Norm Geras has a thoughtful post on the ease with which too many folks assume we're all potential genocidaires, and wonders why we're not also commonly assumed to be potential rapists, say.
Norm is a nicer and more moderate chap than I, and much better at English understatement. Me, I'm of the opinion that much of the banality-is-evil chatter is bunk. This opinion of mine is based on years of close investigation of the worst genocidaires of all: the men of Adolf Eichmann's office in the SS. Yes, the very group about whom Hannah Arendt postulated the banality concept while willfully not listening to the proceedings at Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem. I don't much deal with the matter anymore, but once wrote a book about it which you can read in a variety of languages (see the link somewhere over to the left).
The closest one can reasonably come to a blanket condemnation of man's potential for evil is that it's not easy to know in advance who is capable of it, and who isn't, not ever. That's a far cry from the silliness traded in so mindlessly by the "Anyone might do it" brigades. And also - here I'll unmask how unpolitically correct I really am - cultural conditioning is part of the story. Some cultures more easily allow people to engage in mass murder than others.
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16 comments:
Dear Yaacov,
I think the banality of evil explanation is another of those intellectual mantras purporting to explain complex processes with a simplistic formula. This is an irresistible pull (yes, I confessed that I am sinner too...) of our so-called postmodern world, affecting in particular the journalistic profession and, unfor
I was recently re-reading the outstanding book "Into that darkness" by Gita Sereny. What a difference! An informed investigative journalist that won't refrain from asking embarrassing questions and who goes to the core of things.
Regards,
sergio
I'd give it a different label Yaacov. The banality of fear. It's not that human beings are particularly evil, we're just not very brave. When faced with the dilemna of standing up for others, and suffering the same fate as them, or being a mouse.... well most of us squeak don't we. Shut up and live.
All cultures value heroism & bravery highly, obviously because it's scarce, yet idiots like that Clive Owen can't figure it out. Perhaps he's just making excuses for his own future behaviour... he knows he doesn't have the courage to make a stand when it counts.
Gavin
Gavin,
Though I agree with what you said about fear (and I should add indifference too), the "banality of evil" issue is that it has transformed into a facile explanation, and worse still, into an excuse which tends to exonerate perpetrators from decisions which frequently are within their power to change. By claiming that people are just mindless robots in a huge bureaucratic machine, the cultural-historical background, the perpetrator's upbringing/moral stance, intentions, beliefs and will are just dismissed as secondary. Quite an easy way out.
There are tons of examples of willfull acts of sadism or ideologicaly motivated decisions. For instance, in Sereny's book, the Treblinka kommandant Franz Stangl, who apparently never directly killed anybody, repeatedly claims that it was in his nature to do his "administrative" job as efficiently as he could. This is a pathetic cover up this devout catholic invented as an excuse for the daily monstrosities he was responsible for.
Oh I'm not disagreeing Sergio. I was just making the observation that most people commit evil deeds out of fear.... a sense of self preservation. There's evil people, there's craven people, there's people who can't be bowed and no doubt a few other categories. I'd wager that Stangl was just a coward... doesn't forgive his actions I'm just surmising that he wasn't pure evil like say... Heidrich, Stalin, African dictators etc.
I was addressing Owen's claim that we're all capable of evil like Rwanda. He's wrong, we're not. He might be, we're not all like him.
Gavin
The Nazis did what they did because they first dehumanized the Jews and convinced themselves they were not dealing with human beings but rather with demons responsible for the degeneration - that is the downfall of mankind. That became all the justification needed to kill Jews without remorse or guilt - and that is how millions were dispatched to their deaths during the Second World War.
I don't know if evil is banal or not, but it is far too frequent and commonplace.
Nycerbarb
I found the banality label always quite a helpful call to vigilance and not only because I grew up with the perpetrators as my elders.
Because, If you make your living as a paper-pushing clerk more often than not what you are helping along remains quite murky almost invisible.
As an extreme example a Bill of Lading for some apples will demand very very likely the exact same handling procedure as sending humans to their death in cattle cars. Writing cheques to the Deutsche Reichsbahn for having transported apples will involve the same steps as it does for having transported humans.
So a constant reminder that evil may come your way clothed in banality proved in my world, which is probably one level below of what Yaacov looked at, a very good call to attention.
Silke
PS: I object to Hannah Arendt's demand on German TV "man wehrt sich" (one resists/pushes back)
Even the SS behaved differently in the camps and could make life-and-death decisions all the time, with plenty of latitude.
I also think that Stangl's case is of cowardice and unbriddled careerism. But to stomach the euthanasia programme, then Sobibor and Treblinka, one had to have antisemitism as a second nature. An example of Stangl's "kindness" is when he relates in a most casual way that he once allowed a prisoner to have a last meal with his recently arrived 80-years old father, befored have him shot instead of gassed.
