[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1592073718664{margin-top: px !important;}”][vc_column][nd_options_text nd_options_text_tag=”h1″ nd_options_text_align=”center” nd_options_text=”Rohingya Genocide Rememberence”][vc_separator css=”.vc_custom_1592073469617{padding-top: 15px !important;}”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1592073707897{margin-top: px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_column_text]The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied — as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels — that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong…..Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report of the Banality of Evil)
What did Hannah Arendt really mean by the banality of evil? Thomas White
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. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.
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 Arendt’s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’.
Source: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”3155″ alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_border” border_color=”orange” onclick=”img_link_large”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
