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Thursday, April 9, 2020

On the Meaning of Evil

In Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, a character went to the zoo and found an empty cage with a notice saying that the monkey that used to live in this cage was blinded by an evil man who threw tobacco in its eyes. The character was shocked because in communist ideology that he had been taught, the word “evil” was always used to describe the agents of American imperialism who plotted against the Soviet Union. It was unbelievable that an evil man would do something as immoral and meaninglessly cruel as throwing tobacco into a monkey’s eyes.

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