The chorus chants, "The timid are blind, more blind than the blind. / Hoping the evil is not really evil / They welcome the evil. / Defenseless, exhausted by fear, they hope for the best / Until it's too late." The success of The Arsonists, also known as The Firebugs or The Fire Raisers, established Frisch as a world-class dramatist.
The battle lines between good and evil, between love and hate, between civilization and barbarism, between what could be the last generation of Western civilization and the first generation of a new Dark Ages, have been drawn more starkly than ever before.
Now there can be no mistake or denial of what we are up against: evil incarnate.
It is impossible to hear or see gruesome details of the massacre of civilians in Israel on October 7th - a date that will live in infamy - without the paralyzing sense that you are staring into The Abyss - the face of true evil.
Yes, as the Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn brilliantly noted, the line between good and evil cuts straight through every human heart, and certainly all of us have been guilty at some point or another of bad things.
The vast majority of us never cross the line into evil.
Those privileged young people who support this evil from their Ivy League dorm rooms are not the revolutionaries they fancy themselves to be; they are just automatons indoctrinated to shed their humanity and hate their political and religious enemies - but they have sufficient numbers and political/cultural power now not to hide it anymore.
Seeing the surge of support for - even celebration of - the barbaric evil on October 7th throughout Europe, Australia, and America, it is easy to feel disheartened and believe that it is too late, that we are witnessing a point of no return in the West's collapse.
Like the characters in The Arsonists, the West has been too blind for too long to see the evil, and/or too timid to nip it in the bud.
Many in the West, like Max Frisch's character Beidermann, simply could not grasp that things could get this bad, that the evil could be among us.
Yes, it can - but not if we don't recover a civilizational pride and self-confidence, the courage to stare down evil, and something the West hasn't had in half a century: the will to win.
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