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“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
— Joseph Conrad
*
“The systems of explanation, historical and psychological, that we employ to explain ordinary human behavior, however extreme, cannot explain Hitler, who represents, (theologian Emil) Fackenheim believes, a ‘radical evil,’ an ‘eruption of demonism into history…’”
— Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler
*
“All mankind needs to become the monster he truly is, is being told he can.”
— Magda, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels
Mankind was on a runaway train in 1938, highballing toward the abyss. The last year of “peace” before the Second World War began in earnest had started with the Rape of Nanking, in which the armed forces of Imperial Japan indulged in a grotesque orgy of slaughter in the Chinese city, leaving tens of thousands of civilians dead. The Third Reich’s Anschluss in Austria was followed by the humiliation of the Jews of Vienna, who were forced to get on hands and knees and scrub the city’s streets. By the autumn, when the Wehrmacht rolled unopposed into what was left of a diplomatically dismembered Czechoslovakia, the war clouds on the horizon had built to a towering black wall rolling inexorably down upon civilization.
The world was living for real in the shadow of the fictional prophecy that forms the bedrock of Showtime’s new horror tale, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels:
“A time will come when nation will battle nation, when race will devour race, when brother will kill brother, until not a soul is left.”
City of Angels is built around the seething racial tensions that simmered just below the golden surface of Los Angeles through most of its history. The planned Arroyo Seco Motorway (eventually the 110 Freeway running from Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles) will displace a Mexican-American neighborhood, just as the construction of Dodger Stadium would clean out Chavez Ravine two decades later. Nazis are infiltrating the film studios and the aircraft manufacturing plants. A ritualistic murder has left four mutilated corpses in Dia del Muertos makeup arranged on the concrete bed of the dry L.A. River. All the golden metropolis requires is a spark to erupt in a consuming conflagration.
Magda, a shapeshifting demon, seeks to provide that spark in order to reap a harvest of souls that her anguished sister, Santa Muerte, must escort to heaven — or hell. The demon is an agent provocateur — she does not create conflict, she exploits it, setting race against race, brother against brother.
Magda does not cause men to do evil — she simply gives them permission to be what they are. She plays upon men’s lust — for power, for sex, for meaning, for ecstatic action, whispering seductively into their ear that they can.
As a theory of evil, this folkloric conceit not only has legs, it dances like Judge Holden dances in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, never sleeping, never dying.
*
For years, I subscribed to Joseph Conrad’s materialist aphorism quoted in the epigraph at the top, believing that man generates his own wickedness. Yet, I’m not sure I ever fully believed it. Hell, I’m not sure Conrad really believed it, either. Is there not something uncanny about Kurtz (a trait even more pronounced in his incarnation as Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now)?
More than two decades ago, I read Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, which remains one of the most potent pieces of historical exploration I have ever encountered. And I could never shake Emil Fackenheim’s characterization of Hitler, Nazism and Auschwitz as “an eruption of demonism into history.”
Adolf Hitler taking a travel break in the Harz mountain range, Germany, 1936. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)
I still remember the frisson I experienced in reading the words: I instinctively felt them to be terrifyingly true.
Thus, I was startled, even shaken, by the manner in which Magda exerts her power in City of Angels — for she bridges the divide between the materialist insistence that man is sufficient unto himself in his capacity for evil, and the concept of “radical evil,” something that exists in some spiritual-yet-tangible form just outside our ken.
This is why Story matters — it gives us a visceral way to understand a world only dimly perceived.
*
Philip Caputo, in his brilliant Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War, posited that most men have a moral safety net that keeps them from falling headlong into the abyss, even under the great strain of war. There is danger that that moral safety net may fray, or that there may be a hole in it — even decent men are capable of slipping into evil acts that haunt them for the rest of their days. But Caputo understood that for some men, there simply is no net… and there is no bottom. If there is a demonic embodiment the spirit of evil, it can rent the one and own the other.
The men without a net are the men to whom Magda might most productively whisper her sweet nothings, the men for whom all that is required is a permissive environment to conjure forth the monster that he is. Offer him the cover of chaos, or place state power in his hands, and you have an eruption of demonism into history.
The 20th Century served up many such permissive environments. There is a case to be made that the explosion of the First World War in August 1914 ripped the lid off of Hell and we’ve never been able to get it fully secured since.
War and revolution and the utopian ideologies of Bolshevik Communism, Japanese Imperialism and National Socialism whispered “you can” to a witches brew of souls who made the very most of the opportunity to become monsters. And the act of battling monsters created more, even on the side of the angels, just as Nietzsche had warned:
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
I have taken up the trail of the strange and demonic Baron Roman Federovich von Ungern-Sternberg — a partisan warrior, mystic and madman who cut a bloody swath in Central Asia during the Russian Civil War.
The man and his actions are so outlandishly savage that they qualify under Fackenheim’s framework of “radical evil.” (And how the Bloody Baron — a vicious anti-Semite — would froth at being held to judgment at the bar of a Jewish theologian).
