The Banality of Evil

[Cyrano]

Last edited Tue Jun 25, 2019, 01:52 PM - Edit history (1)

“What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”

Hannah Arendt wrote those words about Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi, one of the architects of the Holocaust, who was put on trial in Israel in 1962. Arendt was a Jew who narrowly escaped the Holocaust herself. The “New Yorker” magazine sent her to Jerusalem to cover this trial. And the article linked below includes a line that refers to the above excerpt as:

“… a passage that applies to Donald Trump with astonishing accuracy …”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/02/07/hannah-arendt-the-banality-of-evil/