The EU

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Monday, May 9, 2011

"Banality of Evil"

This article in today's International Herald Tribune isn't great, but it does bring up some interesting issues about the Holocaust and the treatment of the perpetrators (and victims) in the years that followed.

The article is in the Arts Section of The New York Times Online, but page A-1 of the New England Print Edition.

The article covers a new exhibition on SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann at the Topography of Terrorism Museum, in Berlin.  For those too young to remember, Lt Col Eichmann was assigned by Obergruppenführer (General) Reinhard Heydrich to organize the logistics of the round-up and deportation of Jews to the German Death Camps in Poland.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt came in for some strange criticism in the article and in the exhibition
…reappraising the work of philosopher Hannah Arendt, pointing out that she failed to attend much of the trial, never saw Eichmann cross-examined and thus didn't witness his "just following orders" defense crumble.

"Neither perverted nor sadistic," is how Arendt described Eichmann, but "terribly and terrifyingly normal."
In this age of Osama bin Laden, Ms Arendt's description still rings true to me.  Evil, micro and macro, still abounds.  The atrocities in Communist nations in the Twentieth Century, are ignored.  The Rwanda Genocide, and other like it, are just too hard to deal with.  For quite some time it was too difficult and too politically chargted to deal with ethnic cleansing in the Balkins.  Then there are those incidents like the several women in a McDonalds in Maryland, kicking another woman senseless.  And yesterday (as in Sunday) it was Salafis thugs in Egypt, persecuting the Christian miniority.
Christians blamed Saturday's deadly sectarian clashes at two churches near Cairo on Egypt's ultraconservative Salafis, a radical Islamist ideology whose growing influence is worrying both secularists and the country's Christian minority.
In the end, it is our own indifference, reinforced by the reality that we can't do everything—so we do nothing.  One arguement about not going into Libya this Spring was that we were not also willing to go into Syria.  On the other hand, if France and its allies, including us, can fix the Libya problem, then maybe Syria will take note and change its approach to its own protestors.

Regards  —  Cliff

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If one examines accurate history, one can quickly conclude that most of the monsters of our past....and frankly...in our present and our future.....are terrifyingly, terribly normal. As one rather famous cleric observed about Satan himself, religious leadership centuries ago determined that they had to depict Satan as this ugly, nightmarish figure in order to attempt to strike fear into the hearts of those who would fall victim to his entreaties. In fact, scripturally, Satan is one of God's most beautiful creations, so beautiful in fact that he rivaled God himself, seeking to replace Him....and thus (in a bit of oversimplification) his fall from grace.

The monster in our midst lives and grows simply because we are unable to discern him or her, and even if we sense danger, are often persuaded by our "herd" that our posits are in error. "Just wait. You'll see. He really IS a good guy." I imagine that hundreds of thousands of Germans felt that during the earliest years of Hitler who, after all, preached national pride in being German and the need for Germans to "take their place in history as a proud and capable people."

They did.