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Political reminders at the dawn of a new dark age....
How dangerous is the cliche! When Marshall McLuhan speaks of the world as a "global village" do people think that we're all going to be living in grass huts with bamboo walls? Fortunately not. The "global village" of Marshall McLuhan has proved his "other" cliche "the medium is the message". But how many people who use these cliches actually read and understand the source material? Do any of the so-called communists understand what Marx meant by the "withering away of the State"? If the practise of the Communist parties in power is to anything to go by, not very many at all.
Consider the cliche "The Banality of Evil". How misused that has become! Do such people have any idea whatsoever of what the term means, who coined it and why? Because one thing is for sure, it does _not_ mean because because one thinks political evil is not impressive therefore it's banal and boring. It does _not_ mean because political evil does not strike one as interesting, it can justify retreating into the private life and disengage from civic involvement. In fact, it means the exact opposite.
For purposes of history truth, to give honour and dignity back to the person who coined the phrase and in the desire to teach, let us engage in an brief examination of a hero of the species named HANNAH ARENDT.
Born of secular Jews in 1906, expelled from school as a teenager for "insubordination" (fine spirit this one), romantically involved with Martin Heidegger (the existentialist philosopher who would become a Nazi) in the 1920s, a collector of "Judenhaas" (Jew-hating) propaganda in the 1930s, she smuggles Jews out of Hitler's regime through her apartment in Berlin, arrested, escpapes, spends 18 years as a "stateless person", is jailed by the French in 1940 because of her German birth (a fine touch of irony), escapes again, flees to the United States of America.
There, in the post-war period, she writes "The Origins of Totalitarianism", one of the finest political treatises of the 20th century. The first person to understand that totalitarianism was dynamic with terror as its essence, based on ideological principles, caused through dislocated and - this is important - SUCCEEDS WHEN PEOPLE RETREAT FROM CIVIC INVOLVEMENT TO THEIR PRIVATE LIFE.
"The Origins of Totalitarianism", published in 1951, won critical acclaim across the world as the most comprehensive understanding of Nazism and Stalinism. Arendt went on to write "The Human Condition", where she elaborates the reasons for political involvement, "On Revolution" and ... "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil".
Political evil, that is totalitarianism, was not banal - indeed it is the exact opposite. It was one of the most dynamic systems of government ever invented with the use of State terror, not just as a means (for the political opponents had already been defeated), but as the very essence of its existence. The people whom totalitarian regimes jail and torture are no threat to the regime - the Jews, the homosexuals, the Gypsies, the Kulaks. They are put in the concentration camps and exterminated by the regime _must_ exterminate them to justify their ideological principle.
There is nothing banal about this. There is nothing banal about Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot or even George W. Bush. The death and destruction they weave is not banal, it is not boring. It shatters the lives of tens of millions of people. That _is_ impressive and very interesting indeed. To think otherwise is a dishonour to the people who have to experience these murderous regimes.
What Arendt was referring to with the phrase "The Banality of Evil" was Adolf Eichmann, kidnapped by the Israeli Secret Service in 1960 and spirited away to stand trial in Israel. Eichmann's job in the Final Solution was to organize the transport of Jews across Europe to the extermination camps, a job that he carried out with extraordinary efficiency.
The problem was, Eichmann didn't fit the mould of what the media circus and the Jewish state of Israel wanted. They were looking for a commited Nazi, full of Judenhass and to document the sheer scale and passion of the regime for the Final Solution. But Eichmann didn't have anything in particular against Jews. He wasn't a fanatic. He was a calm, stable person, ordinary looking, moderate, proud of being a "law-abiding citizen" (always a danger in my opinion) with a particular capacity and knowledge about mass transportation of human beings. That's all.
It is not the deeds that Eichmann carried out that are banal, it is not the political practise of totalitarism that is banal. It is certainly not the mass extermination of millions of people that is banal. It is Eichmann who is banal because - and Arendt must have been overwhelmed by this clear justification of her own theory - EICHMANN DIDN'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS.
So when people ask, "Gee, tcpip, why are so worked up about politics? Why not just retreat behind closed doors, where it's safe and sound and let none of this affect you? Just let it go, let it go...", I am reminded of Hannah Arendt and study and direct experiences of totalitarianism. If you don't want to see concentration camps, if you don't to be dragged away to one yourself, if you don't want to see the world in flames, you'd better out of that door, into the streets, engage in the civic sphere of life, protest against plans of war and protect people - even people who you may not personally like - from the prospect of State violence. Because in the immortal words of Reverend Martin Neimoner, composed at Dacau concentration camp in 1945 (where he'd just been marked for execution):
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
And _that_ is why I get so "worked up" over politics.
