"La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas."
"The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist."
Charles Baudelaire
Evil has always been a characteristic inherent in men. As much as we wish to objectify it as the imposition of a fallen angel ---evil is an inherently human trait. The concentration camps of Germany were dreamed up by men. Slavery is the brainchild of living. breathing sapiens. War and destruction is a solution to a problem that didn’t exist before man walked the earth. Unlike the bible story, there is no devil who makes us do evil.
The recent turn of events in America speaks to the inherency of the evil we are capable of. It is time that we begin to recognize the immoral equivalencies of what is done in our name. Men do not need a devil to do evil things. For those who have suffered evil, there is no hell but this one—not a place in our future, not a retributive assignment of judgment by a more benevolent creator. No, hell is where Hitler reigned, where men planned to fly into towers, where slaveowners bought and sold men and women like chattel. where Donald Trump separated babies from their parent.
If there is a “devil” it is us, and, as Baudelaire has stated, our ruse is to convince ourselves that that part of us doesn’t exist. But it does. You see, in human terms, Hell is not a place that is earned. Jews did not “deserve” death camps because of something they had done, they were assigned there due to who they were. Africans weren’t “condemned” to slave ships because they had violated a moral truth or a manmade law. They were chained there due to the color of their skin. And in the instant case of immigrants who are being persecuted in our name at our borders, children are not vermin threatening to infest America, they are being incarcerated due to their vulnerability and inability to resist.
Hell as a metaphor is not a place one has earned, rather, it is a place one is forced to endure. The reasons for the assignment to a hell-on-earth are taken from a well-known set of grievances-- but the one overriding grievance is that they are not us. They do not belong to our tribe, They are different. The further point is that human evil derives its “legitimacy” from the momentary advantages of power. Knowing what would happen to Germany in 1945, what would “good” Germans have done to stop Hitler’s rise to power in 1932? Would Japan have rethought their war plans if they had known what would happen in Hiroshima in 1946? The transactional nature of evil determines that its benefits are transient. What comes around...
And so, Trump's evil will pass but there will always be another round, a different breed, a stunning backlash that, for all of evil’s brilliance, was never considered. Evil lacks one important trait of wisdom---prescience.
“The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;
We find delight in the most loathsome things;
Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,
And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.”
― Charles Baudelaire
Donald Trump, the puppet who would be king, has carved for himself a place on earth much worse than hell. Like those who have come before him, there is no atonement from the infamy of reputation they have earned for time immemorial. No devil could cast a shadow as long as the shadow cast by time. No subsequent deed could expiate the evil deed that has earned history’s verdict. That is the lasting nature of evil, once carved it cannot be unetched.
The Trump reign will end, but his infamy will live on. As he attempts to outrace the verdict of history by denying what he says and what he does. The denials will ultimately fall on deaf ears. His is a Faustian bargain—one forged at his father’s knee. A bargain that exchanges spiritual and moral values for an opportunity to obtain wealth and power. That bargain dies with him. As much as he tries to convince first us, then himself, that his legacy of evil does not exist, it will remain with him, like a stench, forever. This is truly Trump’s finest trick---his ultimate deal.