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The banality of Arendt’s “banality of evil” — 43 Comments

1. Neo, there’s something “off” with your link to Thomas White– the highlighted words come directly back to your post.

2. In C S Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength, the protagonist is a young sociologist who becomes increasingly involved with a very evil organization:

   “This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.”

3. in so far as he wrote the wansee protocols, that dictated how many people would be killed, it strikes me how anyone could fall for the ‘banality of evil’ trope, his interviewer the dutch nazi sassen, had a son who was an arms dealer to places like the balkans some 40 years later,

4. Conjecture: Arendt’s unfortunate phrase has been widely misunderstood and therefore mocked and criticize; but she is in large part responsibility for that lack of clarity.
   According to this conjecture, it would seem she meant “the SEEMING banality of evil”, since the Eichmann she witnessed looked, spoke and ACTED like a shlub of a bureaucrat.

   Alas, evil can NEVER be banal, and certainly not the kind of evil that was Eichmann’s forte and trademark—which she something MUST have known. She after all is not everyone…
   Hence, “the SEEMING…”

   OTOH, maybe she didn’t know. Or didn’t want to know… Maybe with all that searing intelligence and formidable analytic ability, empathy was not her strong suit…

   Maybe she was morally compromised by past loves and/or antagonistic to Jews in police uniforms staging a trial and trying, in her view, to squeeze the most out of it.

   The point is, that while the filmed interview is fascinating, it is entirely NOT necessary for any normal person to see (or read) it so as to form an opinion on this mass killer.

   “I killed X-hundred thousand people (or X-million people) because I was simply following orders.”

   Huh??

   Which is why it is absolutely unsurprising to officially “learn” that he was proud of his work and had no regrets.

   The only astounding thing is that he agreed to say this all on film.
   But then…it is not astounding at all…simply because that’s who he is. And proud—even ecstatic—of what he was able to accomplish.

   Well he fooled Arendt, didn’t he.
   But one could say that a lot of people get fooled by psychopaths and/or perhaps that Arendt wasn’t “at the top of her game”, or that she herself had “issues” with the whole gestalt of it.

   But her lack of clarity, if it was that, has caused a lot of controversy.

   (And of course, I could be wrong about everything here…)

5. Eh. There undoubtedly were truckloads of banal bureaucrats and functionaries below Eichmann that support Arendt’s general point. Hasn’t most research and study shown that even serial killers are a fairly banal group? There really are no Hannibal Lecters out there.

   I just read something online from a doofus trying to excuse Biden’s horrifically bad domestic policy record by saying “I judge Presidents on foreign policy because that’s what they actually control.” But is he at all concerned about Biden’s atrocious foreign policy record? Of course not! It’s just a banal trope that allows him to avoid confronting reality.

   Mike

6. The Nazi system deliberately allowed for evil to be banal so its functionaries wouldn’t be bothered by some relict moral loading.
   Jobs were split up, paperwork was required, so forth.
   Just for grins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9hzpsOIJ10

   They could have used trains to carry ammo to desperate corps commanders, to carry components to tank factories, to get guys back from field hospitals. But, no. Had to use them to schlep Jews from place to place looking for a functioning death camp.
   But the boys were ON IT. Figured one camp was going to be overrun, cut orders to transport to another. Discovered that, too, was at risk–these guys didn’t sleep, I tell you–and looked at their map of blown railway bridges. Can’t find a camp, drive the train off a bridge into a river.
   The train crew couldn’t figure out how to do that without being at the front end–the Kill Jews office didn’t see the problem–and so they left.

   Then the Americans showed up.

   But, still, there were problems. At one point, Goebbels said, “For those whose nerves are broken, we say, take your pensions, go.” Speaking of executioners. Broad-minded guy, for sure.

   A lot of people had to be involved in this and exerting at least some initiative. But making it banal at least superficially allowed the perps to work effectively and not have to take their pensions early.

   So a picture of a non-striking face on top of a vaguely military uniform behind a desk in what is some kind of office looks pretty banal. Might not be the full picture.

7. PA Cat:

   Thanks, I’ve fixed the link now.

8. Barry Meislin:

   My link to that last article was broken, but it’s now fixed and I suggest you read it. Long ago I used to think that what Arendt might have meant by “the banality of evil”
   was ” the SEEMING banality of evil,” but if you read that last article linked to in the post it’s clear she actually meant the banality of evil.