Consider the cliche "The Banality of Evil". How misused that has become! Do such people have any idea whatsoever of what the term means, who coined it and why? Because one thing is for sure, it does _not_ mean because because one thinks political evil is not impressive therefore it's banal and boring. It does _not_ mean because political evil does not strike one as interesting, it can justify retreating into the private life and disengage from civic involvement. In fact, it means the exact opposite.
For purposes of history truth, to give honour and dignity back to the person who coined the phrase and in the desire to teach, let us engage in an brief examination of a hero of the species named HANNAH ARENDT.
Born of secular Jews in 1906, expelled from school as a teenager for "insubordination" (fine spirit this one), romantically involved with Martin Heidegger (the existentialist philosopher who would become a Nazi) in the 1920s, a collector of "Judenhaas" (Jew-hating) propaganda in the 1930s, she smuggles Jews out of Hitler's regime through her apartment in Berlin, arrested, escpapes, spends 18 years as a "stateless person", is jailed by the French in 1940 because of her German birth (a fine touch of irony), escapes again, flees to the United States of America.
There, in the post-war period, she writes "The Origins of Totalitarianism", one of the finest political treatises of the 20th century. The first person to understand that totalitarianism was dynamic with terror as its essence, based on ideological principles, caused through dislocated and - this is important - SUCCEEDS WHEN PEOPLE RETREAT FROM CIVIC INVOLVEMENT TO THEIR PRIVATE LIFE.
"The Origins of Totalitarianism", published in 1951, won critical acclaim across the world as the most comprehensive understanding of Nazism and Stalinism. Arendt went on to write "The Human Condition", where she elaborates the reasons for political involvement, "On Revolution" and ... "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil".
Political evil, that is totalitarianism, was not banal - indeed it is the exact opposite. It was one of the most dynamic systems of government ever invented with the use of State terror, not just as a means (for the political opponents had already been defeated), but as the very essence of its existence. The people whom totalitarian regimes jail and torture are no threat to the regime - the Jews, the homosexuals, the Gypsies, the Kulaks. They are put in the concentration camps and exterminated by the regime _must_ exterminate them to justify their ideological principle.
There is nothing banal about this. There is nothing banal about Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot or even George W. Bush. The death and destruction they weave is not banal, it is not boring. It shatters the lives of tens of millions of people. That _is_ impressive and very interesting indeed. To think otherwise is a dishonour to the people who have to experience these murderous regimes.
What Arendt was referring to with the phrase "The Banality of Evil" was Adolf Eichmann, kidnapped by the Israeli Secret Service in 1960 and spirited away to stand trial in Israel. Eichmann's job in the Final Solution was to organize the transport of Jews across Europe to the extermination camps, a job that he carried out with extraordinary efficiency.
The problem was, Eichmann didn't fit the mould of what the media circus and the Jewish state of Israel wanted. They were looking for a commited Nazi, full of Judenhass and to document the sheer scale and passion of the regime for the Final Solution. But Eichmann didn't have anything in particular against Jews. He wasn't a fanatic. He was a calm, stable person, ordinary looking, moderate, proud of being a "law-abiding citizen" (always a danger in my opinion) with a particular capacity and knowledge about mass transportation of human beings. That's all.
It is not the deeds that Eichmann carried out that are banal, it is not the political practise of totalitarism that is banal. It is certainly not the mass extermination of millions of people that is banal. It is Eichmann who is banal because - and Arendt must have been overwhelmed by this clear justification of her own theory - EICHMANN DIDN'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS.
