of control. When we want to support the war effort, we do so as the government gives something like 67 Billion dollar no contract award to some company like haliburton. The divide between the rich and the poor is growing and so on and so forth. The reoccuring theme with the Muslims is “Death to America.” Can you imagine why they are so angry at us? Yeah the Muslims Kill Catholics all over the world. Yet everytime we criticize them for some other reason.
 
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Bill_A:
Can you imagine why they are so angry at us?
Click to expand...
:yup: bootsandsabers.com/images/uploads/_newsreportfromiraq.wmv
 
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Jay74 http://forums.catholic-questions.org/images/statusicon_cad/user_offline.gif vbmenu_register(“postmenu_342072”, true);
Senior Member

You said the following are evil:
  1. Slavery and Racism
  2. Communism
  3. Nazism
  4. Islamic Extremism
You are absolutely wrong! There were slaves duing Jesus’ time, Jesus said to treat your slaves well. And the other three, in themselves are not evil.

For something to be evil, it has have been instigated by the Evil One. Sorry but you are wrong.
Click to expand...

well, you’re opinion is your opinion. But this was about what has confronted the USA over the last 200 years.
 
Islamic Extremism is a great moral test, but not in this country. I think the great moral test of this generation is abortion, hands down.
 
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