"The Banality of Evil"--Revisited

[WJHopwood]

Several months ago there was a discussion in this group
about the objection by some critics to the term "banality
of evil" as used by Hannah Arendt in her book "Eichmann
in Jerusalem." The objection was that the term minimized
the evils of the Holocaust. The term has been revived
in a German trial now in progress which certainly does
not minimize the Holocaust.

Apparently attracting worldwide press interest is the trial
of Oskar Groning, the alleged "Accountant of Auschwitz,"
currently in progress in the German city of Luneburg.
Groning, now 93 years old, met the incoming trains and
inventoried the arriving Aushwitz victims as they were
divided into two groups--some to forced labor, the others
to immediate death. He is now being tried on the charge
of complicity in the murder of 300,000 Holocaust victims.

Seven decades after Auschwitz, Groning, seems to have
few regrets about his role there. The killings were "orderly"
and "clean," he testified. "In 24 hours you could take care
of 5000 people. After all that's how things went in a
concentration camp."

Covering the trial is the editor of the German newspaper Der
Tagesspiegel, Anna Sauerbrey. This week in a report to the
New York Times she wrote that from Groning's perspective
the killings were "routine." The trial, she says, has exposed
once again "the horrifying, mind-wrecking banality of evil"
that has sustained the German "self-narrative of guilt much
more than compassion ever could have....the victims tell us
we must never forget. The perpetrators say we may do it again."

WJH

[David Wilma]

Groning's comments echo those of Hoess who compared the
extermination of Jews to killing rats, to be done with a minimum
of suffering and no concern for the rats.

[Roman W]

On Sun, 03 May 2015 15:44:01 -0400, David Wilma

Post by David Wilma
Groning's comments echo those of Hoess who compared the
extermination of Jews to killing rats, to be done with a minimum
of suffering and no concern for the rats.

Which sounds strangely familiar to current media comments in Western
media calling Mediterranean Sea migrants "cockroaches". Different
era, the same dehumanisation of fellow human beings.

Just shows how easy it is for "normal" people to slide into such
thinking. Evil isn't just banal, it is also common.

RW

[m***@netMAPSONscape.net]

Post by David Wilma
Groning's comments echo those of Hoess who compared the
extermination of Jews to killing rats, to be done with a minimum
of suffering and no concern for the rats.

Haven't seen this reported in the US press, but he's pretty adamant
about testifying, and admitting what happened there, and seems to take
responsibility for his role. He claims to be speaking out, in part, to
refute Holocaust deniers.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31090925
"Groening, who began work at Auschwitz aged 21, does not deny witnessing
the mass killing at Auschwitz. In 2005 he told the BBC: "I saw the gas
chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw the open fires. I was on the ramp
when the selections [for the gas chambers] took place.

"I would like you to believe these atrocities happened - because I
was there."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32392594

"The nonagenarian has achieved notoriety as one of the few Germans to speak
out about their role in the genocide, a decision he say he took to stop
Holocaust deniers.

"I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria," he told the BBC in the 2005 documentary Auschwitz: the Nazis and the "Final Solution".

"I was on the ramp when the selections [for the gas chambers] took place."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32450169
"In moral terms, my actions make me guilty," he told the court. "But you must
decide whether I am legally guilty."

Mike

[Don Phillipson]

Post by WJHopwood
Apparently attracting worldwide press interest is the trial
of Oskar Groning, the alleged "Accountant of Auschwitz,"
currently in progress in the German city of Luneburg.
Groning, now 93 years old, met the incoming trains and
inventoried the arriving Aushwitz victims as they were
divided into two groups--some to forced labor, the others
to immediate death. He is now being tried on the charge
of complicity in the murder of 300,000 Holocaust victims.

This individual has already been featured in recent TV
documentaries about the death camps. He was a bank
clerk, enlisted in the SS, employed at Auschwitz on similar
duties viz. collecting the cash and valuables of death camp
victims and remitting them to SS HQ in Berlin.

The Groning case highlights the 1960s emotional
character of Arendt's "banality of evil" (then proposed
for Adolf Eichmann.) This judgment presupposes that
routine or repetitive work is ipso facto banal independently
of its context (whether a death camp or some viruous
enterprise like Medecins Sans Frontieres.)

This is not a moral judgment so much as an aesthetic one,
and characteristic of the late 20th century. The social thinkers
of the 19th century hated drudgery or boring repetitive labour,
but they did not despise it as banal: that was an affectation
of the Naughty Nineties wits like Oscar Wilde. It took until
the 1960s for this idea to capture the avant-garde, and even
then paradoxically. Hippies of the 1960s were not necessarily
opposed to hard work, cf. the enthusiasm for laborious homesteading
but were censorious about aesthetics: they refused to live banal
lives and were contemptuous of those that did. Thus by 1963
Hannah Arendt used banality to mean ipso facto contemptibility.

Post by WJHopwood
Covering the trial is the editor of the German newspaper Der
Tagesspiegel, Anna Sauerbrey. This week in a report to the
New York Times she wrote that from Groning's perspective
the killings were "routine." The trial, she says, has exposed
once again "the horrifying, mind-wrecking banality of evil"
that has sustained the German "self-narrative of guilt much
more than compassion ever could have....the victims tell us
we must never forget. The perpetrators say we may do it again."

