GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 5:12
Indifference Does Not Protect From Evil
Indifference does not protect from evil.
The 18th-century Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke wrote, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Close to Burke’s philosophy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) wrote, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
During Bonhoeffer’s last years, German SS (Schutzstaffel, protection squadron) paramilitary troops marched through the streets of German towns singing the national anthem “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Über alles in der Welt…” (Germany, Germany over all, Above all in the world). In contemporary parlance it might be translated “Germany, Germany, make Germany Great Again.” The SS began breaking down doors and windows to arrest Jews, tackling Jews in the streets, capturing Jews in offices in the name of keeping the Aryan race pure. Jews were sent to subhuman camps—some in Germany and others in the Netherlands, Poland, and the Czech Republic—and millions were exterminated. While this was happening, there was no widespread popular uprising against this treatment of German Jewish citizens. However, this indifference did not protect the population from evil, for German citizens considered a threat to the regime were arrested and sent to hell-hole prisons. Bonhoeffer was executed in 1945.
St. Mark described Jesus and his party’s landing on the beach of the Sea of Galilee in the region of the Gerasenes, where a man with an unclean spirit confronted them. Jesus first commanded the unclean spirit to leave the man, but it didn’t. Then he tried to exorcise the evil spirit by identifying it by name, but it didn’t leave. Realizing its time was up, however, the evil spirit or spirits, Mark wrote, “And they begged him, saying, ‘Send us into the pigs, so that we may enter into them.’” (Mark 5:12)
It may be stretching this metaphor a bit, but the pigs were indifferent to what was going on around them; they were doing what pigs do, minding their own business—“Now a great herd of pigs grazing was there on the hillside” (Mark 5:11)—but that indifference did not protect them from evil. The indifference of the German population to the brutal, beastly treatment of other humans did not protect them.
Currently, citizens who watch hooded ICE agents smash car windows so humans can be dragged out, people tackled in office buildings, people taken off streets, people stripped of their clothing, people’s heads shaved, and people sequestered in overcrowded pens with metal beds in windowless rooms all to the tune of making America great again, and remain indifferent, are not protected from evil. Citizens are now being threatened with the same treatment—indifference does not protect from evil.
There is a real problem facing the United States, but becoming complicit, indifferent to the subhuman treatment of humans to address the problem, only diminishes the nation’s humanity—indifference does not protect from evil. Indifference reflected in transferring the problem to the brutal dictator of another nation is not protection from evil. Since U.S. dollars are paying for this subhuman treatment, every United States citizen is with those captives in the foreign hell-hole—indifference does not protect from evil.
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