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My third problem concerns the concept of "evil" itself. Modern secular society has long been uncomfortable with the idea of "evil." We prefer more rationalistic and legal definitions of good and bad, right and wrong, crime and punishment. But in recent years the word has crept slowly back into moral and even political discourse.[5] However, now that the concept of "evil" has reentered our public language we don't know what to do with it. We have become confused.

On the one hand the Nazi extermination of the Jews is presented as a singular crime, an evil never matched before or since, an example and a warning: "Nie Wieder! Never again!" But on the other hand we invoke that same ("unique") evil today for many different and far from unique purposes. In recent years politicians, historians, and journalists have used the term "evil" to describe mass murder and genocidal outcomes everywhere: from Cambodia to Rwanda, from Turkey to Serbia, from Bosnia to Chechnya, from the Congo to Sudan. Hitler himself is frequently conjured up to denote the "evil" nature and intentions of modern dictators: we are told there are "Hitlers" everywhere, from North Korea to Iraq, from Syria to Iran. And we are all familiar with President George W. Bush's "axis of evil," a self-serving abuse of the term which has contributed greatly to the cynicism it now elicits.

Moreover, if Hitler, Auschwitz, and the genocide of the Jews incarnated a unique evil, why are we constantly warned that they and their like could happen anywhere, or are about to happen again? Every time someone smears anti-Semitic graffiti on a synagogue wall in France we are warned that "the unique evil" is with us once more, that it is 1938 all over again. We are losing the capacity to distinguish between the normal sins and follies of mankind—stupidity, prejudice, opportunism, demagogy, and fanaticism —and genuine evil. We have lost sight of what it was about twentieth-century political religions of the extreme left and extreme right that was so seductive, so commonplace, so modern, and thus so truly diabolical. After all, if we see evil everywhere, how can we be expected to recognize the real thing? Sixty years ago Hannah Arendt feared that we would not know how to speak of evil and that we would therefore never grasp its significance. Today we speak of "evil" all the time—but with the same result, that we have diluted its meaning.

Secular leftists borrowed the term "evil" from its Judeo-Christian context in order to add gravitas to their claim that Jews were the unique victims of WWII, and indeed of the 20th century. But secular leftism has no philosophical basis to claim that anything is "evil." The only basis for considering that the mass killings of the Jews by the Nazis were in fact "evil" is that each and every human being is created in the image of God and the mass murder of the Jews is contrary to that which has been established by God, as taught by Judeo-Christian principles. But this is a basis that secular leftism cannot acknowledge, because it would require the acknowledgement of God. So they do not understand why anyone should say that the victims of secular leftism, under Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, etc., should be considered the victims of "evil" because they have only borrowed that term for their own special use and the concept is, in its basic meaning, like the related term "sin," foreign to the philosophical basis of their worldview. And of course the perverted gospel of islamo-fascism is practically a textbook example of "evil" from the Judeo-Christian meaning of the term, and yet to secular leftists it is considered "self-serving abuse" and "cynism" to apply this term to the islamo-fascists, as it detracts from their special claim to reserve this concept for the mass killings of the Jews by the Nazis.

The Jewish Holocaust pales in comparison to the evil destruction caused by marxistLiberals (Hitler too was a Liberal), Stalin, Mao HoChiMinh, and PolPot.
Even before Sep1939, Stalin had killed more than Hitler had by May1945.

That the Jews were specifically targeted is not just incidental to all the evil wrought by MarxistLiberalism writ large.
The various factions of nazis/communists/fascists/socialists/bolshvikNationalists.
killed more than 20X the number of Jews.
These others were as much the victims of this evil so heinous, the fact that one group was named is just one piece of the EvilMatrix that is Marxism.

So the matter of evil coming from Europe was apparent and extant before Hitler’s evil deeds. Yet none of the tony marxist intellectual/pundits want to get their brains around that “Holocaust”.

European selective memory as regards the Germans and Russians and Marx specifically is evil in and of itself for it affords them the deceit of crimes of ommisions.
They have no room to pontificate about ANYTHING.

An interesting lecture. It may be that my interpretation of Arendt's work is less well-founded than that of the author but I find it very difficult to imagine her agreeing to any of the author's main points.

The first of these is that the Holocaust is over-emphasized. Of course there were other victims of both Nazi and Communist, and of course their stories should be told. It is not, however, an overemphasis on the Jewish component of the Holocaust that is to blame, it is a deliberate exoneration of the other criminals, especially the Communists, that serves to de-emphasize their victims.

The reason for a special horror of the Holocaust from the Jewish perspective is twofold - first, its industrial nature, and second, that it was so very effective. How far judenrein went is reflected directly in the paucity of Jewish populations in Eastern Europe as well as Western some half a century after the event. But it is the first point, the industrial nature, that I think is most closely reflected in Arendt's commentary on evil.

And that is simply this - that the murder of an identified minority took place not in an atmosphere of blazing hatred but in one of cold indifference, calculated malice, and a delight in anonymous sadism. It is this that she meant by evil's banality. It was the ability to dehumanize, the willingness to subject persons whose identities their murderers couldn't face that brought us the camps. The latter came about due to the stress put on the SS and others of shooting their prisoners individually. Done en masse it was not only thought to be, but actually was, psychologically easier on the murderers. That method of denying human identity is the signal characteristic of evil, and it is all too ordinary in history. That, I think, is what Arendt was saying.

I take great issue with the author's flip dismissal of Bush's locution "axis of evil" for this reason. The evil of consigning faceless innocent civilians to non-humanity sufficient to justify the bombing of a marketplace, a school, or the flying of airliners into buildings, all on the basis of religious identity, falls fully into Arendt's category of banality. One looks at the 9/11 bombers and marvels not at their superhuman nature but at how very sordid, ordinary, and ultimately futile they were as human beings. This is indeed the stuff of the Holocaust.