The Enemy in the Mirror

“Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults.”

― Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack*

The Mirror

John Haynes Holmes (November 29, 1879 – April 3, 1964) was a prominent Unitarian minister, pacifist, and co-founder of the NAACP and the ACLU. He is noted for his anti-war activism.

It is on the “anti-war activism” that I will focus.

The Good War That Wasn’t – and Why it Matters, by Ted Grimsrud

John Haynes Holmes…published an article in the Christian Century in December 1940 that warned that going to war with the Nazis would not eradicate the spirit of Nazism.

Holmes writes: Christians had long persecuted Jews; whites had long held a view of racial superiority over blacks; Hitler’s were not the first concentration camps – the Spanish over the Cubans, the British over the Boers, the Americans over the Filipinos; Hitler did not invent the idea of the subjection of helpless people – the British in India, France in Morocco, and Belgium in the Congo.

“Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

Grimsrud, citing Holmes:

“This man, so cruel, so ruthless, so revengeful, is not alien to ourselves.  He is the perversion of our lusts, the poisoned distillation of our crimes.  We would not be so aghast at his appearance did we not see in him, as in a glass darkly, the image of the world that we made.  Our sins have found us, that’s all.”

Conclusion

"The Mirror" is episode 71 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It originally aired on October 20, 1961 on CBS.

In a Central American dictatorship, Ramos Clemente, and his four lifelong confidants, D'Alessandro, Garcia, Tabal, and Cristo, stage a successful revolution against the regime of General De Cruz….De Cruz also tells Clemente that his ornate mirror has the ability to reveal enemies in its reflection. Clemente initially dismisses De Cruz.

After a week of killings and executions (including of his four lifelong confidants, whom he has seen in the mirror), a priest named Father Tomas asks him to end the executions:

Eventually, Clemente seeks counsel from the priest, but finds no comfort in the priest's response that all tyrants have but one real enemy, whom they never recognize until it is too late. Clemente takes one last, long look in the mirror ... and sees only himself. He picks up his pistol and throws it at the mirror, smashing the glass. The priest, who is standing just outside the office, hears the glass break. As he listens at the door he hears a gunshot. He rushes into Clemente's office and finds Clemente's lifeless body sprawled on the floor, a gun in his hand. "The last assassin," he says, "and they never learn ... they never seem to learn."

“I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.”

― Franklin D. Roosevelt

(* All quotes from Goodreads.)