Goodies and Baddies
Our human obsession with dividing light from darkness
The year was 2006, and the performing duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb were the hottest thing on the British comedy scene. Having found great success with their television program Peep Show, they began a sketch program titled That Mitchell and Webb Look. The first episode featured a sketch in which the two comedians played Nazi SS officers on the Eastern Front of World War II. It proved to be a classic.
The sketch begins with Webb’s character proclaiming his optimism about the campaign, only to be interrupted by a troubled Mitchell, who has just noticed that the SS caps have skulls on them. Suddenly doubting all his presuppositions, Mitchell asks, “Are we the baddies?” The scene proceeds with Mitchell continuing to voice his doubts and Webb attempting to assuage them, until they both accept the fact that they are, in fact, the baddies.
This humorous sketch, now memorialized with the use of “Are we the baddies?” GIFs in countless social media debates, provides a window into human moral thought. Nearly everyone on planet earth accepts that the Nazis were the baddies in World War II. But the existence of baddies seems to imply the existence of goodies, and those tend to be more difficult to identify.
Were the Soviets the goodies? After all, that is who the Nazis were fighting in that Mitchell and Webb sketch. It was the Soviets who ultimately pressed all the way to Berlin, ending the Nazi regime. I recently had the chance to visit the memorial that the Soviets left to their dead in the middle of Berlin’s Tiergarten. Present-day Russians are proud of what they achieved in the “Great Patriotic War,” as they tend to call it.
But other factors may cause us to question if the Soviets were goodies. First, the war began when they invaded Poland along with the Germans. Second, the policies of Soviet leader Josef Stalin had led to so many deaths in Ukraine that a substantial portion of the people there initially welcomed the Germans as liberators in 1941, a fact that the Kremlin is doing its best to use for propaganda purposes today. The Soviet regime was totalitarian and genocidal, with millions of its own citizens perishing in political purges, forced migrations, and man-made ecological disasters. Right up to 1939, most people in Europe believed the Soviet threat was bigger than the Nazi one, and with good reason. The Soviets’ push to Berlin was also a campaign of mass rape. No, the Soviets were not the goodies.
Were the rest of the Allied powers the goodies? This has been the standard interpretation in the West, but it is being increasingly called into question. The release of the film Oppenheimer this year has renewed the debate over the use of nuclear weapons against the Japanese population, and the internment of Japanese Americans within the continental U.S. has also led to significant criticism. The British are blamed, rightly or wrongly, for failing to stop a horrific famine in Bengal that claimed millions of lives, and for bombing campaigns in Hamburg and Dresden that are often deemed excessive. The French have been forced to deal with the legacy of Nazi collaboration, and it is now more widely known that the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek purposely destroyed levees on the Yellow River to slow the progress of Japanese invaders, killing hundreds of thousands of his own Chinese countrymen.
In war as in all of life, it is easy to find baddies, but much more difficult to find goodies.
Unholy Land
This brings us to the tragic situation unfolding in the Middle East. Hamas, the militant Islamist organization that has run Gaza since the last election was held in 2007, committed the largest terrorist attack on Israeli soil in that nation’s history, with perhaps as many as 1,500 people killed by gunmen who managed to break through the blockade around the Gaza Strip. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict had been on a low simmer since the Second Intifada ended and Israel’s Iron Dome was installed, but now it is threatening to boil over and flood the entire region in a scorching deluge. So, who are the baddies and the goodies?
Hamas’ long-standing policy has been to kill Israeli citizens whenever and however they can, but their latest attack marks a new ethical low. The civilian casualties in this case were not mere collateral damage, but the entire point. Hundreds of Israelis were shot at point blank range, many in their homes. Women were sexually assaulted. Even infants were not spared. It seems safe to conclude that the people who rape women and slaughter babies are the baddies, and nearly all the world reached this conclusion as details of the attack were revealed.
But just as quickly as Hamas was condemned, there came a tidal wave of nuance. Palestine is not Hamas, many insisted. Palestinians are not the baddies. As Israel placed the Gaza Strip under a complete siege, with no water, electricity, or fuel allowed through, the protestations grew. Images of flattened Palestinian neighborhoods and an Israeli military directive for all civilians in Gaza to move south within twenty-four hours also soured the pot. Soon, the number of Palestinians killed in these bombings surpassed the number of Israelis killed in the terrorist attack. So, are the Israelis also the baddies?