   And yes, she was compromised by a lot of things.

9. eichman was so dedicated to the task, that he learned yiddish and along with another ss officer hagen, visited jerusalem, to confab with the grand mufti haj amin husseini,

10. miguel cervantes:

    I’m not sure whether you’re joking about that “learned Yiddish” part, or whether that really happened – but for a German speaker, leaning Yiddish would be a very simple matter, since the two languages are very similar.

11. It is not evil that is banal but the degree of banality within the people who embrace evil. We are susceptible to evil’s seduction for we lack the degree of discernment needed to always distinguish between good and evil. Thus the road to hell being paved with good intentions. Calls for greater gun control by the sincere being a current example.

    One possible working definition of evil is the distillation of wrongness. Think wrongly enough and hate arises within the heart. Hate deeply enough and the compulsion to lash out becomes irresistible.

    “We did it because we damn well felt like doing it!”

    “Compulsion” 1959 movie about the murder by Leopold & Loeb.

12. from here

    By learning Hebrew and Yiddish, Eichmann and other Nazis ventured into the very heart of what used to be a private ground closed to Jews and a few Christian theologians. Many Jews thought Hebrew to be their own language, even if they did not understand it. … They did not imagine their enemies reading Hebrew letters, and thus Yiddish newspapers like Haint felt relatively free to write what Jewish publications in German, English, or French might have expressed with somewhat more caution, knowing they would be closely observed. — Brenner, p. 19
    the late phillip kerr’s bernie gunther, described that scene in 1937, in the prologue to one of his novels,

13. A handmade tale of a wicked solution to a purportedly hard problem: “Jew privilege”, rabid diversity [dogma] (e.g. anti-semitism), and redistributive change (the Jews have too much) under a nominally “secular” ethical religion. Social justice with a progressive path and grade. Never again, and again, and again.

14. bernie gunther found himself in some of the nastiest corners of the 3rd reich, from the construction of the olympic grounds to the killing fields of the Balkans and the Caucasus, yet managed to stay as clean as willard put in apocalypse now, ‘like giving out speeding tickets at the indy 500,

15. Neo, thanks so much for fixing the link– I’m glad I had the chance to read the essay. As for Arendt– a student/professor affair with Martin Heidegger, of all people; two marriages, the second one turning into an openly polyamorous arrangement; and a renewed relationship with Heidegger in 1950, when she defended him against critics who attacked him for his membership in the NSDAP. According to Adam Kirsch, Arendt “portrayed Heidegger as a naïve man swept up by forces beyond his control, and pointed out that Heidegger’s philosophy had nothing to do with National Socialism.” Yes, she was compromised in a number of ways.

    Re the relationship between Yiddish and German: you might be interested in these brief comments by a linguistics professor on the relationship of Yiddish to Pennsylvania Dutch (aka Pennsylfawnish Deitsch, the “Muttersproch” of my home county)– both dialects (the professor considers them distinct languages) developed in the Rhineland, hence their similarities:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14_Id_jRFNk&ab_channel=YiddishBookCenter

16. miguel cervantes:

    Anyone could learn Hebrew who wanted to do so, although it was probably mostly Jews and Christian scholars who wanted to do so.

    But Eichmann did not learn to speak or understand Hebrew. He apparently learned the Hebrew alphabet in order to read Yiddish newspapers and keep up on what Jews were writing in them. Yiddish is a German dialect written in Hebrew script. Eichmann and other Germans could almost certainly already understand Yiddish well enough; they just couldn’t read it because of the alphabet.

    Also from Brenner:

    One of the most tragic chapters in the use of the Hebrew language began when Nazi officials acquired the language in order to control the Jewish population. In some instances, it served even as an instrument in the extermination process of the Jews. Adolf Eichmann only acquired skills to read the Hebrew alphabet in order to understand the Yiddish press, but lower-ranking Nazis were able to deceive the East European Jews by their decent knowledge of Hebrew.

    Apparently some Nazis did learn Hebrew in order to act as some sort of spies or agents, or just as more friendly to Jews than they actually were, but Eichmann was not one of those people.

17. Geoffrey Britain:

    The film “Compulsion” is a fictionalized version of the Leopold and Loeb case. The actual perps “did it” because they felt they were superior beings and they thought they could commit “the perfect crime” and wanted to prove it. Loeb was a classic psychopath and Leopold was not, by most accounts.

