THE BANALITY OF EVIL

An old friend of mine sent me a photo of Hannah Arendt, who wrote about Hitler’s Germans, one in particular, who was captured in Argentina after WW2, brought to Israel, and tried for his crimes, and executed there for his crimes against humanity.

This man said that he was just following orders. He was practicing the banality of evil. What has gone on in Gaza personifies this human cruelty manifested in the slaughter of thousands of people because they had been designated by officialdom as the enemy to be eliminated.

This man organized the systematic extermination of human beings as a duty, matter of fact deeds to be accomplished. The slaughter in Gaza is like that, effectively. Bombs and schrapnel, rather than a wooden bar of soap in a gas chamber. Men, women and children, bombed, leafleted, bombed again, 40, fifty thousand dead, a city in ruins, manifestations of the “banality of evil” practiced by people who should understand the practice from practical historical experience, an experience that has brought them from Europe to a homeland in the Middle East since 1948.

8/14/24