Standards of Evil: Competing Moral Frameworks and the Fracturing of the West

From Doctrine to Violence: The Moral Fault Lines of Our Age

I’ve written before about the differences between cultures and how distinct moral systems shape the societies that grow around them. If a people share the same morality, then it necessarily becomes a lens of value permeating everything the society does or builds, from its form of governance to how it treats the relationship between the governor and the governed, and to how it interacts with other societies it comes into contact with.

Morality, at its core, is a framework for distinguishing good from evil, and when we discuss morality we tend to look at what a moral system views as good. To truly understand a society, we must also ask what it considers evil, for it is always what is viewed as evil that a society will seek to destroy, both within itself as well as within the world around it.

This question has never been more urgent, with political violence becoming normalized in the United States and across much of the Western world.

Recent polling shows that 31% of Americans believe assassinating Elon Musk would be at least somewhat justified, while 34% say the same about Donald Trump. Among those who identify as left-of-center, those numbers climb to a shocking 50% and 56%, respectively.

Many Americans don’t just want another President - they would be happy to see the current one killed to get rid of him.

Meanwhile, 40% of Americans, and 60% of the political left, now believe that property damage is a justifiable form of protest, as we saw in the aftermath of George Floyd.

An Emerson College poll from December 2024 found that 41% of voters aged 18–29 supported Luigi Mangione’s alleged assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. California even named a ballot initiative after the killer: The Luigi Mangione Access to Health Care Act.

My guess is that Luigi Mangione gets a hung jury. I don’t see twelve voters in New York agreeing to convict, regardless of the evidence against him. Someone on the jury will consider him a hero.

The reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk reflects the same divide. The political right responded with grief and outrage. The political left initially did as well, but within a couple of days the outrage turned outward, toward the political right, and morphed into denial, distortion, and in many corners, celebration.

National figures, like Jimmy Kimmel, falsely portrayed Kirk’s views and downplayed or misrepresented the political leanings of his alleged killer, Tyler Robinson. Online, social media platforms lit up with glee from progressives who viewed the murder as some kind of moral triumph. On X (formerly Twitter), some users are even discussing who to take out next.

And predictably, some voices on the right are now calling for retaliation, leading to open talk of civil war.

Evil Defined

In a nation where political murder is becoming a matter of perspective, it’s time to step back and ask a basic question: What is evil?

I keep a 1985 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary on my desk. I prefer it over more recent editions because over time, the definitions of words have been warped. This is a subject I’ve explored before in what I call the War on Words. 1985 predates the weaponization of language.

Here’s how evil was defined in 1985:

“adj. 1. Morally bad or wrong; wicked. 2. Causing ruin, injury, or pain; harmful. 3. Characterized by or indicating future misfortune; ominous: evil omens. 4. Purportedly bad or blameworthy; infamous: an evil reputation. 5. Characterized by anger or spite; malicious: an evil temper.
n. 1. Something that causes harm, misfortune, or destruction. 2. Something morally bad or wrong; wickedness. 3. An evil force or power. 4. Something that is a cause or source of suffering, injury, or destruction: the evils of war.”

As clear as these definitions may seem, terms like “bad,” “wrong,” or “wicked” are subjective. What one group views as wicked, another may see as virtuous, or even heroic. Think Luigi Mangione.

The modern collapse of objective morality did not happen overnight. It began with a shift in Western philosophy, particularly through the influence of existentialism and postmodernism.

Existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre rejected the idea of an inherent human nature, arguing that individuals must define themselves through action in a world without objective moral order. Postmodern thinkers such as Michel Foucault went further, asserting that concepts like "good" and "evil" are constructed by those in power to maintain social control.

Under these frameworks, morality becomes not only relative but inherently political, justifying the reversal of the moral order any time the wrong people are in charge. What one group calls "evil" is considered just an ideology from another group that dominates through coercion.

These ideas, once confined to philosophy departments, now saturate much of Western academia, media, and activism, undermining the Judeo-Christian view that evil is real, fixed, and rooted in divine law.

I’ve written before about how different moral systems give rise to different civilizations. In this essay, I want to go a step further. I want to show how there is no universal standard for what constitutes evil, an absence that has fueled some of the worst human atrocities in history, and that is about to do so again.

