How to beat the Devil

I met the devil once and I know what he looks like. I survived but I am haunted to this day.

I have seen evil. Yep, I looked the devil right in the eye and let me tell you, he was beautiful. Well of course, he would be. Makes sense. The devil wants us to see what we want to see.

That’s why we can’t see the devil. What’s the old saying? The devil’s greatest trick is making us think he doesn’t exist.

It gets to the point where we think the devil is just an office clerk. Evil is something anyone is capable of. That’s what Hannah Arendt meant when she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.”

This past week, I watched a film of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1961. There was Arendt in the courtroom, that’s where she had her epiphany. God, knows what she was thinking.

There was the devil right in front of her, and Hannah Arendt became his stenographer.

Let me take you back to when I met the devil. It was on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. I was working with CNN and embedded with Pakistani troops fighting the Taliban. The militants had already seized a good chunk of northern Pakistan and had now advanced to about a three-hour drive from the capital Islamabad.