Here is a perfect example of what Hannah was talking about.
Would you be able to tell just by looking at these three that they are all sexual perverts?
Posted on 02/07/2021 8:40:30 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution.
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.
Even 10 years after his trial in Israel, she wrote in 1971:
"I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer...The deeds were monstrous, but the doer...was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous."
The banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy. To Arendt’s critics, it seemed absolutely inexplicable that Eichmann could have played a key role in the Nazi genocide yet have no evil intentions.
In Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), the German historian Bettina Stangneth reveals another side to him... Drawing on audiotapes of interviews with Eichmann by the Nazi journalist William Sassen, Stangneth shows Eichmann as a self-avowed, aggressive Nazi ideologue strongly committed to Nazi beliefs, who showed no remorse or guilt for his role in the Final Solution – a radically evil Third Reich operative living inside the deceptively normal shell of a bland bureaucrat...
(Excerpt) Read more at aeon.co ...
Here is a perfect example of what Hannah was talking about.
Would you be able to tell just by looking at these three that they are all sexual perverts?
I used to be quite interested in this sort of thing, but I am out of practice by several decades. Perhaps I see it superficially now and miss essential elements. But I look to the odd psychologist/mystic G.I. Gurdjieff who felt that most humans were simply asleep. We sleep-walk through life, with no real deep thoughts or awareness. We are like machines. We wake up, go to work, go home, go to sleep. In between, we eat, make love, and perhaps pursue hobbies. But are we really “there”? Gurdjieff said that, mostly, we are not. The true quest for a man is to “wake up” and be present in their own life. It’s hard. We fool ourselves and think that we are in charge of our own lives, but really we are directed by forces outside of ourselves and we just drift along.
For my part, I see Hillary Clinton as really evil. I think she hates this country, and actively works to hurt the country and the people. John Kerry is also that way.
But I think most Democrats are asleep. I think Eichmann was mostly asleep. I don’t see any great reason why a person necessarily needs to be “possessed by an evil nature”. I think a lot of boring, sleep-walking people go through life causing damage without giving it a whole lot of thought. Banality of Evil has always seemed to me to be a very accurate concept.
Who cars? That woman was a puffed up intellectual idiot. Hannah wanted a groovy saying for her inaccurste book about Adolf Eichmann.
The instinct to benefit self and family causes many people to overlook their evil deeds.
The tribe then convinces them that doing their evil bidding will benefit them and their family.
My personal opinion is that this is more frequent in females.
I think that Hillary Clinton hates everyone, including herself.
As she also pointed out, Eichmann did absolutely nothing illegal in the context of his own society. He was not a lawbreaker, hellraiser, or anything much but a hard worker, patriot, and family man. In a sense, that’s more shocking and scary than tales of psychotic sadistic brutality in the streets or camps.
C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters makes many terrific observations about how the human soul can be corrupted. One that has always stuck with me is:
"It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
We are created to glorify the God of Israel. To worship him. Only in this way does the rest of our lives have meaning. I know evil from good and do not think killing millions of any race of people as being normal. Many books are written but only the book of life will be opened at the final time.
The “Banality” is a hollowness, an emptiness.
There is no “There” there.
Empty vessels, easily filled by any outside force.
Lots of folks followed the Nazi line because it took no effort. Just “doing what they were told”.
So too, it’s easy tp be a Democrat today.
The modern Demon-Rat party is filled with just such empty vessels, that have now been filled with a phony vitriol and rage from some self-serving actors. The
Antifaschistische Aktion (those Antifa reprobates parading in black bloomers and face diapers) were and are just unleashed G-dless Communists, actually promoted and never, ever punished by those in power.
All of this “Woke” BS is simply gibs-me-dat, in a Valley Girl accent.
Gott ist tot. Without a core of The Divine, humanity is simply hollow husks in the wind.
Some people will argue it's the right of the parent to discipline their children as they see fit. Maybe the child did something to put himself in danger and it warranted a swift and harsh response. On the other hand, the mother may be an irrational tyrant who takes out all her anger and insecurities on her innocent and helpless child.
Others will argue it's your duty to stop obvious child abuse and you should intervene or call the police and report the mother.
We see these two opposite reactions all the time in this forum. 'Leave the parent alone. It's none of your business how she disciplines her children.' 'The parent is a monster and the child should be removed immediately.'
Is it ok to stand back while a parent beats a child in front of you? Is that accepting the banality of evil? Should you intervene? When is it right or wrong to intervene or not intervene?
If they child is later beaten to death because you didn't intervene did you accept the banality of evil? If the child is taken from the parent and the child later suffers even worse abuse at the hands foster parents are you guilty of over-reacting and causing the suffering or death of the child?
What we get is Monday-morning quarterbacks telling us why we should have responded differently.
>> Without a core of The Divine, humanity is simply hollow husks in the wind.
Bingo. As a Law Enforcement chaplain I see it every day I’m on duty.
Go read Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland”.
.
Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’,...”
Not buying this ideocy. Just because he wasn’t some preconceived cartoon doesn’t mean that there was somehow less evil or unevil in his evil. He did what he did because he was what he was. If he seemed otherwise like the guy who fills your prescriptions at your pharmacy, that doesn’t mean anything.
He may have had a bland demeanor, but quotes from him show that he was full of a murderous hatred for the Jews, just like Hitler. He was an active evil murderer, not some passive “just following orders” type.
There is a big difference between spanking a child and beating a child. Normal people know it when they see it.
Parents discipline and spank a child out of love and the need for correction (so the child will learn right from wrong).
Sick people beat their child.
It doesn't matter much. Eichmann hung for his deeds, not his demeanor. No one sane is able to separate the efficiency of the extermination camps from their purpose, nor do I think that's really quite what Arendt had in mind.
It is curious, though, in the study of this astoundingly evil period of history, to mark both the degree to which the perpetrators did know at least that they'd be called to account for their actions and the thoroughness with which they managed the coverup of evidence - actual archaeological evidence of the Sobibor facilities, for example, wasn't uncovered until 2014. Those aren't the signs of a clear conscience. The Nazis kept their eyes on a shining image of a purely fictitious imagined future as they performed incredibly evil actions in order to pursue it, a thing modern progressives have assiduously avoided noticing in their own actions.
And so once again we hear calls for mass "re-education" camps from people who refuse to learn better. This thing just won't go away.
Thank you for this fascinating article. It made me think. In my mind the banality of evil is not the crazy eyed obviously demented Charles Manson. The banality of evil is the BTK killer who lived an amazingly “normal” life with a family, church, etc., but was a sadistic killer/torturer in private.
You can be evil without looking or acting like a rabid dog.
Not.
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