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Evil and the ordinary
26 November 2005
[indent]Hanna Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem was subtitled, A Report on the Banality of Evil. In her coverage of the famous trial of Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, Arendt saw that - rather than the monster he had been painted, Eichmann was in fact, a boring, trite and banal person. And in his mediocrity lay a greater horror.
Her point was that ordinary people - petty bureaucrats like Eichmann - could be seduced into committing the most atrocious acts of evil, shelving their conscience and morals and defend their actions as simply "following orders." Madmen we expect to commit such acts, not the average person. Arendt summed Eichmann up as "terribly and terrifyingly normal." To her, he was not the sinister figure conjured by the media, although his deeds were undeniably monstrous: the horror lay in his unthinking acceptance of his orders; his thoughtlessness, even refusal to consider the implications of his actions.
[indent](To which I have to interject: Eichmann can be presented as the antithesis of Buddhist teaching which emphasizes a deep focus on every action, a single-minded attention to the effect and counter-effect of everything we do, and the connections between us and every moment we live. A Buddhist would never be so thoughtless. Arendt herself raises the question about whether thought itself protects us from doing evil: "Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it 'conditions' men against evil-doing?")[/indent]We may agree with Arendt about Eichmann, but we still have a tendency to caricaturize the "Inner Circle" of Nazis as frothing madmen, insane demagogues. It's difficult not to: modern media tends to sensationalize rather than report. We see mixed film clips of a ranting Hitler screaming at his audience, we get 30 seconds of scenes from the death cams, a pastiche of images of war machines and soldiers in action. We don't get the boring images of men in offices, surrounded by paperwork, of men who could encourage their people to greater atrocities, then return home for a bromidic family dinner with wife and children.
These are, in my opinion, more frightening because they portray not normality but rather how thin the patina of civilization is, how easily we separate ourselves into individual pockets where the ugliness of one does not intrude into the other. Where morals and conscience are compartmentalized and segregated from whole sections of our daily lives, operating only in a few permitted zones.
I'm currently reading Anthony Read's The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle. It's a mix of biography and political history. Read exceeds even the detail of Shirer's master work, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by synthesizing the vast volume of modern material and surviving documentation into a single work about the small group that competed for power around Hitler.
Like Eichmann, most of these men were more ordinary than evil. Read describes them variously as vain, plodding, insecure, inarticulate, failed artists and sometimes just pedestrian. Of course much of the book is dedicated to the Nazi's rise to power, rather than the final self-immolation of the war years.
Far from glamourous national leaders, these men were often part-time bureaucrats scratching to serve their party as unpaid workers. Some had outside lives of numbing banality - Himmler, for example, continued to run his chicken farm (or rather, left his wife to manage it) until he rose to his position of power. Others were full-time, paid bureaucrats whose jobs were boringly administrative and functional.
Another image we find in Read's telling is the internecine struggles within the party. Some of its early founders fought to assert their independence and even supersede Hitler in the party hierarchy. The struggle between the political arm and the militants - the Brownshirts or SA - weaves a thread of tension and excitement through the first half of Read's tome.
Others competed for Hitler's blessing, the ultimate benediction for the true believers. Interestingly, many of the inner circle kept diaries, committing to paper their roller-coaster emotions when they achieved or failed to get Hitler's support or sanction. It becomes quickly apparent why Read compares Hitler's sycophants to a religious cult: the mechanics are similar and have analogues in many lurid front-page tales of cult and religious madness today.
Aside from adding to our understanding of the historical references of the period, Read's work helps us see past the cartoon-like Good-Evil dialectic often painted in pop culture, modern media and cult religion. The protagonists of the tale are commonplace, not incipient Lucifers awaiting their ascendancy - at least in the beginning. They fuss over their dress, their social position, their place in line and their standing with their competitors. In fact, they often seem more tragicomic than demonic, in those early years.
Why do I read books about the past and this tormented period of history? Aside, that is, from that old chestnut that "History repeats itself. Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to relive them." (variously quoted by many authors, it was originally written by philosopher George Santayana as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfill it."). I read them because they give us insight into what we are today, they reinforce the memory of those dark days and strengthen my belief that this must never happen again.
I read them because, too, the time was interesting. The modern era really begins at the end of WWI, when the feudalistic monarchies of Europe was swept away in a revolution of political change. You could even date the modern era from the Russian Revolution, which began felling the royal dominoes. But it was also the first era of mass media. And there are lessons in that, too - lessons we should have learned about state control of the media that seem to have been forgotten or ignored in America under the Bush regime.
Radio stations blossomed in the 1920s, providing a new and exciting vehicle for communication never experienced before. Radio let people in their homes could hear events as they occurred even though they were half a wold away. People could experience entertainment, politics, religion, sports and news in the comfort of their living room. And many gathered around radio sets nightly to while away the evening listening. A political message could reach millions quickly - gone were the days when campaigning from the back of trains was the way to spread the word. Radio won over millions.
Goebbels made his first radio broadcast to the nation in 1932. That same month, Hitler recorded a grammophone record of an eight-minute speech. The party sold 50,000 copies of it in a very short time.
Multi-media campaigns also came into existence in the 1920s. Savvy propaganda masters like Goebbels combined radio with print in a devastating attack on the senses. You could not go anywhere without either seeing or hearing an appeal for the party. It was injected into the very fabric of daily life.
Print itself was energized by the development of the offset press, a new, fast and efficient method of printing that had only been introduced in 1903, quickly replacing slower and larger lithographic presses, and soon allowing even the smallest and most insignificant political party to run a printing shop out of a basement office (the effect of portable technology would be repeated in the mid-1980s when desktop publishing allowed anyone with a computer to create professional-looking publications, and a decade later when the Internet gave everyone the ability to comment online).