As his biographer James Palmer acerbically noted:
“You had to really go above and beyond to stand out as a sadistic lunatic in the context of the Russian Civil War, but he went that extra mile.”
The Baron built a native army leavened with renegade Russians to build a power base in Mongolia. His driving ambition was to leave “an avenue of gallows” from Mongolia to Moscow, where he would swing Bolsheviks and Jews, enemies of the divinely ordained monarchical order of the universe.
There is something atavistic about the warfare in Central Asia during this period, even though the ragtag armies were armed with bolt-action rifles, machine guns and even some modern artillery. Ungern-Sternberg’s conquest of the Chinese-occupied city of Urga in Mongolia in the winter of 1921 was an evocation of hell, a kind of steppe Blood Meridian.
Peter Hopkirk wrote in Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia:
“The main gates were immediately blown open with grenades and the triumphant attackers, lusting after Chinese blood, poured in. A massacre of the demoralized garrison now followed. (White Russian officer Dmitri) Alioshin, the sole participant to leave an account of the fighting, describes the scene:
‘Mad with revenge and hatred, the conquerors began plundering the city. Drunken horsemen galloped along the streets shooting and killing at their fancy, breaking into houses, dragging property outside into the dirty streets, dressing themselves in rich silks found in the shops…’ Wherever they could be found hiding, Jews were killed, their women first being raped… Many of the attackers were now so drunk that one Cossack began killing his own comrades, until he himself was shot…”
The Bloody Baron would finally be abandoned by his men and captured and shot by the Reds he despised as much as he hated Jews.
The Bolsheviks, of course, produced a mighty share of demonic figures. Stalin sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, but his great rival Trotsky thrived no less on the opportunity to give free rein to his sanguinary impulses. And Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the dreaded Soviet secret police the Cheka, could scarcely conceal the demonic fire that burned within.
The souls devoured by such men still cry out for those with ears to hear.
*
Extreme wealth and limitless power, the chaos of war and revolution, racial and ethnic hatred, the messianic conviction that the creation of an earthly utopia justifies all action … any combination of these explosive elements prepares the path for the advent of evil. They await not a spark, but a mere seductive whisper, a voice out of the void murmuring, “You can.”
*
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Matthew says
I don’t know what is more disturbing the idea of supernatural evil or the idea that humans are entirely responsible for our own atrocities.
Tolkien, of course, had profound sense of evil. His idea that the Shadow always takes another form reflects that. Tolkien was Roman Catholic so he had a complex belief in both free will and higher powers. His witnessing the horrors of Le Somme and the Rise of Nazism probably played into that too.
My mother, daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher, mentioned once that she thought Hitler was literally possessed by demons. The thing about having a Southern Baptist background, while it certainly can be strict and repressive, one who has it tends to be less surprise about the horrors that man can commit.
Indeed.
RLT says
Add Jung to the list of people who may never have fully believed mankind alone was responsible for its evil, as exemplified in his paper on Hitler. Last fall you wrote a blog post about that very thing, Jim, and I ended up riffing on it for a few posts on my own blog. But the gist of my argument was that the darkest parts of our nature may (and might as well) have metaphysical form, a weight of their own… And if you want power, they will be happy to answer.
Hitler’s a great example. Obsessed with Wotan, Hitler tried to draw on his energy. Whether the Wotan of the hunt or the Wotan of Hitler’s own soul, he knocked on the door of a dark and old power. And Wotan answered.
Rhyd Wildermuth says that he doesn’t think it was really Wotan because he (Rhyd, in prayer) asked the god and Wotan denied it. But there are aspects of Wotan that are as dark and twisted as Crom Cruach…aspects that could grant a man like Hitler the power (or just the sheer will) he desired. But as Jung points out, that sort of transference is a two way street. Europe burned. England’s civilian populace was raided by Germanic ships (of the air, this time) and slaughtered without discrimination. And once again the Germanic tribes marched on their old foes. They even took Paris.
You can’t tell me that some of Wotan’s darker aspects wouldn’t have thrilled at all of that.
Should probably point out that today is Beltane/May Day/Walpurgisnacht, and I’m starting the day with some pagan reading, including the Havamal. So this post caught me in a certain state of mind…
Yes, this exactly. The personifications we place upon this principle may be representational, but that “weight of their own” is real.
RLT says
…which makes this a good time to point out that ‘good faith’ embraces of metaphysics in and of themselves can help a leader gain more power. Hitler’s semi-religious proto-Germanicism didn’t grant him access to existing power structures (such as the Catholic Church), but it did allow him to tap into some of the deeper aspects of the human psyche. People are wired for metaphysics, and although I’ve always suspected that most of the Thule/Vril crowd was there for the political connections (and for Maria Orsic!), I guarantee some of the smaller, esoteric groups (like those based on Odinic warrior cults) took the metaphysics of it all very seriously.
