The Banality of Evil

One of the subjects that Arendt discusses in this chapter that interested me a great deal was her description of brand of evil she witnessed in during the Eichmann trail in Israel. Specifically the term "banality of evil". In her description of Eichmann, we are denied the villain we believe we should be treated to, and are instead given a man who seems almost pathetic in his inability to connect his actions to the evil that they caused. What's more, though he seems to be completely incapable of personal thought or actions. Arendt says that, "In the setting of Israeli court and prison procedures he functioned as well as he had functioned under the Nazi regime but, when confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he was helpless," (Page 4). To me, this speaks of the two kinds of evil in this world. The first, and most familiar, are the deliberate and oftentimes intelligent acts of cruelty performed by human beings. Which can range from murder to wholesale genocide. The second kind is this sort of banal evil, in which people facilitate it, but deliberately separate themselves from it. Though they may not commit the acts, they are involved in them at the very least indirectly. Eichmann was not responsible for the murders committed in the concentration camps, but he was responsible for the logistics that allowed those people to get there, and so by extension somewhat culpable in the crime. What's more, though he had knowledge of what was going to occur during the Holocaust, he, like many other Germans, made no attempt to prevent it. This, to me, is the hallmark of the second, and ever increasing, kind of evil. Where people, good or bad, ignore the evil acts of others and in turn become involved in those acts. I'll end this with a quote, which I think fits in with this particular kind of evil, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," (Edmund Burke).