ABSTRACT
Understanding appalling evil and its authors is a complex matter and Andrew Gleeson explores two extreme alternatives in a continuum of possibilities and settles for an intermediate position. It avails itself of what is allegedly good in both and, following authors such as Raimond Gaita, rejects an assumption common to both, namely that basic or minimal respect is something to be earned. The moral for liberal opponents of vengefulness is that they cannot dismiss indignation towards evil-doers without undermining the compassion they claim as their inspiration. A second strategy for 'humanizing' evil-doers is to relativize their actions to the wrongs of which we are all guilty, or easily could have been guilty. The third humanizing strategy in The Hand is to present the perpetrators of the Ukrainian Holocaust as 'ordinary' people, fathers and uncles, aunties and lovers, enjoying all the domestic pleasures of any ordinary person: human beings, not demons.
