‘Necessary’ evils?
Dear editor:
Musing over The Esteemed Senator Cotton’s assertion that “chattel slavery,” by which our great nation was built, was a “necessary (my italics) evil,” I found his admission admirable, if not quite disarming. If I were African American, I’d probably say: “Now that you’ve confessed, what about reparations? What about legislation to give aid to the class of descendants, along with the rest of the downtrodden — Native Americans, Asians, the “poor white trash” left behind by the smug and sanctimonious still battening off the “masses yearning to breathe free?” And notice how “breathe free” strikes a bell, a sad inharmonious note of the vicious inhumane masquerading as human beings.
What they are, and Senator Cottonmouth stands staunchly among them, is a coterie of the contemptible, the straggling fetor of history.
They are not anything new, alas, but part of a line of cruelty beyond tabulation, though we can note a few standout examples of perpetrators of “necessary evil.”
In the good old days of Imperial Rome, 600 followers of Spartacus were crucified at intervals along the road and allowed to putrefy in the southern sun as an example to all who would dare claim freedom.
The Inquisition relished a good old auto-da-fé for Jews and infidels, just an odd way of manifesting Christian compassion and mercy.
Vlad The Impaler had 200-plus impaled to stud a field to deter the Austrians on the march, and it did, indeed, make a formidable and effective deterrence.
On the way to taking their land and displaying empathy in such expressions as, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” our American forbears sent gifts of smallpox-infected blankets to their might-havebeen hosts and hostesses, the latter being subject to friendly rape from time to time by our heroic soldiers.
Jews and Gypsies and the unwanted defectives were rounded up, their goods confiscated, their homes given over to Party Loyalists, and told that “Arbeit macht frei!” (Work frees one!), on their way to being starved, gassed, and disposed of in communal ovens.
This devils’ list is hardly more than a hint at the horrors done as “necessary evils.”
It bears thinking about when those in charge try to justify their iniquities.
Stuart Jay Silverman Hot Springs