The forced expulsion, by murder, torture, rape, and removal, of a population from a country or territory. The phrase is a euphemism for what is considered a type of genocide. It was applied in particular to the violent and coercive actions of the former Yugoslavia, under Bosnia Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, which included the killing, torture, rape, and expulsion of tens of thousands of Muslims and other non-Serbs from Serb-dominated areas of Bosnia in the early 1990s. First appearing in the press in 1991, the term was an expression of Serbian nationalism and hatred for the non-Serbian population. The ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia has been com-pared with the genocidal policies of Hitler in Nazi Germany and Stalin in the So-viet Union.
Hitler’s policies have been referred to as “ethnic purification.” The idea of cleans-ing a country of the “pollution” of Jews was expressed in virulent terms by nine-teenth-century Orientalist and biblical scholar Paul de Lagarde: “Jews are an alien body that creates ill-feeling, disease, ever-festering sores—death. These aliens are the cause of putrefaction and should be destroyed as quickly and thoroughly as possible” (Hood and Jansz 1994, 47).
Some critics of Israel’s repressive policies toward Palestinians have also accused that country of ethnic cleansing. In 2002, in a television interview, House major-ity leader Dick Armey called for the Palestinians to be expelled from the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. According to polls taken in 2002, a large number of Israelis tended to agree with some strategy that would expel the Palestinians. See alsoEXTERMINATION;GENOCIDE; HOLOCAUST;MASSACRE;MURDER.
Evil
A term with various meanings, including profound immorality, willful causing of great misfortune or harm, and wickedness associated with Satan or some other cosmic destructive force; from an Indo-European word meaning “exceeding due limits.” Philosophers and theologians have examined evil in terms of categories such as sin, suffering, misfortune, and imperfection. They have struggled with “the prob-lem of evil,” seen as the challenge its existence poses to the premise that there is a beneficent prime mover or God behind the universe. The reality of evil may, in one solution to the problem, be swept away as illusory, or it may be rendered as a
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realm other than God, free to go the way of doing harm. For many people, however, especially those afflicted by or involved with war or other struggles, evil is some-thing pitted against good in an everlasting cosmic conflict.
Not only is evil difficult to define, but not everyone sees it with the same eye.
One needn’t be a moral relativist to acknowledge that ideas of what constitutes evil take shape in shifting political and social contexts. Justifiably the idea of evil is invoked to describe or account for such horrors as the Holocaust (see HOLOCAUST) or oppressive institutions such as slavery, but even in these cases, meaning may be contested, though today by a small margin of commentators. For example, Holo-caust deniers claim that either the HoloHolo-caust was not intended by the Nazis or it was totally fabricated, the result of an international Jewish conspiracy to gain sym-pathy and power. The Holocaust denier tries to protect Nazism against the charge of being evil, while still finding evil in Nazi Germany, not in the Nazis, but in an imagined sadistic Jewish conspirator believed to drive history—an antisemitic con-struction that could itself be seen as evil. In another contest of meaning, in the nineteenth century, slaveholding Southerners, among others, argued that not sla-very but labor unions, women’s right to vote, and even the infamous “Bloomer women” (who wore pants instead of skirts) were all “evil.”
The concept of evil has its uses both within terrorist groups and among those who oppose them. On both sides, the evil found in the others’ actions releases those who fight it from responsibility for the violence of their own actions. The suffer-ing and death of those defined as evil, as in a drama, leads to the audience feelsuffer-ing justified in its hatred (Michael and Doerr 2002, 15). Personalizing enemies in terms of symbols of evil is also a problem because it easily distracts from examination of the causes behind the “evil,” including the possibility of both sides having a role in it.
As suggested by the Islamist al-Qaeda’s envisioning of America as the “Great Satan,” terrorists usually think of themselves as the redeemers of a larger commu-nity of people seen as being threatened by some cosmic destructive force. For ex-ample, Donatella della Porta, who interviewed left-wing militants in Italy and Germany, noted that they “began to perceive themselves as members of a heroic community of generous people fighting a war against ‘evil’” (Hudson 1999, 59).
Of course, for most ordinary people who are not involved in a crusading move-ment, it is far more understandable why the term is applied to the terrorists. Ameri-cans readily concurred with U.S. District Judge Kevin Duffy, who branded Ramzi Yousef, convicted for the 1993 Trade Center bombing, which killed six people and injured a thousand, and the 1994 bombing of a Philippines airliner, an “apostle of evil.” Similar sentiments were heard in discussions of the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, which was called the “purest evil”—with-out context or precedent (Sorkin and Zukin 2002, 47). President Bush joined in with his reference to the 9-11 attackers as “evildoers.” In one forty-four-minute press conference, the president used the word evil or evildoer no fewer than twelve times.
