Confronting Evil | Three People in History
How do leaders confront villains? Among history’s most important lessons are seeing how people and nations face down rising evil. In this episode, we are going to examine the actions of three statesmen as they looked outward and saw gathering storms on the horizon. They took different approaches; some failed and others succeeded. And perhaps their deeds can shape our own if ever our societies are under threat.
The dark is generous.
Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from the truths of others.
The dark protects us from what we dare not know.
Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentle dreams in night’s embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what would repel in the day’s harsh light. But the greatest of its comforts is the illusion that dark is temporary: that every night brings a new day. Because it’s the day that is temporary.
Day is the illusion.
Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of its own self.
With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.
James Buchanan
The 1856 presidential election in the United States was unique in many ways. It was the first in which the newly-formed Republican Party competed on a platform of ending what its leaders called the “twin relics of barbarism,” slavery and polygamy. Several minor parties nominated candidates as well, and the Democrats selected the relatively unknown diplomat James Buchanan. He had served as an ambassador abroad for most of the previous decade and was thus untainted by the controversy about chattel slavery. Buchanan won the election by sweeping the South and much of the lower North, and he pledged to preserve the South’s “peculiar institution” and respect voters’ wishes in matters of popular sovereignty.
Two days into his administration, the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Southern slaveowners could bring their slaves into free territory. President Buchanan likely knew of the case’s outcome thanks to his close association with Chief Justice Roger Taney. It is curious that he spoke of honoring the voters in his inauguration given that the Court had just taken slavery out of the political sphere—it was now, by judicial fiat, legal in most of the United States. The Dred Scott decision probably made civil war inevitable, and some Northern abolitionists began to speak openly of secession. Their argument was that a minority of Southerners had now captured every governing institution in Washington, DC, and they wished to form a new country that would preserve the rights of all people regardless of race.
Just four years later, President Buchanan learned that his successor would be the Republican Abraham Lincoln, who had won the presidency despite his name appearing on the ballot in only four out of more than a thousand counties in slave-owning states. Now Southerners called for breaking up the Union. Buchanan, a long supporter of slavery, believed that since Lincoln’s election had caused this crisis of the Union, he should be the one to fix it. The president gave a half-hearted endorsement to a packet of amendments to the U.S. Constitution as Congress tried to stave off a political disaster. These would have permitted slavery in federal territories below the old 36°30′ line set up under the Missouri Compromise (since ruled unconstitutional in Dred Scott), and forbade Congress or the president from abolishing slavery in the South. Most historians believe that Buchanan’s efforts showed that he did not understand the magnitude of the crisis facing the United States. Many Southern politicians, known as “fire-eaters” because they would rather eat fire than see slavery abolished, refused to limit slavery to certain states and territories, and Northern Republicans like President-elect Lincoln knew that further compromise with Southerners was futile. The amendments failed in Congress, and the United States hurtled toward disunion.
South Carolina, long the most quarrelsome of the slave states, seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860, and six more states followed it over the next seven weeks. President Buchanan did not act to bring the secessionists back into line but instead urged Lincoln and the Republicans to compromise on slavery. New measures proposed in Congress fell on deaf ears as “secesh” troops from the seven now-independent states took control of federal armories and fortresses across the South. Buchanan’s secretary of war insisted that the commander-in-chief’s inaction would precipitate a North-South conflict, but Buchanan still clung to hope that the slave states would not start a war until after he was out of office.
Events in South Carolina dominated Buchanan’s last days as president. Federal troops had secured Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, and “secesh” soldiers now took up positions and prepared artillery for an attack. The governor insisted that Buchanan order his men to give up the fort, but the president instead chose to reinforce Sumter with men and supplies. Unfortunately, he did not inform its commander that help was on the way, and the mission failed. A message reached the White House on March 3, 1861, that Fort Sumter was nearly out of food and fresh water, but the presidential inauguration was less than 24 hours away and Buchanan did nothing—though, in fairness, there was nothing he could have done by that point. Civil war came five weeks later when President Lincoln called up volunteers to suppress the rebellion and South Carolina militia attacked Fort Sumter. The war devastated the American South, cost nearly a million lives lost or changed forever, but it finally abolished the United States’ great national sin of chattel slavery.
