Carl Jung, Alan Watts, and the Eternal Bum
Two great thinkers who struggled with the concept of evil
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
At the brink of the second Gulf War in 2003, I briefly dated a Harvard-educated woman who questioned my failure to support the pending US invasion of Iraq. I remember her describing Iraq president Saddam Hussein as “sui generis.”
My response was, and I quote: “huh?”
Sui generis is Latin for single, solitary, unique. She meant Saddam’s brand of villainy required no further analysis, geopolitical or otherwise. He was a one-off, like Godzilla. This was a limousine liberal’s way of calling out evil without sounding, you know…judgemental.
Saddam, himself a spawn and pawn of AngloAmerican monkeywrenching in the Mideast, was no nice guy in any conventional or political sense. But the legacy media’s easy villainization of him into the Mesopotamian Monster (with unfindable weapons of mass destruction) segued with depressingly predictability into the deaths, injuries and permanent displacement of millions of innocent men, women and children in the Middle East.
Saddam’s death sentence, like Gaddafi of Libya, likely came when he initiated moves to start up an exchange currency outside the US petrodollar, but that’s another story in itself. (As the hideous Hillary Clinton remarked with a laugh of Gaddafi’s fate, “we came, we saw, he died.”)
Sidenote: One of the depressing ironies to result from the Mesopotamian misadventures is corporate media’s current habit of lecturing news consumers on the threat of “Islamophobia.” The very phobia that corporate media itself whipped up during the farcical Bush/Cheney War on Terror.
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