On The Banality Of Evil

In the year 1961, Adolf Eichmann, a mid level Nazi bureaucrat from Hitler‟s collapsed regime was brought to Jerusalem, Israel from his long time hiding place of Argentina. Israeli special services were the ones responsible for first kidnapping him and then gaining his consent to travel to Israel to stand trial for his crimes. He was brought to the District Court of Jerusalem and was accused of playing an indefensible role in the execution of “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question” as held by the Nazis.

It was sensational news as until now, the few Nazis that were tried faced prosecution by the Nuremberg Trials in Germany. There had never been a Nazi that was actually tried by the victims of their genocidal rein. Hannah Arendt was a brilliant political philosopher, a German Jew who fled to New York from her home country when the Nazi regime was gaining in power. Now, she flew to Jerusalem to cover the trials for the "New Yorker‟

providing her deeply insightful take on the one of the most gruesome events in the 20th century.

Evil as we know it is associated with hatred, a burning rage of something. This is why murderers are always portrayed as red faced tyrants in modern culture. This definitely is the case for a lot of deviant and malevolent criminals but is not nearly the only psychological makeup that employs these behavioral traits. What happened after the events of the World War II was the very direct confrontation with the scale of the human destruction that happened. The casualties that captured the public imagination were not that of soldiers but of the civilians whose cultural presence was almost wiped out of Europe. For the first time, the masses were aware of the destructive power

of reified violence caused by the people themselves and not armies.

Arendt uses the phrase „banality of evil‟ to describe the violence and scale of atrocity that can be committed by people who do not think of themselves as individuals but as one link of a giant system. Here, the individual is so consumed by the righteousness and necessity of their actions that they are blind to any other point of view. The Nazi Civil Servants were so deluded about their place in the war that afterwards, when asked to justify their actions they claimed they were simply doing their jobs. They were so confident in the moral propriety of their actions that high ranking members of the Nazi party, at the time when it was clear that Germany would lose the war, fully expected to be forgiven for their crimes by the Allies. After all, such things were commonplace in war and should be expected. When discussing the matter of Jewish extermination their arguments were always of passive disapproval, as if they had nothing to do with it, stating – “What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily

the task weighted upon my shoulders!”

Arendt sates that it was sheer thoughtlessness that predisposed Eichmann to become one of the greatest criminals of the century. What does it say of our time if an average government servant can accidently become guilty of systemic ethnic cleaning? What does it say about the nature of modern individuality that to lose it in a bid to be a part of something bigger one would need to abandon all ideas of personal morals? If nothing else, Arendt's work helps us confront the nature of human society as it is and its many blindspots. All that can be hoped now is that our eyes stay open to them. After all, the secret headquaters of the modern villain is not a dark cave but the upscale corporate office.