Eichmann and the Holocaust

"Nothing's as hot when you're eating it as when it's cooking." The failure of that piece of conventional wisdom to predict the Holocaust, to predict the way things actually went down, cuts to the awful core of what those men--bad men, but not monsters, because that lets us all off the hook (how terrifying is it to speculate that some of them may even have been good men?)--did in the same way that Eichmann the man, the cliche-spouter, the bureaucrat, the banal evildoer, does. This happened because of our ability to keep going--to filter out, to play through, to overcome and triumph. It happened because millions of regular Germans kept their heads down and focused on what they could comprehend, not the enormity before which words fail. The capacity to reduce existence to platitudes--"just doing my job", "there's a war on", "Elders of Zion", "it's worse in Russia"--is the only way you can reconcile the obvious human drives toward altruism and cooperation with the Final Solution. Sometimes it feels like platitudes are also the only way we can understand it, and we should quit trying to stain the silence with words. But Arendt's words show us just how culpable we all are--and that's vital. This is a collection of excerpts from the complete Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil, and I don't know why you wouldn't just read the whole thing, but Eichmann and the Holocaust is still a great book. ( )

In her own words: "And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang."

A truly memorable book. So sad . . . ( )