FEE Stories- Hannah Arendt’s Chilling Thesis on Evil
Hannah Arendt’s eyewitness assessment of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as “terribly and terrifyingly normal” took the world by surprise.
How often have you noticed people behaving in anti-social ways because of a hope to blend in, a desire to avoid isolation as a recalcitrant, nonconforming individual? Did you ever see someone doing harm because “everybody else was doing it”? The fact that we all have observed such things, and that any one of the culprits might easily, under the right circumstances, have become an Adolf Eichmann, is a chilling realization.
As Arendt explained, “Going along with the rest and wanting to say ‘we’ were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible.”
Texel island is claiming independence from Holland due to nitrogen policy.
If you don’t realize that the capacity for evil exists in you then you don’t understand anything. It’s arrogant folly to presume that you are “good”; being good takes a supreme effort, and may demand a high price, including your life and the lives of those you love. Don’t dare to make so presumptuous a claim.
Jeremiah 17:9
‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?’
Unless, and until we understand that truth we will never see our need for The Saviour.
East Germany was a very creepy place. It was every bit as totalitarian as the third Reich, but way more subtle with their approach.
The Stasi were very pervasive, had informants everywhere, and encouraged everyone to denounce each other as a way of cultivating a culture of fear and mistrust.
Even the church was infiltrated with agents and informers….. kind of like it is here nowadys.
The Stasi had a bag of tricks that they called “decomposition”, which were campaigns of harassment and gaslighting targetted at dissidents who were too prominent to just remove. It involved:
-Breaking into homes, looking for incriminating evidence and rearranging belongings for the sole purpose of messing with the target’s perceptions.
-Prank calling the target late at night.
-Sending the target weird stuff in the mail, most likely items that would make them look bad.
-Spreading malicious rumors about the target.
-Pulling strings to cause the target to miss out on opportunities, or even to lose their job or schooling.
This sounds eerily familiar today…
Exactly like the moronic group-think of progressives.
On Saturday, I heard an add on the radio urging people to call 911 if they suspected a boater of being intoxicated.
Don’t forget the Covid-Karen ratlines.
The people who do things like that, denouncing their fellow citizens, don’t think of themselves as evildoers doing harm, rather they are full of righteous indignation. Anyone with a brain, however, would think of them as evil.
All this does for me is confirm we passed peak-performance of intellectualism. No one was permitted to speak this way for two years, and it wasn’t hard because there were so little.
Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.”
— Marshall McLuhan
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
This reminds me of an old parlour game called “Who goes Naz*?” by Dorothy Thompson in Harper’s 1941. She goes through the room and discusses various people and their character. It’s an interesting read, if you have the time. I think a few people in Canada will recognize Young Mr. D. Anyway here’s a quote from Thompson from near the beginning:
“Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.
At any rate, let us look round the room…”
And near the end:
“Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Naz. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Naz out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Naz in a crisis.
Believe me, nice people don’t go Naz. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.”
The last 2.5 years made clear which people and institutions go authoritarian. The character types Dorothy Thompson talks about are all very much present in modern society. Journalists, media companies,big tech, all Canadian governments and most prominent institutions failed Thompson’s test.
Here’s the link to the article
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
LC
+++++/\
Seems pretty self serving. The post was literally about Eichmann, who would fit exactly into the ‘nice, civilised, gentlemanly family man’ category.
Respect Muh Authority.
The mediocre shall rule.
Bureaucracy is their element.
Their place of glory.
Shut up,”cause the Regulations say so.”
The most fascinating aspect of Dread Covid Theatre has been the removal of the masks and the collapse of the illusions..
Do you see “them” yet?
Your “Helpers?”.
Your owners,or so they say.
All in the name of “Safety”.
These fools and bandits really should have left well enough alone.
But then they would not be the fools they are,if they could have comprehended the danger..
We shall remain in a perpetual “State of Emergency” as it is now “Too Dangerous” for our parasitic overload,for them to lose their grip on power.
I just ran across Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men” (1992) which tells the story of “Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland”. Middle-aged Germans, too old for the Wehrmacht, who mostly became completely comfortable shooting tens of thousands of Polish Jewish women, children and old men. Just yet another example of “the banality of evil”.
It’s an interesting read, but I’m not sure how accurate it is. There was an interview of Eichman that took place before the Israelis captured him. Wilheim Sassen (a Nazi Journalist and past SS member) did a recorded interview that suggests that Eichman was obsessed with killing Jews and disturbingly prejudice towards them. The Nazi collaborators in Argentina used to sit around once a week smoking and drinking with the only entertainment being the recordings of Eichman (and a 700 page dictation). By all accounts I’ve read on the matter he was charismatic in his comments. Those aren’t the qualities of a functionary. I, also, seem to recall that Eichman was ordered not to continue with the gassing of Jews. But, he ignored the order and did it anyway. Again, that’s not a functionary’s behavior.
I think the functionary and subordinate schtick was born out of his defense in Court, and Arendt’s account/ assessment is born out of ulterior motives. But, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.
Orson, I read something along the lines of your thesis a while back.
I think you may well be right about the subordinate/functionary schtick. Why would a person facing a possible death sentence not try this obvious deception. I believe there is a reassessment of Arendt afoot.
‘the functionary and subordinate schtick’ is a strawman. Eichmann was a true believer and said as much. He was (if you believe him) disturbed by what he was doing but was convinced it was the only way to secure the future of Europe. He was definitely ‘prejudiced’ against jews but didn’t kill them to feed a malicious pleasure in their destruction (again, according to him), it was an unpleasant task that had to be carried out as efficiently as possible. Other Nazis also seemed to report this attitude.