    Loeb was killed in prison by another inmate. Leopold was released after serving 33 years.

    See this:

    After 33 years and numerous unsuccessful petitions, Leopold was paroled in March 1958. The Brethren Service Commission, a Church of the Brethren-affiliated program, accepted him as a medical technician at its hospital in Puerto Rico. He expressed his appreciation in an article: “To me the Brethren Service Commission offered the job, the home, and the sponsorship without which a man cannot be paroled. But it gave me so much more than that – the companionship, the acceptance, the love which would have rendered a violation of parole almost impossible.” He was known as “Nate” to neighbors and to co-workers at Castañer General Hospital in Adjuntas, where he worked as a laboratory and X-ray assistant.

    Later in 1958 he attempted to set up the Leopold Foundation, to be funded by royalties from Life Plus 99 Years, “to aid emotionally disturbed, retarded, or delinquent youths.” The State of Illinois voided his charter, however, on grounds that it violated the terms of his parole.

    In 1959, Leopold sought to block production of the film version of Compulsion on the grounds that Levin’s book had invaded his privacy, defamed him, profited from his life story, and “intermingled fact and fiction to such an extent that they were indistinguishable.” Eventually the Illinois Supreme Court ruled against him, holding that Leopold, as the confessed perpetrator of the “crime of the century”, could not reasonably argue that any book had injured his reputation.

    Subsequently, Leopold moved to Santurce and married a widowed florist.[7][8] He earned a master’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico, then taught classes there; became a researcher in the social service program of Puerto Rico’s department of health; worked for an urban renewal and housing agency; and did research on leprosy at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine.[67] Leopold was also active in the Natural History Society of Puerto Rico, traveling throughout the island to observe its birdlife. In 1963, he published Checklist of Birds of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. While he spoke of his intention to write a book titled Reach for a Halo about his life following prison, he never did.

    Leopold died of a diabetes-related heart attack on August 29, 1971, at the age of 66.

    Also, while in prison:

    Despite suffering from depression, [Leopold] became a model prisoner and made many significant contributions to improving conditions at Stateville Penitentiary. These included reorganizing the prison library, revamping the schooling system and teaching its students, and volunteer work in the prison hospital. In 1944, Leopold volunteered for the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study; he was deliberately inoculated with malaria pathogens and then subjected to several experimental malaria treatments. He later wrote that all his good work in prison and after his release was an effort to compensate for his crime.

    In the early 1950s, author Meyer Levin, a classmate at the University of Chicago, requested Leopold’s cooperation in writing a novel based on the Franks murder. Leopold responded that he did not wish his story told in fictionalized form, but offered Levin a chance to contribute to his own memoir, which was in progress. Levin, unhappy with that suggestion, went ahead with his book alone, despite Leopold’s express objections.

18. Eichmann was an alcoholic. He was drunk when he boasted and not drunk when he acted boring (because without drinking, he was a bore). Classic alcoholism.

    If I’m right, this explains everything about the man.

19. Doug Thorburn:

    I’ve never read anything that indicates Eichmann was an alcoholic. Got any links for that?

    What’s more, even if he was an alcoholic, that certainly wouldn’t explain everything about the man. The vast majority of alcoholics aren’t mass murderers, for example.

    However, it is known that for the German soldiers and police known as Einsatzgruppen, tasked with the shooting of civilian Jews in the operations in Eastern Europe, alcohol was considered helpful in getting them to the point of mass murder. So alcohol definitely seems to have had a role in mass murder:

    Despite Himmler’s admonition against the abuse of alcohol, he supported the distribution of special alcohol rations for SS and police forces in the East for the purpose of promoting social bonding. In fact, the precedent for “fellowship evenings” among SS members had been set as early as 1938, when the SS headquarters staff at Buchenwald gathered monthly for “eating and drinking sprees.” The practice was instituted in the police battalions in the summer of 1941 during the invasion of the Soviet Union. In Richard Breitman’s assessment, such evenings, which consisted of “a good meal, good beverages, and music” were intended to “take the men to the beautiful realm of German spirit and inner life.” Not coincidentally, these get-togethers often took place in the wake of mass executions—a fact reflected in Himmler’s comment that such “celebrations” helped to prevent these “difficult duties” from “harming the mind and character” of the participants. In fact, these fellowship evenings were intended specifically to help “wipe away” (verwischen) the effects of daily duties associated with mass murder.

