“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. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.

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. In Arendt’s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’.

This wasn’t Arendt’s first, somewhat superficial impression of Eichmann. Even 10 years after his trial in Israel, she wrote in 1971:

I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – 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. Gershom Scholem, a fellow philosopher (and theologian), wrote to Arendt in 1963 that her banality-of-evil thesis was merely a slogan that ‘does not impress me, certainly, as the product of profound analysis’. Mary McCarthy, a novelist and good friend of Arendt, voiced sheer incomprehension: ‘[I]t seems to me that what you are saying is that Eichmann lacks an inherent human quality: the capacity for thought, consciousness – conscience. But then isn’t he a monster simply?’”

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil

“Hillary Clinton – “At this point, what does it matter”

In Wehmar Germany Hitler received 37.5% of the vote to be named chancellor. Only a small fraction of the populace were members of the Nazi Party. What was important was that sufficient numbers weren’t prepared to oppose them.

When the left pushes, do these “good people” leave the democrats, or do they just stay silent and go along with it ?

With the J6 prisoners in the DC jails, haven’t the camps started already? At least, in an early form?

the vehicle is a legendarily corrupt prosecutor, who is undeterred by legal rebuff, and a judge who has proven a tool of criminals from lagos to their patrons in islamabad,
imitating predecessors in kuala lampur,* islamabad and moskva also kiev, our new bestest friend, see medvechek so the game of risk, played with what remains of our arms inventory has less purchase, for moi,

*malathir ultimately apologized to ibrahim, because his successor rajib made a mess of things thanks to the imdb scandal,

For Posobiec tweet see miguel’s comment August 6 3:11 pm

stan can defend himself, e e cervantes can be as cryptic as ever, and you; well, have you actually said anything about stan’s opinion that all Democrats are evil? I’ve known and know some who aren’t. stan claims to know that all are evil.

Dead certain he seems to be.