The universality of evil

In 1916, a man by the name of Jesse Washington was accused of rape and murder and swiftly convicted. Washington was black and the woman was white and the location was Waco, Texas, a state that in the memory of men then alive had bolted from the Union over the issue of slavery. Washington was instantly seized by a mob. In front of schoolchildren free on their lunch hour, he was horribly mutilated and burned, his charred body hung from a tree. By all accounts, the crowd had a very good time.

The lynching of Jesse Washington happened not quite 100 years ago. It happened in the lifetime of my father, who was born in 1908, and of my mother, who was born in 1912, and it was done by Americans to an American -- and you can, if you have the stomach for it, Google the photo of Washington: a "Strange Fruit" of Billie Holiday's painful signature song. Somewhere out there, someone may recognize an ancestor in the gleeful crowd.

The ghastly death of Washington came to mind because of something President Obama said at the recent National Prayer Breakfast. Referring to the immolation of the Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh by the Islamic State, he said, "And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ." With that, all hell broke loose.

Obama was criticized for the inaptness of this comparison -- an atrocity committed just this year by Islamic militants likened to the effort hundreds of years ago to wrest Jerusalem from the Muslims. Some Christians took offense, seeing in the president's statement an effort to smear Christianity with a late hit. Yes, much evil has been done in the name of God, but the Islamic State evil was fresh and Christians have been off the hook for at least 700 years. Time, as they say, to get over it.

But for me, the hideous murder of the Jordanian pilot was not about religion -- after all, both the victim and his killers were Sunni Muslims -- but about evil and its universality. The Islamic State may cruise into town under the rippling black banner of fanatical Islam, but its heart beats with the pounding clarity of secular fascism. It wasn't religion that compelled Hutus to kill Tutsis in Rwanda and it wasn't religion that nearly killed off America's Indians. And while American racists often cited the Bible to justify slavery and then Jim Crow, other Christians were even more certain that slavery was an abomination. John Brown was no less fanatical than any Bible-pounding slave owner.

The Islamic State did not burst out of the desert; it burst out of human nature. It is not a throwback. It is of the present: now. Its atrocities are not solely the product of antiquated, warped Islam but of who we -- or at least some of us -- are. We are just an evolutionary tick away from the people who went to the Roman Colosseum to watch wild animals rip apart human beings.

Attempts to locate the soul of darkness in Islam or in Arabs or in any particular religion are refuted by memory. Germany was among the most civilized of nations before it went mad. Its music, its literature and its cinema were bold, and in its urban corners it was tolerant of gays and lesbians. Still, in an historical micro-second, it built bonfires, first for books and then for human beings.

Even the Holocaust -- the mass murder of Jews -- was not an effort to exterminate a religion, but a supposed race. It made no difference to the Nazis if a victim was religious, secular or even a convert to Christianity. The capital offense was supposedly in the blood. Being is what doomed the Jew. Not believing.

If you go to Germany today, you will find mere residues of its recent madness. In Poland, rock concerts are held near Auschwitz and the place itself is often a backdrop for selfies. In the Roman night, couples go to the Colosseum to smooch. We turn evil into comforting kitsch, but the hideousness of the Islamic State provides the sharp slap of a necessary reprimand. It reminds us not just that evil exists, but that it lurks under a patina of history -- or maybe just around the corner.

Richard Cohen's email address is cohenr@washpost.com.

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