From a literary examination of the character “Randall Flagg/The Walkin’ Dude/The Dark Man”:
Characterization
A common characteristic of Randall Flagg is his embodiment of evil. When Stephen King was first creating his vision of Flagg, he based him around what he believed evil to represent. To King, Flagg is “somebody who’s very charismatic, laughs a lot, [is] tremendously attractive to men and women both, and [is] somebody who just appeals to the worst in all of us.” This idea is carried into The Stand, Flagg’s first official appearance in literature. Here, Flagg is characterized as the personification of evil set against Mother Abagail, the personification of good. The character of Tom Cullen describes Flagg as having the ability to kill animals, and give men cancer and disease only by looking at them. Cullen goes on to refer to him as the demon Legion. According to Stephen King, he was not trying to say that Flagg was the Devil. He wanted Flagg to represent a “gigantic evil”, though the character was supposed to taper off by the end of The Stand. King states, “I think the Devil is probably a pretty funny guy. Flagg is like the archetype of everything that I know about real evil, going back all the way to Charles Starkweather in the ‘50s — he is somebody who is empty and who has to be filled with other people’s hates, fears, resentments, laughs. Flagg, Koresh, Jim Jones, Hitler — they’re all basically the same guy.” Though Flagg was never intended to represent the Devil, that did not detract from what King sees as his ultimate goal. King notes that it does not matter who sees him, or how they see him—as Flagg can appear differently to each individual—but that his message is always the same: “I know all the things that you want and I can give them to you and all you have to do is give me your soul.”
Apart from King’s interpretation, literary critics have noted Flagg’s penchant for evilness. Tony Magistrale sees Flagg as a Shakespearian villain. Magistrale compared Flagg to such Shakespeare villains as Iago, Edmund, and Richard III, even going so far as to say that Flagg was an antihero. Magistrale states that Flagg’s evil is based on his ability to cause conflict where it has never been before, and destroy things simply because they are united; though he seeks power, that power is just a resource for him to achieve a higher degree of destruction. Heidi Stringell finds that Flagg truly is “an embodiment of pure evil”, though she also states that he does not represent either the Devil, or any other demon for that matter. Stringell believes that King sees good and evil as “real forces”, and that Flagg’s representation of pure evil is validated by the fact that “he is a killer, a maker of mischief, a liar, and a tempter”. To Stringell, Flagg’s disappearance at the end of The Stand shows that “evil ultimately leads nowhere”. The author goes into further detail when she calls Flagg a “generic hybrid” of the character archetypes “the Dark Man and the Trickster”. To her, it is the combination of these two characteristics, both found in different cultural realms, that force people to face their own “flawed humanity” with the “amorality” Flagg represents.
[Baphomet: Baphomet is a name of unestablished provenance. It first appeared in trial transcripts during the Inquisition of the Knights Templar in the early 1300s. Some modern scholars believe the name to have been an Old French corruption and misspelling of the name Mahomet (Muhammad)]
“A storm’s a’comin’”
I think you might want to read post #28.
I guess Koresh was not a really nice guy, but we don’t know a whole lot about him. All the evidence was burned up in a fire. Therefore, I would hesitate to put him in the same category as Jim Jones, let alone Hitler, as King states. Of course, I’m not at all a fan of Stephen King. Most of his “work” is pure crap. He starts out with some decent and intriguing premises, but always ends up in some left field tangent somewhere, leaving me wondering, what the hell did I spend 16 hours watching this mini-series for?