Arendt's articles on Eichmann and the "banality of evil" are classics. I remember reading it for psych classes along with Milgram's study on "Obedience to Authority". Both were considered controversial by some, but not me. The "banality of evil" can be seen in our nation's treatment of illegal immigrants including, of course, women and children. This 'banality" extended to people here on asylum, in the process of legalizing their presence and married to Americans. The desert and swamp camps were throwbacks those seen in the 1940s. It will take years to figure out how many bodies were tossed into the Everglades.
As for the Strait of Hormuz, it won't be solved militarily as the Party of Trump keeps thinking.
Georgia Arkell reconsiders Arendt’s explosive report on the trial of Eichmann.
philosophynow.org
In her report, Arendt grappled with an enigmatic question: can one commit evil deeds without being innately evil? Her conclusion was a shocking and provocative theory which defied the conventional representation of evil as exceptional and demonic. Arendt did not see in Eichmann the monstrosity of a psychopath, but rather the mediocrity of a bland, mundane, unimaginative human being who, in her words, was “neither perverted nor sadistic… but terribly and terrifyingly normal” (p.276). According to Arendt, Eichmann had not recognised the atrocity of his acts due to a particular “inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else” (p.49). On the basis of what she saw and heard at the trial, she concluded that while acts of evil can result in monumental tragedies, the perpetrators of these acts need not in every case be inherently evil people. They may have motives they do not recognise as evil, and which may, indeed, be ‘banal’.
Arendt was also harshly critical of the conduct of the trial (which she labelled a ‘show trial’) as being erroneously centered on the sufferings of the Jews rather than on the ethical nature of the deeds perpetrated by the accused. In her view, the judges failed to understand Eichmann, obscuring what, according to her was “the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” (Eichmann, p.252).
This theory immediately stirred up a storm of debates and controversies. Critics accused her of being a ‘self-hating Jew’; of justifying Eichmann; and of trivializing the Holocaust as an unexceptional event. But what did she actually mean when she wrote of ‘the banality of evil’?
