“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Our collective unconscious, our collective shadow: https://vimeo.com/242569435

After reading Solzhenitsyn, I was surprised to learn that these famous words are actually taken out of context.

The full idea is something like this: There are no "purely good" people, the best we can see is part-good-part-evil, and thus improving the world requires an internal battle, but... people can actually become "purely evil", and the usual path is through ideology, when you simply decide that anything you do serves a goal that justifies the means, and then you feel free to become a cartoonish villain as long as you follow the ideology.

Funny that you would quote Solzhenitsyn, who in the last years of his life went hard-core Russian nationalist extremist and indeed called for separating certain people from the rest of us and destroying them (only this time it would be a “Christian state” doing the destroying, and not the godless USSR, so it would all be OK).

This is exactly what I think he is trying to say - and of course he is no exception to this rule. Are you equating his behavior with him being a failure, discrediting his work? This angle is a bit too black and white / dualistic for me.

Yeah, bad is who does bad, not much more to it than that when it comes to torture and wars of convenience.

This person was an interrogator. Should armies not interrogate prisoners and not have interrogators? Is trying to obtain intelligence information from the enemy an inherently evil activity?

If it is not, then yes it's better to have good people do this job than bad ones, as with any job.

I'd say worry first about whether you should take part in an unjust war, the specifics of your actual role in the inevitable atrocities seem more like a secondary concern.

I mean, clearly his individual crimes aren't as bad as say those of soldiers raping a 14-year old. But he does willingly and knowingly take part in, and help perform, the the larger crime that is the poorly justified invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In this case, yes, it was clearly evil. The videos speak volumes.

There is not such thing as "good" people raping, torturing, humiliating, terrorizing and doing evil things to other helpless and disarmed people.

> There is not such thing as "good" people raping, torturing, humiliating, terrorizing and doing evil things to other helpless and disarmed people.

There's no indication that he directly participated in any of that, and quite a bit to indicate he didn't. After all, he was heading towards pacifism before he was deployed, and became so disillusions that he was honorably discharged as a conscientious objector. I wouldn't be surprised if the people doing those evil things were careful to hide those activities from him. He seems like the kind of person who'd have caused problems for them, and they probably understood that.

> Is trying to obtain intelligence information from the enemy an inherently evil activity?

In a war of aggression it very much is.

It would seem that in the case of interrogation, it would be best for a 'good' person to do the job to reduce the number of false-positives?

Or for that matter the idea that a "good" person will do less harm in a "bad" situation than someone that's outright malicious.