You'll forgive my ignorance of the Silmarillion
Absolutely not. Go and read it at once.
but what are we calling evil? Does Sauron engage in genocide or broad acts of sport torture and rape? It seems like Sauron is guilty of using the same sort of military powers that other kingdoms use to consolidate power. His evil seems to be the ruthless methods and breadth of his ambitions, rather than a promotion of hate and cruelty for their own sake. Sauron seems more like the Romans, Victorians or Spanish from the point of view of their colonized populations.
So how "evil" is Sauron? Or is he just a control freak that justifies his means with the ends?
He doesn't get much page-time in The Silmarillion, but in one epsiode in which he plays a major part, he tries to get Finrod to reveal his name and purpose by having a werewolf devour one of his companions in front of him each night. Agreed, that's not quite evil of the order of stamping on a child's pet kitten for kicks, and maybe no worse than was done by those you mention. I guess it depends where we set the bar for "evil" (inevitably an individual opinion). Personally, I would put his behaviour in LOTR as being slightly worse: showing no concern whatever for the well-being of those under his control, forcing them to live in misery, and sometimes using them as suicide troops. But we're not really invited in LOTR to examine the functioning of Sauron's empire in the same way as we might be if LOTR was written by a more modern author.
Presumably after the fall of Morgoth he thought he could give that all up, and may have sincerely tried to do so for a while, but the hunger for that sort of power was always going to come back, and ultimately became a stronger motivation than the better motives he started with. And so he forged the Ring. Perhaps it was only when he first put the Ring on his finger that he understood himself, that he had reached a point where power was all.
Teresa, can you recall where you picked up the stuff about "better motives"? I can only find it in the letters I've quoted, and mentioned briefly (I now realise) at the start of "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age" part of The Silmarillion, where the narrator hedges about Sauron's motives ("And some hold that this was not at first falsely done") more than Tolkien seems to do in his letters.
But whatever the truth about whether Tolkien meant to assert in these letters that Sauron really had temporarily turned good, what frustrates me is that this makes Sauron a much more interesting character, and yet this stuff isn't even hinted at in LOTR. The book mentions (from Gandalf I think) that Sauron wasn't evil "in the beginning", but there's nothing about him possibly genuinely almost reforming after the fall of Morgoth. It's not even mentioned in the Second Age section of the "Tale of Years" in the appendices, in which it only says that Sauron begins to stir again.
Sauron in LOTR is barely a character at all, and is only depicted as a power of darkness who seems to love darkness for its own sake, and to inflict misery and slavery on others not because it makes his policies easier, but because he enjoys doing so. His aesthetic seems to be consistently grim -- the bits of the Black Speech given have a certain power but cannot be called attractive. And yet it turns out that at the beginning of the SA he actually wanted to make Western Middle Earth a kind of paradise to rival Valinor (admittedly to thumb his nose at the Valar). As a maia of Aule, we can believe he would love to create things, and now he is freed from having to obey the dubious brutalist aesthetic choices of his former master, he might well have made a decent job of it, whatever his motives. The fall from that kind of person to the Dark Lord of LOTR is a extreme journey, and I think it's a real shame that Tolkien knew about it at the time of writing LOTR, but said nothing about it. We might indeed have had a figure more like Milton's Satan than a nebulous and unrelatable personification of evil.
