Satanic force v. evil empire.

IN THE LIGHT of Eugene Methvin's essay in this issue (p. 22), it is fascinating to read the New York Times's lead editorial on the day of the President's Bitburg visit. As a rule, the Times maintains a facade of secular rationalism. But this occasion elicited from it a revealing lapse into the rhetoric of the supernatural.

"Once, but in our time, there was a war transcending greed and miscalculation." This was World War II--the liberals' holy war, so different from the sordid events of World War I, Korea, of Vietnam. "Once, in our time, there existed a satanic force that aspired not only to conquer and plunder but to establish a bestial order in half the globe." The German people "enthusiastically" followed "this fascist demon" and "systematically slaughtered, gassed, and burned ten million men, women, and children whose genes might pollute the German 'race.'" After the ware, "the Russians, who had to drive back the Germans from the outskirts of Moscow, at a cost of twenty million, dead, loosed a terrible vengeance."

Setting aside the figure twenty million (the sole source for which, as Mr. Methvin points out, is very dubious), we have here the Times world view in a nutshell. It all revolves around Hitler, the satanic force, the fascist demon, the focus of evil in the modern world.

When Hitler is thus diabolized, he transcends measure or analogy. Even the stupendous statistics fall short, fail to express the "unique" evil that existed "once." In this way, liberalism immunizes Communism from the moral equation with Nazism.

Apart from the obvious service to Communism, this frees the liberal from any obligation to "speak out" (how the liberal loves to "speak out"!) against an evil that looms like a mountain over his humdrum moral preoccupations--South Africa, Chile, budget cuts. He can seek reconciliation and "dialogue" with the soviets. He can chat amicably, only ten years after the war, with the tyrants of Vietnam, who do not lie now in scattered graves. He can give the benefit of doubt to fledgling Communist regimes, as in Nicaragua, that have not yet consummated purges and genocides.

If the Sandinistas had adopted the symbolism of the Nazis, liberal shock and outrage would have been immediate. There would be no question of giving them time, waiting and seeing, or pointing out that Nazism isn't necessarily monolithic. The symbolism of evil--the satanic force itself--would have been more than enough. And rightly so. Symbols signify intentions.

But the adoption of Communist symbolism not only fails to horrify liberals; it actually enlists their sympathies. To them the symbols of Communism, even after 68 years of tyranny, terror, aggression, and mass murder, signify good intentions--nothing to "speak out" against.

The Times editorial speaks of the need to sustain "the memory of evil." Yet it treats the Soviet Union, Hitler's partner in launching the war, solely as hitler's victim; its postwar monstrosities were only "vengeance." Some "memory of evil." But then the Times often had a had time remembering what the Soviets are doing today.