The dark is generous, and it is patient.
It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt.
The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout.
The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and it waits behind the star that gives them light.
The dark’s patience is infinite.
Eventually, even stars burn out.
Neville Chamberlain
Fans of this podcast and history buffs worldwide know the story of World War Two’s origins, how the Western Allies chose to appease Adolf Hitler and the Nazis out of fear of another continental war and guilt at how an earlier generation of Allied statesmen had humiliated Germany. There is little doubt that appeasement emboldened the villains in Berlin, but that is not the only lesson of Neville Chamberlain’s premiership in Great Britain.
Winston Churchill and other opponents of appeasement had spent years describing Germany’s rearmament programs in parliamentary speeches and newspaper editorials, and Chamberlain had looked on these reports with disbelief. But as crises mounted in the Rhineland, Spain, Austria, and the Sudetenland, Allied leaders realized that they needed to strengthen their militaries in case the unthinkable came to pass. Chamberlain began to speak in Parliament about the necessity of rebuilding the British Army and increasing aircraft production in the country. This satisfied many of his opponents (though not the stubborn Churchill), and when the prime minister bought peace for the price of Czechoslovakia’s freedom at Munich, most in Britain believed that the government would immediately build up the military’s fighting strength. Some of Chamberlain’s defenders today argue that appeasement actually helped the Allies ultimately prevail in the war.
But the facts of history are stubborn things, and they point out a flaw in Chamberlain’s deeds. From October 1938 to September 1939, British and French rhetoric grew more bellicose. Both governments issued declarations that they would protect Po-land and other states in Eastern Europe from Nazi aggression, and those countries’ leaders believed these words. However, examining Anglo-French production statistics shows that neither power increased their output of weapons in those eleven months. Nor did they step up recruitment and training within their respective militaries. They did not match their aggressive words with deeds. When war came, Germany overran Poland and crushed France, then subjected Britain’s cities to merciless bombardment. Tens of thousands died, and while the war ended with Allied victory, the price was the greatest shedding of blood in human history.
The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.
It always wins because it is everywhere.
It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.
The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.
John Paul II
As Nazi thugs swarmed through Polish streets looking for Jews and other undesirables, thousands of young men and women volunteered to work for the Germans to avoid being kidnapped and sent to slave labor camps. One of these was the eighteen-year-old Karol Józef Wojtyła, an aspiring actor and linguist. The devoutly Catholic young man spent the war working in quarries and factories, avoiding arrest whenever the Nazis “cleansed” a neighborhood in Kraków, and acting in local theater troops. Wojtyła entered seminary when the war ended and was ordained as a priest a year later in 1946. He served in various Church capacities in Poland and often wept at his country’s broken dreams of freedom. Nazi tyranny had ended in 1945 with the promise of liberation by the Red Army, only to be replaced by more enduring oppression under Soviet rule. Free speech was banned, open elections were an international joke, and dissenters paid with their lives.
The Catholic Church in Poland was probably the strongest national church behind the Iron Curtain, and Wojtyła was a leading figure in it. He pressed for reforms within the Church and also urged the puppet government in Warsaw to loosen its harsh controls on Polish life. His youthful looks, elegant language, and powerful messages resonated in the hearts of millions on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and his star continued to rise within his Church. Wojtyła became Archbishop of Kraków and a cardinal in the Church, and though many expected him to rise to the papacy, he was content to serve God and his people in Poland.
In 1978, Pope John Paul I died after only a month on St. Peter’s Throne, and the College of Cardinals selected Wojtyła to be his successor after a three-day conclave in Vatican City. Observers knew that the youngest pope in centuries would be a revitalizing force in the Church, but few predicted that he would help lead a charge against the most evil force of repression the world had seen in generations. His early adulthood under Nazism and church service in Soviet Poland shaped his outlook, and soon it would help transform the world.