    Despite Himmler’s intent, in reality such fellowship evenings, and the ready availability of alcohol, often resulted in binge drinking and additional acts of atrocity by those under the influence…

    Despite Himmler’s guidance that alcohol was to be consumed after killing operations were completed, it appears that the decision about when to provide the “special rations” was left to the discretion of the individual commanders. Returning to the issue of the role of alcohol in promoting selective disinhibition, we find numerous documented cases in which perpetrators became more violent after drinking. For example, Erich Mehr, commander of 1st Company of PB 61, took noticeable pleasure in killing Jews. One of his subordinates described Mehr as behaving like “an animal” when he was drunk. Another example of the correlation between intoxication and brutality can be seen in the actions of First Lieutenant Fritz Glück, a Wehrmacht company commander. Glück’s men described him as a “Jew-hater,” a “fanatic National Socialist,” and a habitual drunk. One soldier in his unit recalled an incident during which an inebriated Glück “dragged two Jews out of a house and shot them.” Another testified that “not a day went by that he [Glück] didn’t stagger around the kaserne [military base] courtyard in a very drunken state, firing wildly with his pistol.”

    The effect of alcohol in escalating violent behavior was also evident in the actions of German auxiliaries in the East. Semion Serafimowicz, the head of a Belorussian auxiliary police detachment that was routinely involved in the murder of Jews, was known to be dramatically affected by alcohol. Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew who hid his identity and served as the unit’s translator, called Serafimowicz “uneducated” but “intelligent.” He noted, however, that when he drank, “[Serafimowicz] became cruel and unmanageable.” Rufeisen also described a German gendarme, Karl Schultz, as an alcoholic and “a beast in the form of a man,” whose drinking “merely increased his cruelty.” In another example, a member of PB 322 testified after the war about the actions of Ukrainian auxiliaries during a mass killing. According to the former policeman, almost all of the Ukrainian killers were drunk as they executed men, women, and children. He recalled that drunken auxiliaries grabbed infants and toddlers by the legs and tossed them into the air before shooting them down like “clay pigeons.”

    The question remains as to whether the primary role of alcohol was to provide an incentive to murder or to desensitize the murderers to their actions. Drinking may also have served the men as a post-hoc mechanism for dealing with the psychological impact of their own actions. Many Einsatzgruppen members used alcohol both as a means for preparing for mass murder and as a way of dealing with their role in it. Prior to their deployment in the invasion of Poland in September 1939, personnel from Einsatzgruppe II spent their evenings “for the most part drinking, listening to the radio, or going to the movies together.” Later, during the invasion of the Soviet Union, SS officer Werner Schönemann of Einsatzkommando 8 remarked to a subordinate as they were on their way to a killing site: “We have to carry out this unhappy task, shooting all the way to the Urals. As you can imagine, it’s not pretty and one can bear it only with alcohol.” The execution of children appears to have been a threshold that some perpetrators could cross only with the assistance of alcohol. At the site of the mass execution in August 1941 at Kamenets-Podolsk, for instance, individual shooters who experienced reservations about shooting children were periodically excused to take a break and drink schnapps before returning to the firing line.

    Einsatzgruppen members’ intimate, daily involvement in executions led some to seek respite in the bottle. Franz-Josef Thormann, an officer in Sonderkommando 7a, described his reaction to a mass killing operation: “[I saw] the bloody mass [of bodies] moving in the ditch and I turned round, with my stomach heaving. I eventually drank a lot of schnapps. There was a lot of schnapps in Klintsy after the executions.” Similarly, SS lieutenant colonel Eduard Strauch of Einsatzgruppe A was described by his superior in a formal evaluation as “impulsive and explosive”—negative characteristics that the evaluator attributed to a “constant and growing use of alcohol” and its “extreme impact on [Strauch’s] personality.” Finally, SS-Colonel Paul Blobel, a man described “as a most ‘efficient killer of Jews’ as well as a ‘drunk and a monster,’” routinely abused alcohol in the wake of mass killings, apparently to lessen his feelings of guilt and “to find some way to cope” with his actions.