(Mr. Bush also used the rather quaint “evil folks,” and, later, in reference to a His-panic man linked to an al-Qaeda terror plot, the relatively tepid “bad guy.”) Evil
59 The president’s use of evil was both applauded as appropriately tough and
mor-ally accurate and condemned for being simplistic fundamentalism. The former view was the consensus. However, without questioning the immorality of the attacks, Bill Keller (2002), among the critics of the president’s rhetoric of evil, intoned against what he called a moralism “verging on messianic when it comes to the world beyond our borders.” Keller found a messianic attitude in two instances of presi-dential oratory that he argued were not mere rhetorical flourishes: “the glib ‘axis of evil’” and the reference to “America’s ‘crusade,’” which the White House later retracted.” Keller went on to argue that Mr. Bush “seems deeply convinced that America’s great project is to combat evil and implant what he calls ‘universal val-ues’ throughout the world.” Roy (2001, 112) worried that “President George Bush can no more ‘rid the world of evildoers’ than he can stock it with saints.”
Evil rhetoric was reinforced in the 9-11 media accounts by a host of synonyms ranging from fanatic to madman and monster. The language had moral resonance to most Americans, but the emotional charge tended to mystify and stereotype the man (e.g., the “evil genius”) behind the terrorist attacks. Sociologists Lipset and Raab (1970, 10) noted the power such charged words can have among political extremists: “There is . . . a sense of the magical power of the word. But it is not the word vying in the market place of ideas. Rather, it is the recurrent implication that just saying the right thing, believing the right thing, is the substance of victory and remedy.” In times of crisis everyone tends to become an extremist, using words that both shut off dialogue and give the afflicted a sense of claim to victory over the vicissitudes of history. To better understand the Manichaean vision of terrorism that emerged in American culture in the wake of September 11, one might paraphrase Franz Fanon (1963) to the effect that it is not enough for the U.S. military to find its remedy in force applied against the enemy. “As if to show the totalitarian char-acter” of its power over the unruly Islamic world, the United States, and the Western world generally, feels it must paint it “as a sort of quintessence of evil.”
“Evil” rhetoric in other terrorist contexts has also been regarded as pointless and misleading. Telhami (2002), for example, argues that “There has to be a way of dealing with the realities that have made suicide bombings acceptable to a large number of Palestinians and others. To pretend that this issue is simply one of a choice between good and evil is to know nothing of human psychology.” Others have similarly argued the fruitlessness of demonizing far-right hate groups that com-mit atrocities “because the impulse to comcom-mit atrocities doesn’t so much originate with the organization as pass through and become amplified by it” (Jensen 2002, 49–50). However appropriate the moral condemnation of the violence done by these groups, Jensen contends, “eliminating them will not wipe out the social con-ditions that give rise to them.”
The rhetoric of evil also ignores the fact that some relatively ordinary people can commit evil. Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, for example, makes a case that the men usually (and understandably) called maniacs for their extreme cru-elties were not, in fact, sadistic, fanatic personalities, lusting to kill. Although many terrorists are fanatical in their convictions—and certainly not ordinary in
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what they do—even the evil of the most fanatical can take on various shapes and look different depending upon the circumstances in which it reveals itself and upon the observer.
An examination of a videotape made of a “coffee klatch” showing al-Qaeda leader bin Laden with his cohorts presented what journalist Lance Morrow (2001) called “the distinctive atmosphere of evil with its feet up—sated, self-satisfied, laugh-ing.” According to Morrow, rather than evil performed onstage with typical lurid lighting and horrid effects, “Here we see evil backstage, with its makeup off—the smirking, kicked-back thuggishness, say, of gangsters twirling pasta and gloating over the success of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” though granted, with Islamist pi-ety added to the scene.
Although in many instances, the loose and careless application of the rhetoric of evil can be misleading and harmful, evil remains a reality to many believers.
French poet Baudelaire wrote that evil’s shrewdest trick is to persuade us that it does not exist. “Does bin Laden confirm the existence of evil?” asked Morrow. “Or the stupid ordinariness of awfulness? Both, I’d say. One of the consequences of 9-11 has been to revive, so to speak, the belief in evil. Evil is hard to define, but it’s there all right. It’s like pornography: you know it when you see it.” Of course, there are differences about what constitutes pornography, too. See also ANIMAL; ANTI
-CHRIST;AXIS OF EVIL;CRUSADE;DEMON;ENEMY;FANATIC;FUNDAMENTALIST; HITLER ANAL
-OGY;MADMAN;MONSTER; SATAN;SNAKE;VAMPIRE.