So when people ask, "Gee, tcpip, why are so worked up about politics? Why not just retreat behind closed doors, where it's safe and sound and let none of this affect you? Just let it go, let it go...", I am reminded of Hannah Arendt and study and direct experiences of totalitarianism. If you don't want to see concentration camps, if you don't to be dragged away to one yourself, if you don't want to see the world in flames, you'd better out of that door, into the streets, engage in the civic sphere of life, protest against plans of war and protect people - even people who you may not personally like - from the prospect of State violence. Because in the immortal words of Reverend Martin Neimoner, composed at Dacau concentration camp in 1945 (where he'd just been marked for execution):
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
And _that_ is why I get so "worked up" over politics.
no subject
He refused to divert his trains when they were needed for troops transportation towards the end of the Reich. It's his efficiency that I find most chilling, compelling but ultimately understandable. He was, in many ways, the perfect employee.
no subject
I don't think it's Eichmann's efficiency per se isn't chilling. After all, if he used that sort of efficiency to help refugees esacpe Hitler's Germany we would be singing his praises. Efficiency itself isn't banal - indeed, it's an impressive value in it's own right. His "banality" is in the complete _lack_ of _any_ moral or political values - the fact that he was a completely "one dimensional" character.
As the shocked (and later she admitted euphoric) Arendt pointed out at the time, Eichmann was living proof that one didn't need to be motivated by hatred to carry out crimes against humanity. There was a type of evil which actually required no moral motivation at all - Eichmann was literally an animal, he was _amoral_ not _immoral_. Or, as you have correctly pointed out, he was "dispassionate", a bureaucratic equivalent of the "disinterested" Nazi doctors, who - in total opposition to their oath to heal - conducted some of the most horrendous experiments known in the history of our species.
Snipped from Usenet... Someone who understands
technical execution of something, without caring about the morality of its
application, of which Eichmann would have to be an exceptional extreme. But
between the Eichmanns and the Hitlers (who would have to be a minority in
each case) you would also need an army of 'ordinary' people to do the grunt
work and act as cogs in the machine. Some might be 'true believers', some
might have their hearts in the right place but believe what the
propagandists tell them, some might have misgivings but either be too
frightened to disobey or just too confused to know what to do (that American
experiment where people acted against their better judgement just because
someone in authority told them to has always fascinated me) and a lot, i
would imagine, would depend on people who only have a small part to play and
whose individual contribution is negligible but without whom, en masse, the
whole thing couldn't happen. Not the guards who herded people into train
carriages but the people who maintained the trains and tracks. Not the
people who turned on the gas but those who filled the cannisters. Surely
some of them must have known what the trains and gas would be used for, and
i doubt they all would have approved of what was happening but, well, they
weren't the ones doing the actual deed and if they didn't do their job
someone else would anyway. This is the sort of 'banality of evil' issue i
find interesting (even if it isn't quite what the phrase might have been
intended to mean).
It's probably a very important issue, as that's the level most people would
get to make a decision at, and possibly the most difficult to know where and
what to draw a line about. Being me, i'm always tossing up (or is that
off?) about things like that. At work, some products we make go to military
applications, mostly communications oriented but we have at times quoted on
things like parts for hand grenades. That threw up some interesting
thoughts. Now, despite being a bleeding heart hippy, i'm not a pacifist. i
believe that countries have a right to defend themselves and that armies and
weapons are a necessary evil. It was still wierd to be potentially involved
in making something whose functional purpose was to kill and maim people,
though philosophically i didn't have an objection as its main use would be
as a deterrent or, if it was ever used for real, most likely it would be in
legitimate defence against an aggressor. It did get me thinking though,
coming around the time of some fuss about Australian made rifles being sold
to Indonesia, where they were much more likely to be used in human rights
abuses, and i decided at that stage that there would be certain things i'd
draw the line at. For instance, if we were to make parts for land mines, i
decided i would have to refuse to take any part in it (even if it cost me my
job, which it probably wouldn't) or, more recently, i decided i'd also
refuse to participate if we were ever to be making anything for the Israeli
military (which would be more likely to cost me my job, but luckily thanks
to US protectionism will probably never come up). What does raise
interesting issues now is that the Australian defence forces are currently
involved in military action that i am strongly opposed to, so does that mean
i should be objecting to having anything to do with supplying product to the
defence forces, even though it's far more likely to be used in legitimate
defence programmes than what i consider illegitimate interventions overseas?
Common sense tells me that the difference it would make, and the likelihood
of any product we supply having anything whatsoever to do with Iraq, would
make it a pointless exercise (and i still have no objection to helping
maintain Australia's capability to defend itself from aggression, or for
legitimate peacekeeping missions etc).
But it still raises the age old question: where do you draw the line, and
how the hell do you ever know enough to make a decision?
--
stranger..
(i think i think too much)
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http://www.goth.net/~stranger
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