    Members of the SS were not the only ones to reach for the bottle; former members of PB 61, for example, revealed in postwar testimony that they were provided with rations of schnapps prior to executions, apparently to steel them for the task at hand. The use of alcohol to overcome the murderers’ inhibitions extended to some local auxiliaries as well. A Lithuanian Jewish survivor recalled a postwar confrontation with a former employee who had joined a Lithuanian auxiliary police unit and who admitted to having participated in mass executions of Jews. When the survivor asked his former employee why he had killed the Jews, the former Lithuanian policeman responded that the Germans had given the men “so much Schnapps to drink [before the executions] that he didn’t know what he was doing.” Another Lithuanian former auxiliary, Kazimierz Sakowicz, wrote in his diary that he found refuge in the bottle after participating in his first execution—the murder of seventeen women, including three young girls.

    Much more at the link, if you can stomach it.

20. Chicago bigfoot personality interviewer Studs Terkel interviewed Bob Dylan on WFMT radio. Probably it was this, from 1963: https://slate.com/culture/2013/12/bob-dylan-interview-by-studs-terkel-in-1963-on-wfmt-listen-audio.html

    That’s almost an hour, so I won’t listen to it now.

    Anyhow, I distinctly recall listening, during the 1970s, to the recording of such an interview wherein Terkel, who was always very impressed with himself, asked (the very callow) Robert Zimmerman (Dylan) if what they were discussing wasn’t another example of “the evil of banality.”

    I’m not making that up. What a couple of mooncalves.

21. Gunthers cv https://berniegunther.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/909/gunther-biography

    The point was eichmanns evil commitment to his goal

22. I forgot to include in my preceding comment that Dylan agreed with Terkel about “the evil of banality.” (But, as a friend reminds me, Dylan was mostly giving “Yep” and “Nope” answers, so he probably wasn’t invested in the point. Whereas Terkel obviously was.)

23. Tim powers declare which blended lecarre and lovecraft in a tale about philby among other things tried to situate the origin of the soviet bloodletting in an interesting place

24. People like Eichmann will always exist. No amount of wholesome TV shows or two-parent homes or gun control or good education or anti-poverty programs or churchgoing or “hate has no home here” signs is going to change that. The only thing you can do is stay vigilant.

25. The lesson is dont elect or otherwise enable a hitler a stalin a castro a pol pot because they employ an eichmann kaganovich che saloth sar

26. For Eichmann, evil was banal. Not sure that’s what Arendt meant.

27. I’ve seen lots of quotes by Arendt on other blogs over the last few years – most seemed insightful and relevant to describing a banal, yet evil, mindset. Nazi or current liberal fascists often seem to have similar thought processes.

    The Nazis first demonized Jews, with widespread lies and half-truths, and the reality of local economic above average results. The evil folk used the lies to justify “justice based” violence.

    Many Democrats today use a similar thought process of demonization against conservatives, and implicitly support violence against conservatives based on such “social justice” reasons.

    True boring banality is never evil in that way, tho it also doesn’t fight against evil.

    “The evil of banality” is a siren call against inaction, as well as a rejection of a mostly good but still imperfect established reality because it’s not perfect.

    But I haven’t read her books, and they’re not high on my list of books to read right now. (Unlike the excellent and important Why We Fight by Chris Blattman, which I recently finished.)

28. Don’t overlook the way that phrase is also exculpatory.

    If everybody is guilty then nobody specific is to blame.

29. I’ve always found Tolkien’s musings on evil quite interesting and insightful, more so, certainly, than Arendt’s. He wrote extensively on the subject. His writings on evil are included in the multi-volume History of Middle Earth, edited by his son Christopher. His analyses of Melkor/Morgoth and Sauron — how they were alike but, more significantly, how they differed — are especially perceptive.

30. According to the Thomas White link (for which, thanks), it seems that Arendt pulled a switcheroo worthy of John Kerry:
    “…By declaring in her pre-Eichmann trial writings that absolute evil, exemplified by the Nazis, was driven by an audacious, monstrous intention to abolish humanity itself, Arendt was echoing the spirit of philosophers such as F W J Schelling and Plato, who did not shy away from investigating the deeper, more demonic aspects of evil. But this view changed when Arendt met Eichmann, whose bureaucratic emptiness suggested no such diabolical profundity, but only prosaic careerism and the ‘inability to think’. [emphasis mine; Barry M.] At that point, her earlier imaginative thinking about moral evil was distracted, and the ‘banality of evil’ slogan was born….”
    – – – – –
    Anyway, looks like SS-Obersturmbannführer “Banality of Evil” missed a few….
    “Putting Jewish Food in Context;
    “In a new museum exhibit in Budapest, András Koerner examines what Jews had historically eaten—and why”—
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/food/articles/putting-jewish-food-in-context-andras-koerner

    File under: They tried to destroy us; they pretty much succeeded; let’s eat?

