Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem<\/i> was subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil<\/i> — and she spent the rest of her life defending it.<\/p>\n
Her point was simply this: Eichmann was a nebbish nobody, rather than the larger-than-life monster his crimes would suggest, and she believed his objection that he was simply following orders was sincere. That’s what good people do — right? Follow the orders of the lawfully ordained authority? Isn’t that, as our Attorney General recently reminded us, what the Bible — (allegedly) the supreme moral authority — says one should do?<\/p>\n
If, instead of executing Jews, Eichmann had been ordered to make certain that every Jew in Germany received a cake on his birthday, why, he would have done that with the same unthinking, morally neutral efficiency. What Eichmann did was monstrous, but he was not himself a monster — he was disengaged and neutral; he had surrendered whatever manhood he ever had and debased himself to the level of a machine part that performs a task. (Like Abraham, come to think of it.) <\/p>\n
And that, exactly, is what Arendt meant by the banality of evil — unthinking moral neutrality.<\/p>\n
We now have a contemporary example of the banality of evil.<\/p>\n
\nGirl with Down syndrome separated from mom at border<\/a><\/p>\n
A 10-year-old Mexican girl with Down syndrome was separated from her mother while entering the US and put into a federal facility, Mexico\u2019s foreign minister said Tuesday while denouncing the Trump administration\u2019s \u201czero tolerance\u201d border policy.<\/p>\n
Luis Videgaray said at least 21 Mexican kids have been separated from their parents in recent weeks, including the \u201cheartbreaking case\u201d of the 10-year-old girl \u2014 whose father is a legal US resident, according to the Wall Street Journal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This should never have happened, though I don’t doubt that the ICE agent who oversaw this would say he was just following orders. Arendt would weep, as should we all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil — and she spent the rest of her life defending it. Her point was simply this: Eichmann was a nebbish nobody, rather than the larger-than-life monster … Continue reading