“Do not be afraid. Open, I say open wide the doors for Christ. To His saving power open the boundaries of states, economic and political systems, the vast fields of culture, civilization, and development. Be not afraid.” These words in John Paul II’s Inauguration Mass were, for many Catholics, the central message of his papacy. He had seen man’s inhumanity to man in his early life, and he believed that only Christ’s love would cast out that darkness. “Be not afraid” may have been mere words to Westerners who read them, but they sank deep into the hearts of millions of Catholics living under communist tyranny. A year into his papacy, on his first visit to Poland, crowds followed John Paul everywhere he went and chanted “We want God…we want God!” The puppet government in Warsaw considered breaking up these events if the pope spoke against their regime, but he never gave them an excuse. “Be not afraid” meant nothing to the scientific atheists who worshipped at the altar of Karl Marx, but the words put steel into the backbones of average Poles who for decades had remained silent against the villains who ruled them.
One man who heard John Paul’s message of courage was Lech Wałęsa, a young dockworker in Gdansk and a quiet opponent of the government. He took the words “be not afraid” to heart, and in 1980 formed Solidarność, the “Solidarity” labor union. These associations were illegal in the worker’s paradise of communist Poland, but Wałęsa’s movement soon spread across the country. Soviet spies infiltrated the union and beat or arrested members whenever they could, but Solidarity’s power only grew as more and more Polish workers remembered to “be not afraid.” Though not a Christian or Church-affiliated organization, Solidarity’s members often quoted John Paul in their literature, and the pope’s image regularly appeared on banners in their street marches. The Soviets knew that John Paul was a threat to their power in Eastern Europe, and many Western intelligence agencies pointed fingers at Moscow when a militant fascist shot and gravely wounded the pope in St. Peter’s Square. The man insisted that he was acting alone, and historians still debate his motives.
What is not open for debate is the effect that “be not afraid” had on the world. John Paul worked with Western leaders like Ronald Reagan to broadcast his words of courage into the captive nations using the “Voice of America” radio network, and people in communist states across the globe began to ask questions. In Central Asia, Muslims living under Soviet control began to turn back to their faith as John Paul spoke of unity among all faiths against the scientific atheism preached from Moscow. In Latin America, anticommunist guerrillas listened to scratchy broadcasts of the pope’s messages as they battled Cuban-backed communists for control of their countries. And in Eastern Europe, Solidarity members and other reformers languishing in Soviet prisons remembered to “be not afraid” while their fellows continued to march in the streets and endure communism’s brutality. Cries of “we want God” and “be not afraid” echoed in the streets of every city and town under the Red Army’s jackboots, and even the cracks of gunfire could not silence them.
In the midst of World War Two, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill reportedly had a conversation about religion. According to the British prime minister, Stalin dismissed the power of Christianity with the words, “The pope? How many divisions has he got?” Authenticity aside, communism’s rejection of human dignity could not compete with the messages of hope coming from Vatican City in the 1980s. Solidarity’s success in bringing down the Soviet puppets in Warsaw and the revival of a democratic Poland is one of many testament to John Paul’s influence. Lech Wałęsa himself said that there would have been no free Poland without “be not afraid.” Although historians debate the exact amount of credit to give the pope for the revolutions of 1989 and the downfall of Soviet power in Eastern Europe, those who heard him and felt their hearts and hands strengthened by “be not afraid” have continued to praise John Paul II as an inspiration for taking down the evil that oppressed them. He did not lead armies in battle or demonstrators in the streets, but he became a model of clear, honest, and un-shakeable resolve in the face of villainy, and his words drove others to leave an evil empire on the ash heap of history.
The dark is generous and it is patient and it always wins – but in the heart of its strength lies its weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.
Love is more than a candle.
Love can ignite the stars.
Standing Against Evil
Evil must be opposed. It cannot be ignored or embraced, as James Buchanan once did, or it leads to incalculable suffering and misery like that of the American slave plantations. It cannot be appeased or confronted with mere words, as Neville Chamberlain tried to do, or it emboldens villains to continue their systematic slaughter. It must be opposed in both word and deed. Pope John Paul the Great gave us just one of many examples. His words inspired others to brave actions, and his message of “be not afraid” reminds us that though evil can destroy the body, it cannot destroy the human soul.
