Best of Dennis Prager - People Hate Those Who Fight Evil Far More Than Those Who Are Evil

by Dennis Prager, column originally posted October 3, 2024

I realized something very important about the human condition when I was in high school.

I realized that people tend to hate those who fight evil far more than they hate those engaged in doing evil.

What made me come to this conclusion was the way in which many people reacted to communism and to anti-communism.

To my amazement, a great many people—specifically, all leftists and many, though not all, liberals—hated anti-communists far more than they hated communism.

Because of my early preoccupation with good and evil, already in high school, I hated communism. How could one not, I wondered. Along with Nazism, it was the great evil of the 20th century. Needless to say, as a Jew and as a human, I hated Nazism. But as I was born after Nazism was vanquished, the great evil of my time was communism.

Communists murdered about 100 million people—all noncombatants and all innocent. Stalin murdered about 30 million people, including 5 million Ukrainians by starvation (in just two years: 1932-33). Mao killed about 60 million people. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) killed about 3 million people, one in every four Cambodians, between 1975 and 1979. The North Korean communist regime killed between 2 million and 3 million people, not including another million killed in the Korean War started by the North Korean communists.

For every one of the 100 million killed by communists, add at least a dozen more people—family and friends—who were terribly and permanently affected by the death of their family member or friend. Then add another billion whose lives were ruined by having to live in a communist totalitarian state: their poverty, their loss of fundamental human rights, and their loss of dignity.

You would think that anyone with a functioning conscience and with any degree of compassion would hate communism. But that was not the case. Indeed, there were many people throughout the non-communist world who supported communism. And there was an even larger number of people who hated anti-communists, dismissing them as “Cold Warriors,” “warmongers,” “red-baiters,” etc.

At the present time, we are again witnessing this phenomenon—hatred of those who oppose evil rather than of those who do evil—with regard to Israel and its enemies. And on a far greater level. Israel is hated by individuals and governments throughout the world. Israel is the most reviled country at the United Nations as well as in Western media and, of course, in universities.

Israel is a liberal democracy with an independent judiciary, independent opposition press, and equal rights for women, gays and its Arab population (20% of the Israeli population). Its enemies—the Iranian regime, Hamas, and Hezbollah—allow no such freedoms to those under their control. More relevantly, their primary goal—indeed, their stated reason for being—is to wipe out Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. Hamas and Hezbollah have built nothing, absolutely nothing, in Gaza and Lebanon, respectively. They exist solely to commit genocide against Israel and its Jews.

Why did so many people hate anti-communists more than communism? And why do even more people hate Israel more than Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah?

The general reason is that it is emotionally and psychologically difficult for most people to stare evil in the face. Evil is widely described as “dark.” But it is not dark; it is easy to look into the dark. What is far harder to look at is blinding bright light. Perhaps that is why Lucifer, the original name of the Christian devil, comes from the word “light.”

Why this is so—why people will not call evil “evil”—is probably related to a lack of courage. Once one declares something evil, one is morally bound to resist it, and people fear resisting evil. The fools who mock Christianity—whether through a work of “art” like “Piss Christ” (a crucifix in a jar of urine), or the Paris Olympics opening ceremony that mocked the Last Supper, or the Los Angeles Dodgers honoring the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” (men in drag dressed as nuns)—would never mock Islam. They fear Muslim wrath; they do not fear Christian wrath. Yet Islamic wrath has done and is doing far more evil in our time than Christian wrath.

And there is one additional reason for hating Israel—one that is specific to Israel—rather than those who seek to exterminate Israel: Jew-hatred, better known as antisemitism. The people who introduced a judging God and gave the world the Ten Commandments have been hated for thousands of years. Not those who systematically violate those commandments.

Column originally posted on Townhall.