Yes Al . Hannah Arendt's "The Banality of Evil". Hitler's Henchmen were every day ordinary Germans. School teachers, Doctors, Lawyers, Clergy, Tradesmen, Laborer's, Police. I remember the story of a Holocaust survivor who played a personal game in her mind afterwards and the personalities they had. Who would give up and die, who would sp…
Yes Al . Hannah Arendt's "The Banality of Evil". Hitler's Henchmen were every day ordinary Germans. School teachers, Doctors, Lawyers, Clergy, Tradesmen, Laborer's, Police. I remember the story of a Holocaust survivor who played a personal game in her mind afterwards and the personalities they had. Who would give up and die, who would speak out and be murdered, who would turn quisling or Kapo, who would steal, who would be the survivors and escape knowing they crossed no lines with their humanity still intact. Who would be Death Camp Guards, who would be torturers, who would commit war crimes and slaughter humans in front of mass pits, who would be the propagandists to make it all happen. Goebbels and others were merely former Advertising Men after all. Arendt when seeing Eichmann. Small bespectacled in civilian clothes. Remembering him in uniform as a giant monster with the power of life and death, may have been how she came to the conclusion how Banal humans are if put in the "right" circumstances!
Doing the job assigned - following orders. Banal - ordinary looking. Though I am now horrified that the people who judged Eichmann are the forerunners of those committing the slaughter/genocide in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank/East Jerusalem, Southern Lebanon, and in Iran, Jordan, Syria!
I am just finishing Asa Winstanley's 2023 book "Weaponising Ant-Semitism" essentially how the Israeli govt agents and British Zionists brought down Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party with false charges of being an anti-Semite - and also brought down and hollowed out the Labour Party to the extent that it is now a party of Zionists and those whipped into shape as Zionist supporters - and the dreadful Zionist PM (Sir????) Keir Starmer...one a human rights defender...
Yes Al . Hannah Arendt's "The Banality of Evil". Hitler's Henchmen were every day ordinary Germans. School teachers, Doctors, Lawyers, Clergy, Tradesmen, Laborer's, Police. I remember the story of a Holocaust survivor who played a personal game in her mind afterwards and the personalities they had. Who would give up and die, who would speak out and be murdered, who would turn quisling or Kapo, who would steal, who would be the survivors and escape knowing they crossed no lines with their humanity still intact. Who would be Death Camp Guards, who would be torturers, who would commit war crimes and slaughter humans in front of mass pits, who would be the propagandists to make it all happen. Goebbels and others were merely former Advertising Men after all. Arendt when seeing Eichmann. Small bespectacled in civilian clothes. Remembering him in uniform as a giant monster with the power of life and death, may have been how she came to the conclusion how Banal humans are if put in the "right" circumstances!
Doing the job assigned - following orders. Banal - ordinary looking. Though I am now horrified that the people who judged Eichmann are the forerunners of those committing the slaughter/genocide in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank/East Jerusalem, Southern Lebanon, and in Iran, Jordan, Syria!
I am just finishing Asa Winstanley's 2023 book "Weaponising Ant-Semitism" essentially how the Israeli govt agents and British Zionists brought down Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party with false charges of being an anti-Semite - and also brought down and hollowed out the Labour Party to the extent that it is now a party of Zionists and those whipped into shape as Zionist supporters - and the dreadful Zionist PM (Sir????) Keir Starmer...one a human rights defender...