31. Leopold, too, is a very likely classic case of alcoholism-fueled egomania. That, in turn, impels the addict to have a need to wield power over others, which further inflates their ego.

    Egomania results from a key distortion of perception and memory that every alcoholic experiences: euphoric recall. They remember everything they say or do during a drinking or using episode through self-favoring lenses. If everything they say and do is good and right, and nothing bad or wrong, they must be God. Hence, egomania.

32. I never understood the meaning of the Banality of Evil. Arendt had it so wrong. But so do those who think the men are simply evil. Yes, some are. But take a look at the prison interview of Jeffrey Dahmer. He clearly had no idea why he did what he did. He was a full-on alcoholic, which explains what he did, even if not the extraordinary vileness of it.

    I have eventually turned up proof of alcoholism in nearly every serial and mass murderer in history whose story I have researched. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Dahmer. Stalin, Mussolini, both Kims. Hitler, amphetamines; Mao, barbiturates. We have excellent evidence Castro was an amphetamine addict; Hugo Chavez very likely on barbs or other come-down pills (he reportedly drank ten espressos daily).

    But then attend any AA meeting. Those with real recovery–who are not only abstinent, but also working the program, designed to deflate that massive alcoholic ego (the first eleven steps are not actions any practicing egomaniac can take), are almost always wonderful people. Yet, when they get honest, they will admit to horrific misbehaviors while practicing alcoholics. At least, those they remember (blackout preclude them from recalling everything).

    Alcohol and other-drug addiction is a far better explanation for evil. It’s not 100%, but I give it a solid 80%.

33. Oxford defines the word “banal” as:

    so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring

    When I read Arendt’s “Banality of Evil” many, many years ago I responded very differently than Neo. I felt that Arendt was pointing out a deeper level of evil than I had ever considered, the bureaucratic enabling of organizations to perform horrific evil with their individual members insensible to the atrocity of their own actions.

    This concept still terrifies me, maybe even more now.

34. Jeanne:

    Did you read that last link? This was Arendt’s position on Eichmann:

    Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy…

    Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief.

    In other words, she didn’t think he believed in the aims of the Nazi Party and just joined it and did what he did out of a desire to further his career. It’s been a long time since I’ve actually read her work, but I believe that’s a fair summation of it. If it is, she certainly was wrong and was minimizing his commitment to evil and buying the story his defense was telling.

35. Doug Thorburn:

    There are millions upon millions of alcoholics in the US. But just a few mass murderers. So the latter cannot be explained by alcoholism. That would be true even if ALL of the mass murderers were found to be alcoholics – and they have not been found to be so, even by you. No doubt some of them were/are alcoholics. The vast majority of alcoholics are not mass murderers, however, and therefore alcoholism does not “explain” mass murderers.

    Now, if you want to say that some mass murderers are alcoholics and it may be a factor for them in some way, that could be true.

    If you want to discuss Leopold and alcohol specifically, offer some proof or evidence that he was an alcoholic.

36. but he enforced nazi academic protocols, then after he had emigrated to argentina, he had been one of the leading figures behind deconstructionism along with belgian fascists, paul de man, which has the effect of dismantling the perception of reality and accountability,

    leopold and loeb, came around in an era where they had not gotten the notion that gott ist totten, the furies would come after the war

37. Neo – I did read the link and felt it reinforced my sense that Arendt’s take on Eichmann is cautionary. I believe she was dissatisfied with the conclusion that Eichmann was a monster. That is too easy. He was perfect for an evil movement for which his innate unquestioning efficiency was a perfect fit. I think she found him more appalling than she expected because of his banality.

    I had not thought about Hannah Arendt or The Banality of Evil for a long time and it feels very apropos for our moment here in the US. A lot of the wokeness that surrounds us is promoted in matter-of-fact, almost perky tones. Arendt might call it banal. One could also observe that Biden is a mild man, nonthreatening . . . banal.

38. Jeanne:

    The kindest thing I can say about Arendt is that she confused a boring facade with reality. For a smart woman, that’s not very smart.

    Then again, she made excuses for Heidegger. At least she had personal reasons for doing that.

