According to my grandfather's 1943 Webster's New International Dictionary, the bogeyman is, "A goblin; a bugbear; also, the Devil." In the year 2000, Webster's New World Dictionary explained that the bogeyman is "an imaginary, frightful being."
Many people today are dismissive when it comes to scary monsters. They don't think the world's scary monsters are all that scary. The scary geo-political monsters of the earth, that claimed 100 million victims in the 20th century, are now fading into legend. In truth, our recognition of evil is often brief and partial. Back in the 1930s and 1940s there were those who denied the crimes of Stalin. Later, the crimes of Mao were set aside by collectivists and social scientists eager to praise bold social experimentation. Fear of communism's stable of monsters was dismissed as a lowbrow reaction. Such a stance was thought to indicate crankiness. Détente with Russia and Nixon's opening to China were applauded. Our comfortable, self-congratulating intellectuals said that anti-communism had fashioned a bugbear out of the USSR and the People's Republic of China. At the same time, on the other side of the political funhouse mirror, there arose a new cottage industry in Holocaust revisionism. The mentality here is not simply the result of Hitler worship. Many have gone this route out of a genuine psychological need to deny evil. There is an urge, a tendency, to deny the monster that lies within by denying the monster that lies without. At least, that's my take on it. Consider the following historical fact: America's confrontation with Hitlerian racism opened the way to a re-examination and correction of racial policy in the United States.
In the present crisis over Iraq there are at least two schools on the question of evil. Each would accuse the other of inventing a bogeyman. Consider President George W. Bush's recent speech to the United Nations. In that speech the president noted that the U.N. Commission on Human rights had detected serious atrocities in Iraq. Bush explained that, "Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution and torture by beating, burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape." The U.S. president went on to say that, "Wives are tortured in front of their husbands; children in the presence of their parents -- all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state."
According to President Bush, Saddam Hussein is an evil monster. In fact, nobody outside Iraq denies these charges. Saddam Hussein is, in fact, a warmongering mass murderer who admires Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Yet, there is a school of thought in our midst that mocks the president's view. According to this school the word "evil" is better applied to oil companies. In fact, President Bush and Vice President Cheney are said to be the henchmen of "big oil" -- one of the chief evils in the world. That's right. Oil companies are looking for oil, drilling wells, shipping and refining oil products. This nefarious wickedness is said to infect Washington, D.C. It is nothing but pure imperialism, argues Justin Raimondo of the Web site Antiwar.com, listed as a division of the Center for Libertarian Studies. According to Raimondo (see https://www.antiwar.com/justin/j091302.html): "Next to the United States, Iraq is a piker when it comes to outlawry and the ruthless pursuit of violent ambitions." No doubt the communists and Islamists would agree. In the antiwar lexicon, Saddam Hussein is a hobgoblin meant to frighten us into an imperialist war. Raimondo tells us to "forget about 'weapons of mass destruction,' unless we're talking about the mass destruction of Big Oil's projected profits."
Saddam Hussein is not a monster. Forget about him. Forget about his victims and his nuclear ambitions. The real evil happens when you pull up to your local service station to discover that gasoline is under $2.00 a gallon. Think of the horror of big oil and the malefactors of great wealth getting it over on everyone. All that evil in the world so that consumers can have something affordable to consume. According to this logic the Sept. 11 hijackers targeted the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with good reason. But the administration propagandists and their toadies in the press have turned things around. They set up Saddam Hussein as a bogeyman when Bush himself is the Prince of Darkness. According to Raimondo, "The actual casus belli is intimately bound up with the economic tug-of-war between the Saudi government and Big Oil over the future development of its rich natural gas deposits, and access to Saudi territory."
That's right. Somewhere out in the Arabian desert an oil executive is pulling the toenails out of some poor Bedouin. "Give us your natural gas or we'll kill your favorite goat!" In the best tradition of conspiracy theory, Raimondo wrote: "For a year, the Saudis have been negotiating with consortia headed by Exxon-Mobil, the Royal Dutch-Shell Group, and British Petroleum over the terms of an agreement that would give Western oil companies access to regions long denied to them."
Oil company executives are not simply like the thugs and gangsters who run many Third World and communist countries. They are worse! One marvels at the fact that Exxon-Mobile, Royal Dutch-Shell and British Petroleum have not launched a blitzkrieg into Indonesia, Venezuela and Libya. Why weren't the U.S. Marines unleashed against the Iranian mullahs in 1980?
In the dispute between the two aforementioned schools of political thought we find two visions of evil. On the one side we see the specter of Saddam Hussein; on the other side we see the goblins of "big oil." There is no better moral test for our time. Those who denounce the United States and its policy, who denounce big oil, who denounce Israel have an easy time criticizing imperfect institutions. But are we to understand that these exemplars have given up their automobiles, walk to the store, ride their bicycles to work and freeze in the winter?
I am also baffled in another respect. Saddam Hussein's organization does indeed torture children to death. His military aggression against his neighbors is well documented. His plan to hit Israel with a nuclear bomb has been testified to by defectors.
Yet the oil companies are evil. The oil companies are responsible for the whole mess.
Take a look around at America. It is not perfect. Things are not as they should be. We do not live in utopia. But anyone who suggests that American government or business is the focus of evil in the modern world needs a reality check. Have you been to Cuba? Have you seen the labor camps in China? Perhaps you ought to take a tour of war-torn Chechnya or visit Iran.
Those who take the time to study conditions in other countries know an imaginary devil from a real one. And there are real devils out there.
