27 Apr '18 22:11>
I'm reading a book written by Dennis Prager on Exodus. He has some rather interesting points in the book, one of which, involves the notion of how one man or woman can stand up to seemingly overwhelming evil.
"Exodus 1:9 And Pharaoh said to the people......
Samson Raphael Hirsch, a nineteenth-century German Jewish thinker, pointed out it was the Egyptian leader, not the Egyptian people, who initiated the campaign against the Israelites that ultimately came to include attempted genocide. This is a profound insight. The terrible truth is individuals are capable of inflicting massive evils -- because indivicuals are fare more capable of doing great evil than great good. Were it not for Lenin, it is unlikely communism would have taken over Russia and ultimately the Soviet Union, where it enslaved over 150 million people and murdered tens of millions. The same holds true for Mao Zedong in China. This one man was responsible for the deaths of over 60 million Chinese men, women, and children. The same can be said for Kim ll-sung, who created the most totalitarian state in human history, North Korea. And were it not for Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust would almost certainly not have taken place.
Understandably, people are very uncomfortable with acknowledging how much evil one individual can perpetrate. That is one reason people concoct and believe conspiracy theories. The assassination of the American President John F. Kennedy in 1963 is one example. The overwhelming evidence is that one man, Lee Harvey Oswald, and American Communist, murdered Kennedy. But the assassination had so many destructive consequences and was so emotionally difficult for Americans to accept that many came to believe there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK. They simply could not believe so much damage could be done by just one person -- a pathetic misfit, no less. Oswald proves the unhappy truth that you don't even have to be particularly talented to do great evil.
"Exodus 1:9 And Pharaoh said to the people......
Samson Raphael Hirsch, a nineteenth-century German Jewish thinker, pointed out it was the Egyptian leader, not the Egyptian people, who initiated the campaign against the Israelites that ultimately came to include attempted genocide. This is a profound insight. The terrible truth is individuals are capable of inflicting massive evils -- because indivicuals are fare more capable of doing great evil than great good. Were it not for Lenin, it is unlikely communism would have taken over Russia and ultimately the Soviet Union, where it enslaved over 150 million people and murdered tens of millions. The same holds true for Mao Zedong in China. This one man was responsible for the deaths of over 60 million Chinese men, women, and children. The same can be said for Kim ll-sung, who created the most totalitarian state in human history, North Korea. And were it not for Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust would almost certainly not have taken place.
Understandably, people are very uncomfortable with acknowledging how much evil one individual can perpetrate. That is one reason people concoct and believe conspiracy theories. The assassination of the American President John F. Kennedy in 1963 is one example. The overwhelming evidence is that one man, Lee Harvey Oswald, and American Communist, murdered Kennedy. But the assassination had so many destructive consequences and was so emotionally difficult for Americans to accept that many came to believe there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK. They simply could not believe so much damage could be done by just one person -- a pathetic misfit, no less. Oswald proves the unhappy truth that you don't even have to be particularly talented to do great evil.