Judeo-Christian vs. Islamic Standards of Evil

I wrote recently for White Rose Magazine on how Islam is an inversion of Judeo-Christian morality, and on how Islam exalts the forced submission of others. I encourage you to read those articles after you read this essay - and to eventually go back and read the entire edition of the magazine.

The Judeo-Christian moral order can be reduced into the two rules Jesus used to summarize God’s moral law: love God above all things, and love your neighbor (aka everyone else) as much as you love yourself. Love is at the center of Judeo-Christian morality, leading us to exalt one another through the natural rights of the individual.

This belief is the centerpiece of the Enlightenment, and though it took the merger of the Judeo-Christian moral order with Greek philosophy to get us here, once that merger took place the Enlightenment became inevitable.

Islam calls for total submission to Allah’s law (Sharia), and even more than that, it exalts those who force others to submit to Sharia. Forced submission is a deeper form of submission than is theological agreement, which is why dying in Jihad is the only guarantee to get into paradise.

Muhammad told his followers that even he, as Allah’s perfect example, is not guaranteed paradise. Only those who die in Jihad get that guarantee - not the priest, but the soldier, and even among soldiers, only the ones who are killed.

Murder, torture, rape, terrorism, theft, and a multitude of other things we might consider to be ‘evil’ under Judeo-Christian morality, are not only justified, but glorified in Islam, if done as a means of forcing others to submit.

Western ‘excesses,’ on the other hand, which would be everything we do that does not conform with Sharia, are considered ‘evil.’ The United States is called “The Great Satan” across much of the Islamic world specifically because of what Islam sees as the excesses of Western Culture, symbolized by the United States.

To Islam, civil rights represent a license to reject Sharia. Nothing could be more evil than that.

I am, incidentally, using the doctrinal books of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for these definitions. There is a wide degree of variance in terms of how closely doctrinal books are followed, but I operate under the assumption that the more devout one is, the more closely they will adhere to religious doctrine.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God loves us and offers us to live in communion with Him, for all eternity, but it is an offer we are free to choose or to reject. Islam is a direct inversion of this, calling for total submission to Sharia, and exalting not the submission itself, but the use of force to make others submit against their will. Islam is evil in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Judeo-Christian tradition is evil under the tenets of Islam.

These traditions are diametrically opposed to one another. They cannot, and in the long run they will not, coexist.

That is not to say that Christian and Muslim people cannot coexist. Of course, as individuals we can, but the ideologies view each other as evil, making it impossible for a society to peacefully blend them together into any kind of cohesive whole, and Europe is struggling with this right now, today.

In cities across France, Belgium, Germany, and Sweden, entire neighborhoods operate under informal but enforced Sharia norms. Police officers are told not to enter these zones unless absolutely necessary, and when they do, they are often met with hostility.

In Sweden, which once boasted one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world, grenade attacks and honor killings are no longer rare. Mass migration, combined with the belief that multiculturalism requires moral equivalency, has paralyzed European governments from enforcing their own laws within communities that reject them outright. Sweden now has the highest rates of rape in Europe.

In the United Kingdom, rape gangs targeting non-Muslim girls operated for years in cities like Rotherham and Telford. Authorities were aware but failed to act, fearing they’d be labeled racist or Islamophobic.

Over 1,400 girls were systematically raped, beaten, and trafficked in Rotherham alone. The ideology that justified the abuse was not just ignored, but protected under the guise of cultural sensitivity.

Germany has had several rashes of Muslim men surrounding and gang raping non-Muslim women at public events. The most significant example was in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, 2015–16, where it happened to over 1,200 women in one night.

Judeo-Christian vs. Nazi Standards

One of the few things everyone still agrees on is that Hitler was evil, and though this should give us some semblance of common ground upon which to build, sadly, very few people know enough about Hitler to understand exactly why Hitler was evil.

Hitler was evil, and he did many evil things, but he did not consider himself evil. Far from it, he considered himself to be the most virtuous person on the planet. Consider the following quotes.

From Mein Kampf:

“I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.”

Here, Hitler is claiming that his actions are divinely sanctioned. It presents his conduct as not just political or ideological, but as something aligning with a higher will.

