WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #456 - BANAL EVIL STILL AMONG US (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 I wanted to reread Hannah Arendt's The Banality of Evil in an attempt to

discern a reference to the causes of current brutality. This text
published in 1963, while focusing on the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann,
responsible for the Nazi "final solution" to the detriment of the Jews,
takes a critical look both at the choice of the charge that was brought
against him and at the declination of the crime, leading to a still very
profound reflection years after the facts in question. One wonders how
it is possible that the victims, heirs of the Nazi extermination, can
justify the genocide of the Palestinian people carried out by the
Israeli government.

Is the insistence on the risk of current anti-Semitism useful in
identifying a victimhood of historical value in order to obtain
impunity? Is international political support dictated by this fear?
Today Arendt's book, and internal Israeli dissent confirms it, appears
as an atrocious reverse of the coin!

Eichmann was tried for crimes "against the Jews", the author argues that
this accusation is incorrect because this crime should have been defined
as "against humanity" and probably, if the perception that underlies
this concept had been shared, today we would not be faced with the
underestimation of discriminatory acts against many minorities.

The very concept of injustice would be considered, by legal systems and
cultural sensitivity, as a priority "evil" and we know well that this is
not the case because a distinction is always made according to the power
supports possessed by those under trial; aggravating or mitigating
circumstances are often calibrated not on the fact itself but on the
presumed social position of defendants or victims.

Arendt reiterates that a genocide is an attack on human diversity as
such, that is, on a characteristic of the human condition without which
the very word humanity would be emptied of meaning.
And today we do more: we avoid recognizing genocide in the clearly
unequal war exterminations; international balances are based only on the
management of resources and the profit that derives from them.
The tension that moves this author to analyze the forms, languages and
meanings of the criminal proceedings against the Nazi defendant is not
the desire to condemn the man, but the ideological system and the
self-justifying thought that led that regime to push itself into such
cruelty. No punishment has ever had the power to prevent crimes from
being committed. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, when a crime
has been committed once, its repetition is more likely than its first
appearance was, she writes in reference to the individual political
responsibilities of those who support and act in the name of a plan to
be carried out thinking it is salvific! Yesterday the Nazis, today the
Israeli government, and we know that in other contexts similar
atrocities are repeated. The victims are never traceable to a single
declination: if in addition to belonging to the Jewish community there
were those who were accused of being disabled, political opponents or of
being part of nomadic ethnic groups, today the criterion does not
change: in the eyes of the executioners the oppressed population always
has characteristics that make it unworthy of existence!
In no era has a tyrant considered himself as such or acted thinking of
doing evil, it is easier to find in the choice of despotic actions a
self-portrait of ethics and value; just as hypocrisy is recognized as
such only by those who observe, or suffer the consequences, not by those
who think up it. And here lies the meaning of the title of Hannah
Arendt's book: evil is banal because those who commit it do not evaluate
it as such, but above all because there is no meaning of extraordinary.
Eichmann had no exceptional qualities: there were many men like him and
these many were neither different nor sadistic, but were terribly normal
(...) this normality is more frightening than all the atrocities put
together; and he adds that he commits his crimes in circumstances that
almost prevent him from realizing or feeling that he is acting badly.
Today the concept of "evil" sounds a bit obsolete, but the reflection on
the banality, on the non-exceptional nature of the intentions of those
who act out of blind obedience to the authorities, thus thinking they
have no responsibility, remains valid. Immersed as we are in a society
that standardizes control thanks to increasingly sophisticated
technologies, that conditions thought by diverting it towards profound
cultural shortcomings and disorienting its priorities, the ability to
discern between "good" and "bad" in Arendt's sense weakens while the
fear of diversity increases because in the din everything can be
perceived as dangerous, leading us to give up, to an emptiness that is
"banality": the dimension of those who do not perceive any
contradiction, of those who choose not to choose.

chiara gazzola

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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