The duty to demand unconditional surrender

The exculpatory Euro-leftists seem unable to discuss those circumstances under which political matters must go beyond discussion. To the exculpatory leftist everything is always open to interminable discussion because they have a blind faith in the absolute power of reason. 

If we think about the matter in those terms, we might arrive at a good working definition of evil: Evil is that circumstance where reasonable men can reasonably no longer discuss differences, can no longer even agree to disagree nor even to settle the matter in combat but must move to settling the matter beyond combat to mutual annihilation. Evil is when reasonable men have a duty to demand unconditional surrender because the consequences of the surrender will be the annihilation of the system under surrender. Evil is what cannot just be defeated but what must be stamped out and eradicated. 

The honor code for dealing with evil is the most delicate of all. It is the duty of reasonable men to turn heartless when confronting evil. Evil evokes extremism in reasonable men, it drives them to behave in ways which, were it not in response to evil, would be considered by those men as both extreme and illegitimate. Evil overrules innocence. Reasonable men must eliminate even the innocent women and children of evil men. You can recognize as evil those whose code of honor enocourages them to treat reasonable men as though they were evil, i.e., men are evil who subject the innocent women and children of reasonable men to the sorts of treatment that would be appropriate only if those reasonable men were themselves evil. 

Reasonable men can differ; reasonable men can even differ so much they are driven to combat but what makes reasonable men reasonable is that at bottom they can agree with each other on some essential particle of justice. The minimal article of justice is the self-restraint that comes of the conviction that every man is due something. What I am due, you must restrain yourself from taking. The more I am due, the more self-restraint you must exercise. The more a code of honor designates as rightfully belonging to the bundle of things that is due to every man, the more just that society is. 

Evil is a society where there is no justice, where that bundle of things that is due to every man contains nothing. The German death camps were the consummate expression of evil. The inmates of the death camps were treated as though nothing was due them. They had no rights and so there was no justice. Those who deny the Genocide deny the possibility of evil in this world. They deny the possibility of evil because they themselves are evil and so they wish to blind the world to their true character. For evil men, dialogue masks their true character because the presumption of all dialogue is that the parties to the dialogue are entitled to a measure of respect, i.e., a measure of what is due them. When a man is evil he does not afford that measure of respect to his adversary. For an evil man therefore to engage in dialogue is a counterfeit. He simulates the affording of respect not because he would exercise the self-restraint that reason and justice demand but only to dissimulate in the act of dialogue and make it seem as though he weren't evil. 

Justice defines the power of the powerless. Justice apportions that measure of self-restraint even the most powerful, especially the most powerful, must exercise with regard to the least powerful because even the utterly powerless have their due. When a Palestinian militant searches out and shoots in the head a five year old girl hiding under her bed, he is exercising not the least bit of self-restraint and so he has become evil. He has shorn himself of all self-restraint because he has accepted an honor code that celebrates his own death and the death of his own children. An honor code that celebrates the death of one's own children is an honor code that entitles one to murder the children of one's adversary, and when he has gone so far as to justify such actions, he has descended into evil; and then, indeed, when the time comes, it will be the duty of reasonable men to murder those children of his, innocent though they may be, because they will have been touched by his cult of death and the evil that resides in its heart.