In her 2004 profile of Lionel Chetwynd, the writer and producer behind Tom Selleck's moving portrayal of General Eisenhower during the immediate period leading up to D-Day, Cathy Seipp wrote:

Now in his early 60s, Chetwynd is a longtime naturalized American citizen who was born in England and raised in Montreal. He'd remembered from Canadian regimental history that of the 4,400-odd Canadians sent to Dieppe, about 3,600 were killed. Although they knew it was basically a suicide mission, not one man failed to report for duty. Chetwynd asked one of the old soldiers in his regiment, Sgt. Gordon Betts, why.

"My generation had to figure out what we were ready to die for," Chetwynd recalled Betts telling him. "You kids don't even know what to live for."

Many years later, when Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.

"So I went in," Chetwynd told me, "and someone there said, 'So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?'

"And I said, 'Well, they weren't bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?' And she said, 'Well, who's the enemy?' I said, 'Hitler. The Nazis.' And she said, 'Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who's the real enemy?'"

"It was the first time I realized," Chetwynd continued, "that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They've become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people."

But apparently, only if they're liberal democracies such as America, Canada, or Israel. And speaking of Hollywood's portrayal of the latter, Bookworm (found via Betsy Newmark) writes:

Terry Gross also asked [Munich screenwriter Tony Kushner] about the fact that Mohammed Daoud -- who masterminded the massacre -- was offended that Spielberg didn't ask him for advice. Kushner said that he and Spielberg consulted Palestinians other than Daoud. Showing his Leftist sensibilities, Kushner acknowledged that this is an Israeli movie, though, and it can't give full measure to the "history of Palestinian suffering." Since this is the usual Leftist talk, we know that he's not thinking of the history of fellaheen suffering at the hands of the Jordanians, or at the hands of Arab leaders who, in 1948, made a conscious political decision to keep the fellaheens displaced so as to retain their victim status. Or their suffering at Arafat's hands after he embezzled several billion dollars aimed at alleviating their primitive living conditions. Or their suffering now at the ends of the terrorist factions that populate their communities, and kill those who don't conform politically or socially.

Kushner raises another relativistic point that is common on the Left, and that I think also demands some attention. He points to the fact that the movie's terrorists are "absolutely recognizable as human beings." In this regard, he thinks that "art makes an important contribution to the discussion."

Kushner's argument exemplifies something common on the Left -- the inability to call Evil by its name and to ignore the trappings in which an evil person may deck himself. While police profilers may need to know if a killer loves dogs or opera, since each bit of knowledge may increase the odds of capturing him, those loves don't make the killer any less evil. (If you're thinking of Hitler at this point, so am I.)

In the same vein, Kushner says that the Palestinian actors hired for the movie were afraid that the Palestinian killers would be presented as "terrorists without any souls." But isn't that what they were? They kidnapped innocent people, bound, and slaughtered them. That's a soul-less act. The fact that not all Palestinians are terrorists without souls doesn't acquit the killers of that charge. While it's hard to imagine a Hollywood movie that shows Nazis as fun-loving guys (the hilarious "Springtime for Hitler" scene in The Producers being the only exception), modern Hollywood just can't proceed without doing a psychiatric analysis of its politically correct killers, and then concluding that their vile acts are all because of psychic damage the received at the hands of . . . (fill in the blank here with white males, rich people, Israel, Jews, imperialism, oil companies, etc.).

As I said, Tony Kushner does not show up as a bad guy in this interview. He shows up as an intelligent man who is so mired in self-created moral complexities that he doesn't recognize evil when he sees it.

Let's face it: the writer isn't omniscient: it's not like he can know everything--especially outdated bourgeois concepts like truth, lies, good, evil, et al. Besides, "if you start with an ax to grind, then you write a bad play or movie."