by Christopher Horner
Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Jerusalem on June 1st 1962, a little after midnight. He had been found guilty by an Israeli court of ‘crimes against the Jewish people’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. One of the reasons he is still remembered – apart from the sheer scale of the crimes committed by him – is the he became the subject of a famous book: Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt. It is a troubling and controversial text, but, I think, one that holds a good deal of interest for us today. For it hs something to say about the modern subject and the way we live today. Eichmann’s significance takes us to the heart of Arendt’s central concern – the very possibility of living together politically in the contemporary world. This is an issue of obvious concern to all of us.
The Banality of Evil
Arendt’s term for what she saw and heard in Eichmann has become famous: ‘The banality of evil’: Arendt’s identification of Eichmann as a somehow thoughtless man, one who replaced reflection on the murder he was committing by clichés and formulae has become famous, so much so that it too risks joining the army of clichés, another formula to replace thought. Yet the question remains: what was it about Eichmann that she saw as significant? What Arendt saw in Eichmann was something that remains present and troubling today. This was the abdication from genuine thinking and judging that she named, an absence that accompanied him through his role in the central crime of the Twentieth Century. The high-ranking Nazi, an agent of genocide was just a colourless bureaucrat. And the manner in which this functionary did evil was as far from the demonic or sadistic as one could imagine –it was banal indeed. Arendt did not claim that evil is a banal concept, but that those who sit in offices and bring it about it are just that: not monsters but ordinary people who do not think. This banality, or ordinariness, is the disturbing reality that makes Eichmann a kind of negative exemplar, a representative figure for our times. The trial gave Arendt the opportunity to encounter the phenomenon right in front of her eyes. Read more »