<
https://theconversation.com/is-it-time-to-reconsider-the-idea-of-the-banality-of-evil-216737>
"After attending the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, the
philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt claimed what was terrifying
about this man was not his moral monstrosity. It was his sheer normality. She
subtitled her 1963 book on the subject,
Eichmann in Jerusalem, “a report on
the banality of evil”.
Arendt’s phrase made its way into our broader culture. It is widely considered
a salutary warning against the idea that enormous atrocities, such as the
Holocaust, could never be conceived of, and carried out, again.
For Arendt, Eichmann, the principal organiser of the trains that took millions
of Jewish men, women and children to concentration camps was above all an
efficient, bland bureaucrat. We may find many of his kind in the modern world,
her argument implied, working away efficiently in their offices, interested in
building careers and not rocking the boat.
In Arendt’s version of Eichmann he was neither a convinced Nazi, nor a
fanatical anti-Semite. He showed no sign of “indoctrination of any kind”, she
wrote, as he testified to an Israeli court in Jerusalem. But he was unable to
see the world, and what he was doing, from the perspective of others, including
the victims of the actions of which he was a part.
Whenever wider reality threatened to impose itself, Arendt wrote, Eichmann
would retreat behind a wall of administrative jargon and mind-numbing
“cliches”. And it was this “thoughtlessness”, she claimed, that enabled him to
work so well, sending millions of innocent people to their deaths in precisely
scheduled trains of cattle cars to places like Treblinka and
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
But the publication since Eichmann’s trial of the full transcripts of audio
recordings and manuscripts he produced in the 1950s – when still at large in
Argentina – show he was anything but a banal bureaucrat."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