    By the way, Arendt was ethnically Jewish but was secular, was not interested in Judaism the religion as such and was only a Jew because Germany and others insisted on treating her as one. See this for a balanced and interesting discussion of this and related issues. An excerpt:

    When Arendt attached to Adolf Eichmann the phrase “banality of evil,” the meaning of which remains obscure to this day, many Jews thought she was trivializing Nazi persecution. Arendt also exaggerated out of all proportion the degree to which some Jewish leaders in Europe cooperated with the Nazi authorities in the forlorn hope that doing so would improve matters. At the time of the book’s appearance, failures of Jewish leadership were little discussed outside of specialized or bitterly partisan circles within the Jewish community, and in any case the question is of dubious relevance to Eichmann’s guilt. Then, Arendt implied that Eichmann’s trial had been a political one, conducted by the Israeli government for its own purposes. Finally, though her recondite meditation on whether Eichmann should have been executed concluded that he should have, the very intricacy of her discussion tempted the impatient to ascribe to her the opposite stance. As a refugee in the 1930s and later, Arendt had been active in various Zionist projects, albeit more from a humanitarian than from a national perspective. Eichmann ruptured some of her long-standing friendships with distinguished intellectuals, most publicly Gershom Scholem.

39. Interesting book about Hannah and Marty Heidegger:

    “Stranger from Abroad” by Daniel Maier-Katkin.

40. 1) there was some foolhardy exercises of that nature, with desperate people, wallenberg tried to do some work in hungary as I recall

    2)he was the highest ranking nazi, the organizer of the final solution, karl wolf was one who directed the military party of this operation, including on the Western Front and then there was gehlen, who was not available

    3) what would arendt have had the israelis do, execute him, hold him without a trial

41. Neo,

    Thank God they don’t all kill, maim, commit domestic violence, abuse animals, burglarize or commit other misbehaviors.

    But if someone commits any of these misbehaviors, especially more than once and serious and as someone in their teen years or beyond, I’ll give five to one odds they are substance addicted.

    I’ll look into Leopold. The case you describe reminded me of the Columbine killers: one was a full on alkie; the other, his enabler.

42. Earlier this year, I listened to a recording of Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” I found it interesting and thought-provoking, but not as persuasive or conclusive as she might have hoped. In part, this is because I had listened to Thomas Sowell’s book, “Marxism,” which deeply examines Marx’s thought (as opposed to MarxIST thought) and which concludes with a brief biographical sketch of Marx. At least in “Totalitarianism,” Arendt appears to dismiss Marx’s anti-Semitism, or minimize it; she appears to believe that Marx’s view of history and economics is the golden key to wisdom. She also seems to think that Marx couldn’t possibly be sincerely anti-Semitic, since he had rabbis on both sides of his family tree. This ignores that Marx was baptized as an infant and raised rather secularly.

    Arendt also apparently believes Lenin’s claim that imperialism was driven by the excess capital of late-stage capitalism, and the need for resources and people to exploit. Sowell delves into Lenin’s claim in either “Basic Economics” or “Economic Facts and Fallacies” (perhaps both – I can’t remember). Finally, while she provides some very interesting historical information about Western European Jews, I disagree with her assertion that Jews were not entirely innocent victims. Nobody “brings upon themselves” such murderous hatred. No matter how annoying or obnoxious an individual’s actions or a group of people’s actions, they do not justify universal discrimination, let alone genocide.

    These have been my thoughts after listening to Arendt’s “Totalitarianism.” I was not aware of her long-running relationship with Heidegger, though that certainly helps me understand better why her book is the way it is. All told, I’d say this particular book IS worth reading/listening to, but you’ll need a higher MERV rating on your mental filter. 😉

43. The conclusion of Thomas White’s essay is interesting:

    “Arendt never did reconcile her impressions of Eichmann’s bureaucratic banality with her earlier searing awareness of the evil, inhuman acts of the Third Reich. She saw the ordinary-looking functionary, but not the ideologically evil warrior. How Eichmann’s humdrum life could co-exist with that ‘other’ monstrous evil puzzled her. Nevertheless, Arendt never downplayed Eichmann’s guilt, repeatedly described him as a war criminal, and concurred with his death sentence as handed down by the Israeli court. Though Eichmann’s motives were, for her, obscure and thought-defying, his genocidal acts were not. In the final analysis, Arendt did see the true horror of Eichmann’s evil.”

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