Regarding the process of gassings (the mayhem, the beatings, nakedness, etc), NormanF is right on the spot. To strip the "normal looking" jews of their human dignity would make their true nature as demons. In his brilliant book "Modern Antisemitism", Hyam Macobby retraces that to Hitler's famous "revelation" in Vienna when he spot an "ostjude" in the street. That was the "real" jew, not the assimilated (hence, disguised) ones.
Regards
Sergio
Sergio
maybe the most heinous and shameful for my people fact of them all is that the people with support from the churches encumbered if not stopped the euthanasia program i.e. protest against the murdering spree when it killed their "own"
compare it to what this survivor of the "White Rose" tells of the difficulties other resistance efforts had to cope with - I couldn't help concluding while listening to it today that they and their like-minded couldn't find any broad popular support to help them
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=17610
Silke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_T4
Silke,
In Sereny's book there is an amazing discussion about the euthanasia program. Apparently Hitle's chancery was afraid of the Church's reaction and summoned an expert to write an "opinion" about it. The
guy said he didn't expect great opposition, and in fact the Church was quite slow in protesting. When it did protest, the program was almost "complete" and, moreover, it didn't stop, continuing on-and-off till almost the end of the war, killing war prisioner and jews. And many of the staff of the T4 program used their acquired "skills" in the camps. Stangl is an example.
Sergio
Sergio
to give you an idea how close it all was
- one of my employers had a free-lance company doctor internal medicine specialist who had worked at Hadamar and according to his devoted secretary "never did or knew anything but had been hindered in his career by it". He was a very nice very caring very considerate doctor ...
That was at the beginning of the 70s, maybe some 68ers had gotten after him and made her whine about it, whether he "did" I don't know, I never asked and nobody I knew ever asked and if we had wanted to we wouldn't have known where to get the info. The world of the clerking class and the world of academia were till the event of the internet very far away from eachother (from what I read the world of the working class is still very alien to academics, we seem to be more interested in their stuff than they in ours and they offer us galore these days.)
Just to give you another idea how far away it all was: To get English language books you had to have travelling friends who were willing to get them for you and to even learn of their existence you had to have I don't know what and that even though I was at the time working in personnel in an American engineering company and sent colleagues on assignments all through the world
- no excuse intended if I and others had really focused on it we should have been able to come up with something
- the 68ers talked about it but their language was so bloated and so nutty-like that we "wage slaves" wanted to stay away from them - all the students (except one math-guy) who showed up as temps to do some typing and filing had to be constantly lashed to do any work at all and talked unintelligible gibberish.
as to not stopping the program - even if you manage only to encumber an operation you save a lot of lives and they could only bring themselves to that for their own, not for the kids of their Jewish neighbors, let alone ask what happened to them. If they knew about the deportation shouldn't they have exchanged addresses to keep in contact? tht's what neighbors normally do, when they part, don't they?
Silke
At least some of those doctors/nurses were hanged after the "doctor's trial".
But one has to remember that eugenics was very much "in the air" since the end of the XIX-century in academic circles, particularly in medicine, and not only in Germany, with tinges of social-darwinism. In fact, Hitler's chancery argued that the US was intending to pursue such a program. It's amazing the power those psychiatrists had: they have to mark in a "card" with "plus" or "minus" meaning life or death. Some really believe they were at the frontline of scientific progress...
Now, the staff, nurses, docs, priests of those places wouldn't have talked about what was going on? And the neighbours saw the buses with "pacients" being transfered and returned empty.
Silke,
By the way, many nazis, doctors or not, could and were very nice/caring and considerate, at least to some creatures. Heydrich apparently was a caring father. And Hitler...well, he apparently loved his dog.
Sergio
Sergio
this nice/caring/considerate was what made being young in this country of mine so disgusting so often
- what was there to tell you who was who?
maybe that's why I am so prone to obsessing about insignificant details because sometimes some turn of phrase, too much emphasis or too little, too fast an answer or none at all made your stomach heave and once it had heaved the signs usually kept on coming.
... and now it's my generation keeping it up
there was a TV-movie some years ago on Speer (I think Sereny has a book on him also) - I haven't seen it but according to media it was indisputable that he knew what was going on under him in for example Mittelbau Dora (he must have been quite a charmer to make them believe him at Nuremberg). One of his children a son who is a prominent architect in his own right said in an interview that he believed that the movie couldn't have gotten it quite right - makes one want to scream ...
BTW my chemist etc superiors used to quip medicine is not a science, let alone psychiatry but still they go on without being doubted again and again
Silke
I'm not sure of the reasons for the decline of humanist thinking in mid-XIX century Europe, even before the carnage of WWI. Maybe it was the human costs of industrialization, or the romantic reaction to the enlightenment, or the colonialist experiences, or the fear of revolution, or the crisis of religion, or a generational conflict, or all that and more.
But in the end, there was a widespread and perverse biologicization of politics, which wasn't the monopoly of the nazis: the talk about races, an obsession with decay and degenerescence and the influence of social darwinism. There was a lot of candid talk of extermination too. And many doctors embraced these ideas, particularly in Germany.
all that and more is probably the right explanation but my personal pet dislike is for Romantics
Silke
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