'EVIL' CHALLENGES IMPOTENCE PREENS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605250014-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 2, 2012
• Sequence Number: 14
• Publication Date: June 19, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605250014-2
gr?EARED
WASHINGTON TIMES
19 June 1985
`Evil' challenges,
impotence preens
The face of evil is a familiar one, and every gen-
eration of us is required to learn to recognize it.
The generations in the West seem cursed with
weak men who yearn in vain for the day that evil -
they shrink in their cowardice even from calling it_
that - gets a facelift.
Evil loves the reflection of its face in all that it
does. This is the reality that weak men cannot bring
themselves to acknowledge.
Josef Mengele, the angel of death at Auschwitz,
went to hell unrepentant, his son Rolf now tells us in
the inevitable magazine memoirs.
"I have not the slightest cause from within
myself to 'justify' or even excuse any decisions, acts
or behavior in my life beyond the objective reasons
behind them," the doctor told his son some years
ago.
.. My tolerance really does have an exact limit
- and that is where traditional values are con-
cerned which are beyond discussion, and where I
must fear danger for those close to me or for my
national community."
His father spoke until the very end of his mali-
cious and malevolent belief in the existence of
"worthless" lives, Rolf Mengele recalls, and he
never understood that neither he nor anyone else
had the right to judge the value of a life, or the lack
of value of a life - let alone to destroy it.
Nevertheless, the doctor, who filled the wombs of
living women with wet concrete and injected dye
into the eyes of living children just to see what
would happen, was "a kindly man." The son recalls
the stories he wrote about about warm puppy
dogs and laughing children, and he often rowed lit-
tle Brazilian children across a lake in a boat he built
himself.
No one in 1985 - well, almost no one - finds it
difficult to see Mengele as "bad;' if not necessarily
"evil" Some of the Mengele neighbors in Bavaria
can't find it in their hearts to blame the family for
taking care of the old man; "after all," said one par-
ticularly mindless hausfrau, "it's the Christian
thing to do."
RLE CH
But recognizing the face of "evil" in a new gen-
eration is difficult for some people in the West who
learned not very much from the experience with
evil during the Hitler time. The Shi'ite savages in
Beirut have conducted no Mengele-like medical
experiments (such "science" being probably beyond
their competence), but they have shown the same
malevolent contempt for the "worthless" lives of
infidels. Like Dr. Mengele, they show a special
interest in Jews.
What manner of men is it that can kill with the
feral fury that took the life of the American sailor,
whose demeanor so set him apart from the rest
of the infidels aboard Flight 847? What manner of
men is it that are so driven to mutilate the body of
the infidel that when their boots are finished with
their grisly work a mother could not recognize the
face of her son?
Far more important, what manner of a people are
they who argue not over how and when such evil
should be answered, but whether? Already the tele-
vision talk shows, the editorial pages of the great
newspapers, the conversations of the
enlightened and the civilized resound to the unctu-
ous bromides of cowards.
"What is hard to understand," writes Richard
Cohen in The Washington Post, who is always
.puzzled and usually a little offended by martyrs
who won't go nicely to their deaths, "is why both the
United States and Israel persist in thinking that
violence is an antidote to passion."
The savages in Beirut, he clucks with a trium-
hant wink, 11 '
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earl
iier Be Beirut bombing in which the CIA has _ be-IYA,\ ,
The White House, recently so contemptuous of ~C4
the "weak" and "vacillating" Jimmy Carter, goes to rn
work on the containment of the "politics" of the
dilemma. Everything is "damage control." This is
the way the political technicians talk; it might even
be the way they think.
Passions cool quickly, righteous anger flees, and
the unrepentant evil among us calibrate the risks in
new assaults on men who revel in their impotence.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/05/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605250014-2