By: Hannah Ardent
Originally Published: 1963
Page number: 252
"Adolf Eichmann, son of Karl Adolf Eichmann, the man in the glass booth built for his protection..." (pg. 5)
About The Eichmann Trial:
Sixteen years after the Nuremberg Trials finalized, another important Nazi prosecution court took place in Jerusalem, it was the trials of Adolf Eichmann. In the Nazi regime, specifically in the implementation of the Final Solution, Eichmann was responsible for the transportation of Jews to ghettos and concertation camps. He used his abilities of negotiation and organization to make agreements with Jewish leaders to deport Jews and organized railroad transportation to maximize the number of Jews to be removed from their land. The book focuses on Eichmann's trial, but more importantly the way Ardent views Eichmann and her philosophy on the "banality of evil".
In the trial, Eichmann was convicted of fifteen charges, all related to the crimes he committed during the implementation of the Final Solution. Eichmann denied the accusations against him from the beginning of the trial. He pleaded "not guilty in the sense of indictment" and justified his actions during the Nazi regime under the concept of "acts of the state". He emphasized that he was only a state employee who had no choice but to obey the orders given by his higher-ups. Evidence proved the "acts of state" statement false. Eichmann was, at no point in time, bound to aid the Nazis in Jewish extermination. He willingly and intentionally chose to do so.
Eichmann referred back to how he felt bad about the Jews and attempted to rescue them by aiding them to leave the German-occupied land. This proves wrong because there is no action taken by Eichmann that would suggest that he acted against the Nazi tyranny. He attempted to be seen as a humanitarian figure who was compassionate to Jewish lives. However the witness testimonies and the documentation (such as the Wannsee Conference in which he worked as the secretary) proved such claims false.
According to Ardent, Eichmann was not a clever and calculating liar. His claims were contradictory. He had an innate inability to articulate clearly, which Ardent thought came from his inability to think. To her, he wasn't this wicked man, but he was a person who could not empathize with people and truly did not contemplate the amount of destruction he caused. He was, despite his cruel acts that killed and terrorized many, inherently banal.
The idea of the banality of evil is a dangerous road to go down. It indirectly undermines the evil done at the hands of average people. However, evil should be shocking and shunned no matter in what circumstance or by whom it was committed. Immoral acts do not become less important when the doer is an ordinary man.
Eichmann was an ordinary man among the German folk who merely went along with the government of the time. Seemingly, he was only a government official who obeyed the orders to the letter, without question. One ought to argue that many military men do as he does, obey the higher-ups with no say in the matter. The key takeaway, however, is that evil expands, like in the case of the Holocaust or Rwanda, because these ordinary men go along with it. Evil spreads like rapid fire when the average man joins in. Many genocides were not done by only military men, they were done at the hands of the common men.
About Genocide:
Palestinian Genocide
The pain felt by the Jewish Holocaust had caused the world to say "never again" to ethnic, religious, and racial cleansing of any peoples. The UN adopted the word "genocide" shortly after the Second World War. The international view agreed upon the necessity to "liberate humankind from such an odious scourge", outlawing persecution of anyone on their ethnic and religious grounds.
Today, in November 2023, the world is witnessing another genocide, the genocide of the Palestinian people, at the hands of Israel. The Israeli government is using bombardment and ground invasion to annihilate thousands of Palestinians. On average there have been 320 murdered individuals in Gaza every day since October 7th. More than 4,500 of the dead have been children.
We witness cruelty at a scale that is hard to describe. It is terrifying. The images and videos of the men, women, and children torn apart; limbs of humans in all corners; blood everywhere; and cries and screams from the hurt. The shock of the children under bombardment; the mothers who take in the endurable pain of lost children; the shattered buildings that held centuries of memories; and the grey and deserted streets that once heard the laughter and chit-chats of school kids.
We are witnessing the active efforts of Israel to remove an ethnic group and their territory from the map. More than 50% of the residency buildings in Gaza are destroyed, the people who owned them are either dead or displaced. This is not a war of two sides: this is genocide.
The West must reshape its attitude toward this genocide. Israel is not a self-defending nation, it is a colonizing and militant entity aiming to wipe off a big portion of the ethnically Arab Palestinians. The US, UK, and France, the leading actors at the UN and international politics are not supporting a country that is defending itself, they are supporting a country that establishes terror and cruelty upon innocent Palestinian civilians who are not associated with or in support of Hamas.
The Russian attacks on Ukraine were met with complete US resistance and support for the Ukrainians. The US firmly stands against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the human rights violations committed under Putin. Today, Israel is murdering innocent children, it is using chemicals like phosphorous on civilians, and it is opening fire on hospitals that hold the injured and the elderly. Israel is invading the Gaza Strip, which was home to over 2 million Palestinians. It is using full force to remove and kill as many Palestinians as it can, without any proof of their association with Hamas. It is killing based on ethnicity NOT on criminality or pose of threat. That is why, the US must show the same attitude it showed to Putin to Netanyahu. If it is a humanitarian nation, it must care to protect all humans; not just European Christians but Arab Muslims. They too are human.
personal rating of the book: 8/10