The Biden administration seemed to initially communicate the exact opposite. In a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledged, “You may be strong enough on your own to defend yourself—but as long as America exists, you will never, ever have to. We will always be there, by your side.”1 Blinken echoed this sentiment a few days later when he said of Israel, “We will stand with it today, tomorrow, and every day, and we’re doing that in word and also in deed.”2
Such absolute statements practically beg for someone to ask, “What if Israel does something incredibly stupid? Will we still support them then?” But such questions are often frowned upon in the American political sphere. Most Americans believe the Israeli government are the goodies in this and every situation, perhaps because they see the modern Israeli state as an important part of biblical prophecy, or less spiritually, because it is the Middle East’s best functioning democracy. Criticism of the Israeli government is seen as anti-Semitism in disguise.
In his press conference with Blinken, Netanyahu asserted, “Hamas has shown itself to be an enemy of civilization,” and concluded that, “There will be many difficult days ahead, but I have no doubt that the forces of civilization will win.”3 Civilization versus barbarism, democracy versus tyranny: that is the way Netanyahu wished to frame the conflict, knowing it would play well with an American audience. Indeed, it almost sounded as if Netanyahu was playing a track from the President George W. Bush greatest hits album, so similar was his rhetoric to the way Bush used to speak after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
But there is reason to doubt whether Netanyahu is the best person to be giving speeches about defending democratic civilization. Indeed, over the past two years or so, Israelis have mostly been fighting each other. The right-wing coalition which Netanyahu leads has attempted to enact changes to Israel’s judicial system that many Israelis see as a weakening of their democracy. The protests have been large and frequent. Nothing like them has been seen in Israel’s history. Netanyahu himself is currently awaiting trial on corruption charges, the first sitting Israeli Prime Minister to face a criminal indictment. Netanyahu kind of seems like a baddy.
Ultra-orthodox Israeli Jews have for years been settling on Palestinian land in the West Bank in violation of international law, often leading to violent confrontations. And while most nations object to Hamas’ repeated terrorist attacks, they also consider the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza as little different from the European ghettos in which Jews were once confined. The longer you look, the harder it is to conclude that the Israelis are all goodies, or that their political leaders are anything but baddies.
Why Then Do We Call Them Good?
But why must we identify goodies and baddies anyway, and what standard are we applying? Certain standards do exist for our reference: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, etc. However, those documents contain moral assumptions that refer us back to a logically prior source. Where do we get our concept of a just war or the universal dignity of human beings? After all, Hamas seems to reject both.
I would submit that we look for goodies and baddies in both current events and history because it helps us to make sense of the world around us. We have an idea, either conscious or subconscious, of some great narrative in which the forces of light and darkness clash, and light is ultimately triumphant. We like our heroes to be purer than pure and our villains too evil to merit compassion. Things are simpler that way. We are not required to wrestle with ethical nuances.
Yet, in my years of studying our world and its history, I have come to the unavoidable conclusion that if being a goody requires making the right moral decision in all times and situations, then there are no goodies on planet earth and never have been. We are simply a bunch of baddies, some worse than others, but all morally compromised. For all of us, at one point or another, have broken the moral codes to which we pledge allegiance. We have victimized other people in ways small and great. When we ought to seek justice, we settle for vengeance, even as Hamas did. Yes, we can make some choices that are better than others and do things that seem objectively good, but in our hearts, we are selfish, prideful beings who hurt one another.
Our desire for a neat black-and-white narrative cannot therefore be based on an honest assessment of the world around us. It is either the product of delusion, or a deep longing for something beyond this earth. We hope and pray that there is one who is not only good through and through, but powerful enough to crush the forces of evil, whose deeds we must endure for as long as we draw breath.
Jesus Christ is quoted in Scripture as saying, “No one is good but God alone.”4 Those same Scriptures say that Christ, the only human to be fully good, now offers that goodness without charge to the baddies of this world. What then can we say, but that grace has allowed us to have that which we could never achieve by nature?
The goody will win. The baddies will lose.
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PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE:
“Violence but not without Mercy” at Jokien with Tolkien
“We Do not Choose our Crosses” at 1517
"Freedom is the natural condition of the human race in which the Almighty intended men to live. Those who fight the purpose of the Almighty will not succeed. They always have been, they always will be beaten." - Abraham Lincoln, spoke these words while President-elect attending the 1861 Peace Convention in Washington, DC, prior to the American Civil War
"Palestinian land in the West Bank", that land was apportioned to the Jordanians in 1946, after being a part of the Ottoman Empire, since 1566, 380yrs earlier. It was never owned or governed by, so called Palestinians. Israel won the West Bank from the Jordanians who attacked them in the Six Day War of 1967. Any newly named Palestinians fled further into Jordan and were eventually expelled after trying to overthrow King Hussein. They were then allowed to migrate to Lebanon through Syria.
"in my years of studying our world and its history", you missed a few critical details."