"The Beast is in Chains"

A Snapshot in TIME - June 6, 1960

"The beast is in chains". With these coded words Israeli agents operating in Argentina informed Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion that Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was apprehended.  A few weeks after being covertly taken in Buenos Aries Eichmann was smuggled out of the country and transported to Israel.  

From TIME Magazine... "The Israeli Parliament assembled last week for a humdrum budget debate. Then Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rose and, in a voice breaking with emotion, said: "I have to inform the Knesset that one of the greatest Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible together with the Nazi leaders for what they called the 'final solution' of the Jewish question—that is, the extermination of 6,000.000 of the Jews of Europe—is under arrest in Israel and will shortly be placed on trial in Israel."   Read more

Eichmann was tried, found guilty, and hanged on May 31, 1962.

THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Historian Hannah Arendt, who covered the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, coined the phrase "banality of evil" in an attempt to account for the committing of unspeakable atrocities by people who seem not to be fanatical, malevolent, or otherwise "beastly", but who rather seem quite sane and normal.  She points to a lack of self-reflective thinking and an uncritical acceptance of state authority as factors in the erosion of personal autonomy and morally responsible judgment. 

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together." Hannah Arendt

Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton picks up on this theme in his 1964 essay entitled "A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann".  Merton points to the same factors at work in the machinations of strategic nuclear war planners.

"One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.  If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, "well-balanced," unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well...

...No, Eichmann was sane. The generals and fighters on both sides, in World War II, the ones who carried out the total destruction of entire cities, these were the sane ones. Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs, thermonuclear bombs, missiles; who have planned the strategy of the next war; who have evaluated the various possibilities of using bacterial and chemical agents: these are not the crazy people, they are the sane people."  Thomas Merton

Merton and Arendt help us to become more aware of the true nature of systemic evil and of our inextricable complicity in it.  Alas!

Remembering and reflecting...  Rob

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."  Hannah Arendt