Night. It is forever night here, even when
the sun shines, stark and blazing, overhead. It is the night of those men who
love darkness, rather than light, because their deeds are evil. Darkness cloaks
the truths we cannot bear to face, re-clothing them in the illusion of
glamour. But how many of these men know
that they do evil? Some know, and take pleasure in it, they are devils in human
form and cruelty and destruction are their delight. The darkness is both within
them and without, and the pain of others has become their meat and drink. But
most of them are men, human beings with wives and children, who love and
delight in the common grace notes of life: the warm hug, the cool drink, the
feel-good trappings of ordinary success. How did they come to be such
instruments of Hell?
Some know that they do evil, but have lost
the ability to preserve their own souls. They may be valiant on the battlefield
they were trained for, but in the moral arena they are arrant cowards. They go
through the motions like men in a waking dream, automata who do just as they
are instructed with set faces and empty eyes. Somewhere, locked deep away,
their soul is screaming with the terror of damnation, but they dare not listen.
It is easier to sell your human birthright for a bowl of soup, than to throw
your soup back in your superiors’ faces. Such men end up on the other side of
the wire. They are called prisoners. But then, in such a system, who is free?
So they fumble their nervous addictions, and try to pretend all is well.
And many deny evil, refusing to name it for
what it is. Years of enculturation have made their hearts as cold, and as hard,
as the ice on the Bavarian mountains. It is just another, necessary job. It is
the prisoners’ own fault if they are hurt, if they are disobedient or
inadequate and cannot meet the demands placed upon them. Weak men deserve what
they get, and the elimination of the weak is the price that must be paid for a
‘better’ world. In truth, they have no choice. Once you admit the truth of others’
pain you can no longer deny your own: you must acknowledge that your own soul
was not created to thrive in this barren wasteland, where dog eats dog and the
hard men laugh at the bones. It is so much easier to drift along with the
system, submit to the propaganda and the lies, and dismiss love as the realm of
women and fools. And if the wind blows bleak and terrible in your nightmares,
well, you have learned to endure silently even in your sleep.
But no night is eternal, and when the light
of heaven breaks upon your prisoners and slaves, the eyes of the world will
turn to you and demand an accounting. And no one will consider the sheer
banality of evil, or the simplicity of the descent to Avernus, an adequate
excuse. You were a human being, you were supposed to see and know.
