By Scott Graber
It is Wednesday, early, and I have my coffee.
Many years ago, I traveled in West Africa. I traveled for a variety of reasons but, from time to time, I traveled on the behest of an African politician.
In those days I had a friend — Herve’ Miabilangana — who went with me to Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) where we met with President Laurent Gbagbo. Throughout that trip Herve’ translated — the official language being French — Herve’ also explained customs, traditions and the bewildering politics of this former (French) colony.
One evening as we were sitting in the bar at the Hotel d’Ivoire (eve-wah) in Abidjan, we began talking about Mobutu Sese Seko, Idi Amin and Charles Taylor, as well as other men who had forcibly grabbed-hold of presidential power in Liberia, Congo-Kinshasa, Uganda, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Angola and Ethiopia. This discussion eventually moved to the obvious question, “What is wrong with Africa?”
“You really don’t understand evil,” Herve’ said to me that night. “Some Americans give lip service to Satan; but you Americans don’t really accept the idea of evil as a person.”
We had had a couple of drinks, Johnny Walker Black Label, so I can’t remember the details except that Herve’ described evil like it was an entity; a dark, cloud-like presence that invested itself in a person who then descended into mischief, madness and the killing of men with machetes.
This stunned me because Herve’ has a PhD in Mathematics; wrote his PhD thesis on “string theory;” and speaks several languages fluently.
I haven’t thought about that late-night conversation in many years, although I have read “The Origin of Satan” by Elaine Pagels, wherein she writes that Satan was in olden times more of a metaphor for those who would lead us away from God — or groups who rejected Jesus — but was not a winged, Batman-styled person making us do bad things.
All of which brings me to Buddhism.
Buddhists do not accept that evil is an outside presence running amok and causing grief; Buddhists look upon evil as an unwholesome internal failure. They call it “Akusala.”
Buddhists don’t think of a single, supernatural presence; rather they see the emergence of greed, or hatred or ignorance bubbling-up (from within) and taking an individual to a place where he or she decides that stealing or killing is acceptable behavior.
Likewise, the Hindus do not personify “evil” — there’s no “Joker” running around Metropolis doing really bad stuff. Rather Hindus see a “disorder” involving ignorance, deception and selfishness that comes from within.
So what does any of this have to do with our current, jangled lives here in the United States.
Right at the moment we’re trying to find and kill the Ayatollah’s son as well as his subalterns who still — in spite of our F-35s and our Tomahawks — hold sway in Tehran.
Our President has characterized these turban-wearing clerics as wicked, or evil, and our Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, reinforces this Satan-like characterization in order to get young men into their F-35s notwithstanding the fact that some of their “ordinances” will, inevitably, land on innocent non-combatants.
In this connection we actually have a formula in place — titled “acceptable collateral casualties” — that determines how many civilians can be killed when we are going after a particular person hiding in a particular bunker.
When we target such a person, the acceptable collateral casualties may vary from 5 to 20 according a recent writing in the New Yorker Magazine.
It seems to me that we are, in effect, turning some people into Satan — at least from the no-trial, no-presumption-of-innocence, no-Geneva-Convention-protections standpoint. And when we stand off the coast 200 miles or so — and fire our Tomahawks into Nigeria, Iran or Venezuela — we can’t be sure about the number of casualties to begin with.
This kind of long-distance killing got its start in WWII arguably with the bombing of Dresden, but culminating in the explosion of “Little Boy” over Hiroshima. That collective decision — to drop or not to drop — was recently described in “The Road to Surrender” by Evan Thomas.
The principals in that decision were troubled but assuaged of those troubled thoughts by saying that Hiroshima was a military target and, of course, the coming invasion of Japan would probably involve a million American casualties.
But the dropping of those bombs was made easier by the cruelty of the Japanese in China, Korea and Burma. The Japanese being almost, not quite, Satan-like.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.