“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

This quote goes further: it frames one of his central ideological - and murderous - projects as a religious or divine mission.

“What we have to fight for... is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator.”

Here he casts the national struggle in language of duty and mission, with God as the one assigning the mission.

We also have a number of telling quotes from Hitler’s Table Talk (based on shorthand notes taken by Hitler’s inner circle, including by Heinrich Heim, Henry Picker, Martin Bormann, etc.):

“When one thinks of the opinions held concerning Christianity by our best minds a hundred, two hundred years ago, one is ashamed to realize how little we have since evolved. I didn't know that Julian the Apostate had passed judgment with such clear‑sightedness on Christianity and Christians …”

Julian the Apostate (Flavius Claudius Julianus) was a Roman emperor who ruled from 361 to 363 AD and is best known for being the last non-Christian ruler of the Roman Empire. He was called “the Apostate” because he rejected Christianity, which had become the dominant religion of the empire at the time, and attempted to restore traditional Roman paganism. This quote shows Hitler rejecting Christian morality, as well as Christians as a people.

“I know that humans in their defectiveness will do a thousand things wrong. But contrary to one’s own knowledge to do something wrong, that does not come into question! One must never personally submit to such a lie. Not because I want to annoy others, but because in it I see a mockery of eternal Providence.”

Here he is explicitly holding himself to a standard of moral seriousness, under a higher power.

Here is Hitler in a speech to the Reichstag on May 21, 1935:

“… I feel myself just as responsible to the German people as any parliament. I act thanks to their trust and in their commission. … As leader and chancellor of the nation I must at times make decisions which are difficult enough in themselves, but their weight is further increased by the fact that it is not granted to me to share my responsibility or to shift it onto others. … The more difficult these decisions are, however, the more I wish as a German to make my actions independent of all instincts of weakness or fear and to bring them into harmony with my conscience before my God and the people …”

Here, Hitler ties his decision‑making to the moral qualities of conscience, avoidance of weakness and fear, acting “as a German” in moral / communal terms, doing what he believes before God and the people.

Clearly Hitler viewed himself not only as a moral person, but as the only person with the moral courage and conviction to lead the German nation toward what he believed was their destiny.

Hitler’s morality is best defined as rooted in will, specifically, the ruthless pursuit of racial destiny through the application of unyielding force, guided by what he saw as natural law and historical necessity. Hitler’s morality exalted the courage to act without moral hesitation in pursuit of the Volksgemeinschaft (racial community).

Hitler’s moral heroes were those who overcame weakness and sentimentality to assert the will of the nation, the race, and the Führer, through actions the individual might find morally reprehensible.

It is not difficult to compare Hitler’s morality to that of the Judeo-Christian world. Hitler believed that service to the nation - the highest moral good - demanded that the German people overcome the Judeo-Christian moral order to do whatever was necessary in forwarding the purity and greatness of the Germanic race.

Evil, to Hitler, was any hesitation toward violating one’s own moral values in furtherance of the state, and Hitler did not view the Christian world as immoral so much as he viewed it as decadent and weak, and ripe for conquering.

Nazi vs. Islamic Standards

In comparing and contrasting evil in an Islamic context with Hitler’s view, we find overlap.

Both moral systems exalt submission. In Islam, the highest good is forcing others to submit to Sharia. In Nazism, the highest good is forcing others to submit to the racial will of the Führer and the Volksgemeinschaft. In both systems, the individual exists only in service to something greater, be it the ummah or the Volk, and morality is not defined by universal principles of right and wrong, but by obedience to the system itself.

Where Islam defines evil as anything that deviates from Sharia, Nazism defines evil as anything that threatens the racial purity or unity of the German people. Both allow for murder, rape, theft, torture, and terrorism, not only as permissible under certain circumstances, but as exalted acts when committed in service to their respective goals.

Both Islam and Nazism permit the most grotesque abuses of human dignity so long as those abuses are directed outward, against the enemies of the system. In both, evil is not a matter of violating moral law, but is disobedience, rebellion, or a refusal to submit.

