iran, iran all night and day . . .

mahmoud ahmadinejad embodies an evil of such monstrous and surreal proportions that it's hard to believe he isn't a fictional character dreamed up by someone on staff at marvel. "mad" may not be his middle name, but it is right in the middle of his name (a handy way to remember the appropriate spelling, if you need one). who would be surprised by his desire to host an intellectual fete debating the reality of the holocaust? not me, and i bet not you either; what i am shocked by is that he's found close to seventy people from thirty countries around the world who want to sit in a room with him and tell him how right he is. my shock is, perhaps, the result of my own naivete and desperate desire to believe most people are not insane and would like to be good; of course, the fact that there's a historical record of something like the holocaust taking place within the last hundred years shakes that belief to its very foundations, so i suppose i shouldn't be as surprised as i am. eugenics was viewed favorably in many countries in the early twentieth century, and scientists in the united states praised 1930s germany as "perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit." everybody everywhere didn't throw themselves in front of tanks in an effort to stop the holocaust the second it began. still, i'd like to think that, as a whole, humanity has progressed since then. but then i hear things like this:

If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt. And if, during this review, it is proved that the Holocaust was a historical reality, then what is the reason for the Muslim people of the region and the Palestinians having to pay the cost of the Nazis' crimes?

"let us throw the jews into the river!" cries manouchehr mottaki. "if they float, they are guilty! if they sink, they are also guilty, but they will no longer be a concern." and seventy people from thirty countries around the world have rushed to his side to defend him.

my country started a war to, as the rhetoric has gone most recently, depose a dangerous dictator. and hussein was a terrible man; under his lead, close to a million iraqi kurds were displaced or killed in the 1980s--when the united states was supplying iraq with weapons, even after hussein ordered the mass gassing of kurdish towns. after the khmer rouge conquered cambodia, killing nearly two million people in three years, the u.s. government directed money and aid to pol pot for half a decade because it thought his "government" was at least a little bit better than vietnam's. in 1994, when the hutus in rwanda started to really find their groove, the united states and the u.n. evacuated all of their personnel and then did nothing more, aside from carefully refrain from referring to the tutsi massacre as a genocide--a categorization that would have necessitated intervention. and now ahmadinejad has thrown a little party and dared his guests to come up with one good reason between them why he shouldn't erase israel from the world map, and we're, you know, we're watching him. we're talking things over. and wouldn't i love to run so far away, but that's been the problem all along. there is a sucking void where modern humanity's moral compass ought to be. too many people would rather not dirty their hands with all this unpleasantness; at all costs, we must defend our beautiful minds.

what if i told you my beautiful mind has decided that war is a genius population-control measure and thinks we ought to start them everywhere? isn't it a fact that every problem the planet is facing right now would be solved by a stiff reduction in the human population? less pollution, less environmental degradation, fewer food shortages, less burden on health-care and social systems, slowed spreading of contagious diseases--all those fears could be placated. and we clearly don't have a problem with wars; the ones we're in are noble and just, and those we choose not to involve ourselves with can be whatever they like, so long as they keep it off of our land. do you think i could get seventy people in a room to weigh the pros and cons of that? does that idea have more or less merit, in your opinion, than the one currently under discussion in iran?

who wouldn't recoil from an idea like that? no one; because we don't want to kill millions of people. we want to be good. at least, that's what we naively, desperately tell ourselves.

so why aren't we?