No Sympathy for the Devil
By John J. Waters
July 16, 2025
There is a sickness inside our hearts. It aches for something brighter, better, a more resplendent mode of being. God, perhaps. Or temporary deliverance from the pain of being alive, and of knowing we will die. It urges us to create something: family; home; work; and art. To contribute something good and useful to future generations. But it also impels us to assert ourselves here and now, to compete for power over others. Please allow me to introduce myself … Because it feels good to have power—telling people what to do, getting things done. The boss sets the agenda, defines progress as he sees fit, or how he’s told to see fit. When the boss encounters obstacles or impediments to progress – either within himself or externally – power can make the impediments vanish. I’m a man of wealth and taste … Totalitarians, especially, excel at removing impediments to progress, however defined.
During the French Revolution, the Jacobins employed the guillotine as part of a public spectacle of murder. They executed some 17,000 people deemed enemies of the revolution. I’ve been around for a long, long year … During Argentina’s Dirty War, the military junta used kidnap and arrest to “disappear” some 30,000 people identified as enemies of the regime. Hitler destroyed millions of enemies across Europe through overwork, torture, execution, shooting, and starvation, and instituted an organizational program designed to exterminate Jews. The Soviet Union contributed the Gulag, a system of forced labor camps that housed both ordinary criminals and political prisoners. Stole many a man’s soul and faith …
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the Gulag as a political prisoner, was our greatest witness to the basic human sickness that constitutes the totalitarian temptation, and his life and work continue to inspire scholar Daniel J. Mahoney. In the new book The Persistence of the Ideological Lie (Encounter, 2025), Mahoney examines the totalitarian impulse then and now, how modern revolutionaries replaced the commonsense distinction between good and evil with “progress and reaction,” how people commit evil acts in the name of justice. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
What is the “totalitarian impulse?”
At the heart of this “impulse,” as I call it, is the desire to destroy the primordial commonsense distinction between good and evil. It’s a lie, of course. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: “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.” That remains the truth of the matter.
https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2025/07/16/no_sympathy_for_the_devil_1123197.html