This appears to reinforce my interpretation that we condemn
banality more for aesthetic reasons (distaste) than moral
ones reasons. Arendt used "banality of evil" knowing it was
a paradox, itself an aesthetic rather than a moral category.

[Rich Rostrom]

Post by Don Phillipson
Arendt used "banality of evil" knowing it was
a paradox, itself an aesthetic rather than a moral
category.

There is a tendency among people to romanticize
criminals and violence, if performed in a
dramatic manner by people with "style". And really
huge crimes are intrinsically dramatic.

For instance, the idolization of "Che" Guevara.

Or right now, thousands of women swooning on-line over
Stockton CA criminal Jeremy Meeks, whose "CRYSTAL CLEAR
EERILY HOLLOW BLUE EYES" and "chiseled cheekbones" in
his mug shot have provoked reactions like "Is it
illegal to be that sexy" and "He can assault me any
day." http://patterico.com/2014/06/22/on-not-being-like-men/

On a historical scale, one recalls the romantic
idea of Satan as the "hero" of _Paradise Lost_.

It's not obvious now from the relatively
poor black-and-white images we see now, but the
Nazis had style. Even those who disliked their
policies were moved by "the golden boys and girls
of the Hitler Youth" on parade.

Indeed the aesthetic merit of drastic action,
even if considered criminal by "conventional
morality" was a key element of fascist thought.
The sheer scale of Nazi ambitions and actions
connected with this.

I remember reading that Himmler only visited
a death camp once, and was deeply disturbed.
He then wrote that the men who were carrying out
the killings were true heroes. They had the
willpower, the resolution, the "strength" to go
ahead with these acts, which were necessary to
the racial purification of Europe despite all
human instincts and traditional moral training.

What Arendt wanted to point out was that the
actual Nazi crimes were carried out by boring
little men with nothing dramatic about them.

[WJHopwood]

On Monday, May 4, 2015 at 10:43:47 AM UTC-4, Don Phillipson wrote:.

Post by Don Phillipson
The Groning case highlights the 1960s emotional
character of Arendt's "banality of evil" (then proposed
for Adolf Eichmann.) This judgment presupposes that
routine or repetitive work is ipso facto banal independently
of its context (whether a death camp or some viruous
enterprise like Medecins Sans Frontieres.)...... This is not a
moral judgment so much as an aesthetic one,....
Hannah Arendt used banality to mean ipso facto
contemptibility. This appears to reinforce my interpretation
that we condemn banality more for aesthetic reasons
(distaste) than moral ones reasons. Arendt used "banality
of evil" knowing it was a paradox, itself an aesthetic rather
than a moral category.

It sems to me that "banal" has many meanings (Collins English
Thesaurus lists 40), and that there was a subtlety in the way
Arendt used the term which may have escaped some
of her critics. In any event, in my view she certainly meant to
categorize genocide as being more than just "distasteful" or
"contemptible." Accordingly. it would seem that the past
controversy over Arendt's alleged trivialization of the Holocaust
seems to have been much ado about nothing.

On the other hand, in the current Gorning trial we again see the
term "banality of evil" but added to it are the words "horrifying "
and "mind wrecking." This time there should be no controversy
over what is meant by the use of the term.

WJH

[Paul F Austin]

Post by WJHopwood
On Monday, May 4, 2015 at 10:43:47 AM UTC-4, Don Phillipson wrote:.

Post by Don Phillipson
The Groning case highlights the 1960s emotional
character of Arendt's "banality of evil" (then proposed
for Adolf Eichmann.) This judgment presupposes that
routine or repetitive work is ipso facto banal independently
of its context (whether a death camp or some viruous
enterprise like Medecins Sans Frontieres.)...... This is not a
moral judgment so much as an aesthetic one,....
Hannah Arendt used banality to mean ipso facto
contemptibility. This appears to reinforce my interpretation
that we condemn banality more for aesthetic reasons
(distaste) than moral ones reasons. Arendt used "banality
of evil" knowing it was a paradox, itself an aesthetic rather
than a moral category.

It sems to me that "banal" has many meanings (Collins English
Thesaurus lists 40), and that there was a subtlety in the way
Arendt used the term which may have escaped some
of her critics. In any event, in my view she certainly meant to
categorize genocide as being more than just "distasteful" or
"contemptible." Accordingly. it would seem that the past
controversy over Arendt's alleged trivialization of the Holocaust
seems to have been much ado about nothing.
On the other hand, in the current Gorning trial we again see the
term "banality of evil" but added to it are the words "horrifying "
and "mind wrecking." This time there should be no controversy
over what is meant by the use of the term.

Arendt's "banality" used Eichmann as her example proof, that he was just
doing his (odious) job, carrying out orders. The key to the banality
trope is the notion that Eichman wasn't personally and emotionally
invested in the evil he did. In fact, he was an eager practitioner of
the Final Solution as revealed by later research.

According to Stangneth's research of Eichman's writings and recordings,
he was an antisemite on the hustle but he boasted of his achievements,
like the deportation of nearly half a million Jews from Budapest in 1944.

Paul