First Things: Anthropos, Enemy, and Bin Laden

We naturally recoil at such commonplace observations about “monsters” like Eichmann and Bin Laden. There is something discomforting about hearing them described as normal people with wives and children. The more heinous the actions of our enemies, the more likely we are to forget that they are more like us than we care to admit. They are not just enemy but anthropos—a human being.

We have a tendency to want to think of our enemies as sub-human vermin, as being so distant from ourselves that they are almost a different species. But as much as Bin Laden and his ilk may justify their dehumanizing of Americans, we can never fall under the same delusion. It would be a Pyrrhic victory to save civilization only to lose our humanity.

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