The conflict inherent in demands to violate one’s personal conscience in support of the system leads both Islamic and Nazi militants to dehumanize and obsess over their opponents. The glorification of the horrific is the only way one can square its commission with one’s sense of self. When Hamas cooked babies in microwave ovens on October 7, 2023, celebrating the act made them feel moral again.

Both systems view Judeo-Christian morality as weak, In Islam because it gives man the freedom to violate Sharia, and in Nazism because it encourages compassion, tolerance, and equality, all of which are corrosive to racial unity and strength.

The difference is one of metaphysics. Islam claims to represent divine authority, whereas Hitler didn’t need revelation, believing himself to be the living embodiment of moral clarity.

In Islamic theocracies, this redefinition of evil plays out in the brutal treatment of apostates, women, and minorities. A woman who is raped may be stoned to death. The man who raped her, if he did so in accordance with his interpretation of Sharia, did nothing wrong.

Under the Nazis, harboring a Jew was a capital offense, not because it caused harm, but because it defied the racial order. The person who murdered a Jewish child was doing their duty; the person who tried to save that child was committing treason against the Volk.

German soldiers who refused to carry out executions on the Eastern Front could be executed themselves. Morality had been redefined as loyalty. Evil had been redefined as resistance.

Even within the Nazi hierarchy, moral standing was measured by one's willingness to follow orders, no matter how depraved. Officers like Himmler praised the "hardness" of those who could carry out mass killings without hesitation, the suppression of conscience being a moral achievement.

Hitler’s closest Islamic ally by far was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who not only endorsed Nazi ideology but actively collaborated in propaganda and recruitment. Figures like Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in Iraq and the Bosnian/Albanian SS units also tied Islam to the Nazi project.

Hitler never converted his admiration for Islam into a coherent alliance the way he did with Fascist Italy, but he repeatedly expressed respect for Islam’s “warrior spirit,” contrasting it favorably with what he saw as the weakness of Christianity.

Progressive vs. Judeo-Christian Standards

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, evil is the conscious violation of moral law (aka ‘sin’). That law is fixed, revealed by God, and rooted in His unchanging nature.

Evil originates in the heart. It is not the product of external circumstances or social environment. A person who is kind, honest, and generous is considered good, even if they come from privilege. A person who lies, cheats, or kills is evil, even if they come from poverty or oppression. Motive has bearing, but not more than the law itself, and judgment is based on actions rather than identity.

Christianity teaches that all people are sinners. None are righteous by their own merit. Redemption comes through grace rather than achievement, and no sin places someone beyond forgiveness. Christianity recognizes that people do evil, but it does not define them by it.

Progressivism turns this on its head. It rejects fixed moral law. It denies original sin but embraces collective guilt, defining evil by group identity rather than by behavior. People are not judged by what they do, but by the power they are perceived to hold. The more power a person is assumed to have, the more evil they are presumed to be. The less power, the more moral weight their voice carries.

In this system, white people, men, Christians, heterosexuals, and those who hold traditional Western values are evil. The more these traits overlap, the more morally compromised the person is assumed to be.

At the same time, people labeled as oppressed are treated as morally pure, even when they engage in deception, theft, or violence. Their actions are interpreted through the lens of trauma or resistance rather than through the morality of the acts themselves.

Progressives often equate speech with violence, while excusing actual violence. A white person who cites factual data may be accused of doing harm. A rioter who sets a building on fire may be defended or even celebrated.

Luigi Mangione is often celebrated.

Under this system, evil is determined by identity and power. Traditional values, including sexual restraint, accountability, and reverence for God, are treated as bigotry, and anyone who affirms moral clarity is portrayed as a threat.

Christianity tells the sinner that forgiveness is possible. Progressivism tells the accused that redemption does not exist. Christianity separates sin from the sinner. Progressivism defines people by the groups they belong to and offers no path out. It calls that justice.

For Christians, evil is something we all carry, but that we can overcome. In the progressive worldview, evil is something others carry, and can never shed. One system holds that truth rises above power. The other insists that power dictates truth. They are not compatible.

During the Enlightenment, thinkers like Locke and Jefferson attempted to preserve Christian moral ideals while discarding the authority of scripture. They based morality on reason and natural rights, but without God as a fixed moral anchor, the idea of good and evil became abstract and vulnerable to interpretation.