Esoteric Nazism and the occult goings on with the Third Reich are not to be discounted. (And was there not something otherworldly about the beauty of Maria Orsic?) I have long believed that both National Socialism and Soviet Communism were fundamentally metaphysical phenomenon. In my pursuit of the Baron, I’ve been perusing a book titled Red Shambhala that would seem to demonstrate that at least some Reds were susceptible to the esotericism that was so prevalent in the 1880s-1940s. (Not that it disappeared).
Despite their vaunted materialism, the Bolsheviks had a mystical belief that they were agents of history that was no less potent than the Nazis’ racial theories or any other religious faith that has sparked holy wars across history.
My study of extreme right-wing terrorists in the U.S. in the 1980s-90s would support the view that they took the metaphysics of their orientation very seriously indeed.
Ugly Hombre says
“Despite their vaunted materialism, the Bolsheviks had a mystical belief that they were agents of history that was no less potent than the Nazis’ racial theories or any other religious faith that has sparked holy wars across history.”
You are right.
Communism is a insect religion a type of a cult, if you want to know the truth about something you go back to the origin- the Bolsheviki. Everything in it is based on deception, like Old Scratch, they hide the reality of it, until you buy into it- sell your soul to them and then you get Cambodia etc. Almost never has any major movie or news report been made about their evil antics- “The Killing Fields” is the only exception I can think of. In China right now they are kowtowing and burning incense kneeling down at golden idols of Mao.
Smoking down there in the lower levels- he probably smiles thinking of that. lol
Ugly Hombre says
https://secure.i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02774/mao-china-1_2774933k.jpg
Ugly Hombre says
http://www.nanophysics.pl/3books/ossendowski/Beasts_Men_Gods.pdf
Here is a first person account by a man who rode with the Mad Baron in Mongolia. Fun to read, Russian civil war pdf. book, with information about the Sternberg’s warped methods and strange thinking
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=men+beasts+gods+book&atb=v200-3__&ia=images&iax=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fprodimage.images-bn.com%2Fpimages%2F2940014895682_p0_v2_s550x406.jpg
By- Ferdinand Ossendowski, a Pole who fought the Bolo’s
Interesting book- Von Sternberg was considered a reincarnation of Beg-Tse, Mongolian god of war. Considered a good man in Mongolia to this day-as he kicked the Chinese out of Ulan Bator. Everywhere else he is a terror.
“I consider Bolsheviks to be devil’s in human form” Urgern Von Sternberg.
Many still do- they killed 100 million in the last century- and tortured and enslaved many millions more. To this day Communists hold the record for worldly evil in the world
TJ says
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you.”
Although not as much since leaving the abyss I used to call my work environment for nearly 30 years — I used to ponder the blessing and curse of our free will. Separates us from the wild beasts, although we are by far simultaneously the most amazing and the savage creatures walking the earth.
As a Christian, recipient of free will, ex street cop and fellow flawed human, I am convinced of the existence of an outside influence of evil. Not talking the mentally ill, or spun-out overdose scenario either.
I have seen it in the eyes and countenance of victim, suspect and random civilians. Felt it on the other side of a door, crime scenes, random traffic stops and even my own dark moments. In some cases the participants are willing and in others, completely taken over by evil.
The boogie man is not as common as some might portray, but very real in my opinion. Thankfully the human race is not as doomed as the media would suggest.
I’ve encountered a few destructive personalities and some dangerously strung out messes, but only one or two people where I caught a whiff of something… else.
TJ says
Probably an accurate estimate. There is a prudent level of survival based selfishness, the balance of which can be a struggle (first hand experience).
There are also unrepentant, predatory a******s wearing bandit masks and business suits. Some people just suck and it’s by selfish choice.
Falling into the “abyss” can take so many forms. Fatigue; apathy; anger; anxiety; sadness; repeated exposure can find you on that unfortunate path.
When the abyss looks back, makes eye contact and calls you by first name like an old friend — time to reassess. Especially when you look forward to it.
More solid work Sir — enjoy your weekend. We have thunder storms coming.
J.F. Bell says
Echoes of HBO’s sadly truncated Carnivale, which used the bust years of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression as the ring where heaven and hell fought it out for all the marbles “…before mankind traded away wonder for reason.’ It’s a strange rabbit hole of a show, half Stephen King and half John Steinbeck, and for the most it works better than might be expected.
On that note, I suspect this would account for the appeal of a frontier — any frontier — as backdrop for grand epics and morality plays. Being outside civilization, and in turns being outside the law and its enforcers, allows us to see what the human animal does when the cage is opened and the muzzle taken off. The physical scenery usually doesn’t hurt, either. There is a peculiar magic in the rough and lonely corners of the world.
Faith — in God, in humanity, in law — might pay dividends while the lights are on and the tapwater won’t kill you. Cut the utilities and emergency services for a week and see if that holds. Cruelly, finding that same frontier suddenly in your own backyard will be a shock from which many likely will not recover.
Or as I once told a friend…I don’t doubt trusting of the Almighty to save souls — but for the duration our asses are stuck down here together, and that is an altogether different story.
I’d forgotten about Carnivale — that show deserved a better fate.