Over time, morality shifted from principle to preference. Definitions of evil became political, subjective, and changeable.

Secular humanism retained the outward appearance of Christian morality for a time, but without a spiritual foundation, the structure could not hold. What remains is a moral landscape that has severed itself from truth. Goodness is no longer a standard. It is a narrative, shaped by whoever controls the story.

Progressive vs. Islamic Standards

Islam and progressivism are often grouped together for their authoritarian tendencies, but the comparison falls apart the moment you examine how each defines evil. They are not the same. They are not even close.

Islam defines evil as disobedience to divine law. Morality is objective, eternal, and unchanging, perfectly delivered from Allah.

Halal and haram are not open to debate. To violate Sharia is to rebel against God Himself, and such rebellion is evil by definition. The rules are strict, often brutal, but they are stable, rooted in the belief that good and evil exist independently of human feeling.

Progressivism, on the other hand, does not believe in objective morality at all. It denies that good and evil are fixed categories. Instead, it defines morality through the lens of lived experience, emotional harm, and power dynamics. Under progressivism, evil is not what violates an external code. Evil is what offends the wrong person, or that disrupts the current narrative.

What is considered moral today under Progressivism may be immoral tomorrow, and what is condemned today may be celebrated a year from now. The only consistency is obedience to the current narrative.

Islam believes truth is handed down from above. Progressivism believes truth is constructed from below, shaped by the feelings and identities of those who claim oppression. In Islam, blasphemy is evil because it insults God. In progressivism, blasphemy is evil because it makes someone feel unsafe. Both systems suppress dissent, but for entirely different reasons.

Both systems also enforce submission, but Islam sees evil in defiance of divine law whereas Progressivism sees evil in defiance of the shifting social consensus, especially when that consensus is framed as coming from the oppressed. The result may look similar from the outside (censorship, fear, and conformity) but the internal logic between the two are opposites .

Islam, incidentally, thinks Progressivism is evil. It aligns with the Progressive movement only because Progressives see Muslims as an oppressed minority to be elevated, and that is highly useful to Islam’s central tenet of spreading Islam by force.

There are in fact several distinct groups that make up the Progressive Left. I’ve written in the past about how these factions are aligned only in their desire to destroy the current order, and will then turn against one another.

Even if Progressivism gets everything it wants, conflict is inevitable.

Progressive vs. Nazi Standards

I wrote an article in February of 2024, in which I compared the DNC platform to the ‘25 Points’ Hitler’s Nazis ran on in 1932. Had I written that article in the mid 1990s, I would have used Mussolini or Franco, but not the Nazis.

I want to be clear that I am not saying Progressives are as bad as Nazis. There are Progressives who will say that about conservatives, and particularly about Donald Trump, but I will not reply in kind.

My fear is not that Progressives are as bad as Nazis, but that they may become so if left unchecked. Hitler, after all, started his political career as a paid propagandist for the Democratic Socialist Government of Bavaria, before discovering the Nazi Party.

Like Hitler, the left does not have a shared understanding of what ‘too far’ on their side looks like, and as such, like Hitler they have no moral backstop.

Identity politics is inherently racist, and there is no way around that. If you judge people not as individuals, but by the color of their skin, you are practicing racism. That’s true whether you’re wearing a swastika arm-band or a rainbow flag.

This is why people like Ibram X. Kendi can publish openly anti-white books and be hailed as moral leaders.

Kendi claims that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. He promotes racial discrimination so long as it favors the “right” groups. Under his moral system, racism isn’t wrong, unless it’s the wrong kind of racism.

That’s tribalism dressed in academic language, and it’s exactly what the Nazis did, just with a different justification and a different vocabulary.

Both are driven by hate.

Kendi’s worldview assigns collective guilt, dehumanizing based on ancestry, and insisting that certain people are inherently oppressive based on who they are. That’s the same logic that led the Nazis to strip Jews of citizenship, jobs, rights, and eventually life. The mechanics are different, but the moral architecture is exactly the same.

If you dare to call it out the dogma, you’re labeled a threat to democracy. Just like under fascist regimes of the past, the people who demand obedience always wrap themselves in the language of justice.

Anything that diverges from the prescribed narrative is deemed evil.

Progressives began speaking about speech as a form of violence a couple of decades ago. Any speech that deviates from what is deemed ‘correct’ in the moment, is considered evil.

In the aftermath of George Floyd, when the saying, ‘silence is violence,’ became common, any refusal to actively participate became ‘evil.’

We pretend that Progressivism can’t become as bad as Nazism, but is it really hard to believe that such people could justify killing Charlie Kirk? Once ‘silence is violence,’ you can justify killing anyone.

Ilhan Omar said that Kirk is ‘Dr. Frankenstein,” and blamed him for his own death, saying he was ‘killed by his own monster.”

In both Progressivism and Nazism, truth is not measured by evidence, but by alignment. The Nazis had a group of scientist called the Ahnenerbe, tasked with proving the superiority of the Aryan race. Unlike actual science, the Ahnenerbe started with the conclusions they wanted to support, and found (or made up) evidence to support those conclusions. ‘Science’ on the left, and particularly soft sciences like the humanities, follow the exact same methodology today.

The Nazis believed that a just society could only be built once the source of moral corruption, the Jews, was removed. Today’s progressives believe that a just society can only be built once the patriarchy, whiteness, Christianity, capitalism, and heteronormativity are dismantled. The language is different, but the mechanism is the same: moral purification through systemic elimination.

I’m just focusing on the worst parts of Nazism. I could also point out how eerily similar fascism is, as an economic model, to Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act, which is a retread of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act, which was put together by advisors Roosevelt sent to Italy to copy Mussolini’s fascism.

Multiple Moral Frameworks

When a society contains multiple moral frameworks that define evil in mutually exclusive ways, peace is impossible, with each group seeing others not just as wrong, but as wicked.

What Christianity defines as sin, progressivism may see as virtue. What progressivism condemns as oppressive, Christianity may regard as obedience to God. When good and evil reverse between systems, compromise becomes surrender and tolerance becomes complicity.

Consider the reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. In one moral system, this was an act of political terrorism and a horrifying evil that demands universal condemnation. In another, it was portrayed as a righteous blow against fascism.

Speech is now called violence, while actual violence is excused as justice. Law enforcement is undermined while criminality is reframed as activism. Churches are burned, statues toppled, and historical truths erased, not in spite of a moral code, but because of a different one.

The West is not suffering from moral collapse so much as from moral conflict, with multiple moralities competing for dominance, each seeing the others as evil.

The Socialist Rifle Association (SRA) claims roughly 10,000 members nationwide. It offers firearms training to transgender, Islamic, and Marxist activists, proclaiming that “the means of production will not seize themselves.” It considers disagreement with its ideological tenets to be “fascism,” thereby granting itself carte blanche moral authority to act against opponents by any means necessary.

To put that number in perspective, 10,000 is about the size of General George Washington’s army when he successfully forced British General William Howe to evacuate Boston on March 17, 1776.

Black Lives Matter maintains a core group of several thousand trained and coordinated organizers, backed by millions of sympathizers and donors and millions of online followers.

ANTIFA, though lacking formal membership rolls, operates through loosely organized cells and mobilizes rapidly through online coordination. Their structure may be diffuse, but their ideology is consistent, and militant.

The broader moral framework that once tethered our society to shared values has fractured. We now live in a country where 40% of Americans, and 60% of those on the political left, say that property destruction is a justifiable form of protest.

More than half of those who identify with the modern left believe it is acceptable to assassinate the President of the United States, and political murder is sometimes praised, as in the case of Luigi Mangione, who gunned down the CEO of a health insurance company and was hailed as a hero by online activists.

When mainstream moral systems can no longer agree on what constitutes evil, or worse, when evil becomes redefined as virtue depending on who commits it, civil society becomes impossible to sustain. This breakdown of shared moral language is a crisis playing out in shattered storefronts, and political assassinations.

This is just the start.

That is the reality of the moment we are living in.

One might notice that General George Washington forced General Howe out of Boston almost four months before the Declaration of Independence.

I fear that if historians ever point to the start of a current Civil War, they will settle on a date that has already passed.