Although they started with newspapers, once they got into power, the Nazis produced hundreds of regular propganda magazines, swamping Germans with a tidal wave of images and articles that related everything from entertainment to shopping, from raising children to gardening to their Nazi philosophy. Its universal impact was only matched by the cultural control in the Soviet Union.
What is actually surprising about this period is that the fledgling technology of television, developed and tested in the late 1920s, was never taken seriously, and treated as much more than a curiosity until after WWII, when it exploded into the pop culture.
Instead, movie theatres were the popular form of mass entertainment. The first "talkie" - a movie with a synchronized soundtrack was only released in 1927. By 1929, talkies were the standard everywhere and a night at the movies was a part of the regular social life.
Movie theatres were not just for films - they were the entree, for sure, but the appetizer and dessert were the shorts - often newsreels or "infotainment" films (sometimes propaganda). The Nazis produced weekly newsreels for public consumpttion (Die Deutsche Wochenschau) from 1939 on. Plus they produced numerous feature films about their cause, the soldiers, special units, battles, etc., as well as "entertainment" propaganda that usually vilified Jews. Leni Reifenstahl's infamous 1934 film, Triumph of the Will, is an early example of Nazi film propaganda.
The Nazis so skillfully manipulated the public in part because the public was unprepared and had no experience dealing with propaganda on that scale. But the same was true in the Soviet Union, Italy, Argentina, Japan, in fact all of the successful dictators of the decades between wars are those who learned quickly to use the new media to their advantage. Even in the democracies, politics shifted to mass broadcasting - seen most effectively in Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaigns. But in the democracies, media was not state-controlled, so at least at times counterpoint could be heard and read, as long as the source could afford to buy a time slot.
Anyway, suffice to say this is both an interesting period and interesting subject to me. When we bow our heads on Remembrance Day and murmur "lest we forget," I take that to heart. We always have to learn about the roots of this madness; what turned ordinary people into thoughtless monsters, how could an undeucated and generally unsophisticated group of fanatics galvanize a nation and send it spinning into the most horrific war ever seen? And, too, how could ordinary humans be mesmerized to perform acts of extraordinary evil, acts that a normal conscience would not permit?
Read's excellent book is a window into this past, into a fascinating yet frightening world.[/indent]
Her point was that ordinary people - petty bureaucrats like Eichmann - could be seduced into committing the most atrocious acts of evil, shelving their conscience and morals and defend their actions as simply "following orders." Madmen we expect to commit such acts, not the average person. Arendt summed Eichmann up as "terribly and terrifyingly normal." To her, he was not the sinister figure conjured by the media, although his deeds were undeniably monstrous: the horror lay in his unthinking acceptance of his orders; his thoughtlessness, even refusal to consider the implications of his actions.
[indent](To which I have to interject: Eichmann can be presented as the antithesis of Buddhist teaching which emphasizes a deep focus on every action, a single-minded attention to the effect and counter-effect of everything we do, and the connections between us and every moment we live. A Buddhist would never be so thoughtless. Arendt herself raises the question about whether thought itself protects us from doing evil: "Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it 'conditions' men against evil-doing?")[/indent]We may agree with Arendt about Eichmann, but we still have a tendency to caricaturize the "Inner Circle" of Nazis as frothing madmen, insane demagogues. It's difficult not to: modern media tends to sensationalize rather than report. We see mixed film clips of a ranting Hitler screaming at his audience, we get 30 seconds of scenes from the death cams, a pastiche of images of war machines and soldiers in action. We don't get the boring images of men in offices, surrounded by paperwork, of men who could encourage their people to greater atrocities, then return home for a bromidic family dinner with wife and children.
These are, in my opinion, more frightening because they portray not normality but rather how thin the patina of civilization is, how easily we separate ourselves into individual pockets where the ugliness of one does not intrude into the other. Where morals and conscience are compartmentalized and segregated from whole sections of our daily lives, operating only in a few permitted zones.
I'm currently reading Anthony Read's The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle. It's a mix of biography and political history. Read exceeds even the detail of Shirer's master work, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by synthesizing the vast volume of modern material and surviving documentation into a single work about the small group that competed for power around Hitler.
Like Eichmann, most of these men were more ordinary than evil. Read describes them variously as vain, plodding, insecure, inarticulate, failed artists and sometimes just pedestrian. Of course much of the book is dedicated to the Nazi's rise to power, rather than the final self-immolation of the war years.
Far from glamourous national leaders, these men were often part-time bureaucrats scratching to serve their party as unpaid workers. Some had outside lives of numbing banality - Himmler, for example, continued to run his chicken farm (or rather, left his wife to manage it) until he rose to his position of power. Others were full-time, paid bureaucrats whose jobs were boringly administrative and functional.
Another image we find in Read's telling is the internecine struggles within the party. Some of its early founders fought to assert their independence and even supersede Hitler in the party hierarchy. The struggle between the political arm and the militants - the Brownshirts or SA - weaves a thread of tension and excitement through the first half of Read's tome.
Others competed for Hitler's blessing, the ultimate benediction for the true believers. Interestingly, many of the inner circle kept diaries, committing to paper their roller-coaster emotions when they achieved or failed to get Hitler's support or sanction. It becomes quickly apparent why Read compares Hitler's sycophants to a religious cult: the mechanics are similar and have analogues in many lurid front-page tales of cult and religious madness today.
Aside from adding to our understanding of the historical references of the period, Read's work helps us see past the cartoon-like Good-Evil dialectic often painted in pop culture, modern media and cult religion. The protagonists of the tale are commonplace, not incipient Lucifers awaiting their ascendancy - at least in the beginning. They fuss over their dress, their social position, their place in line and their standing with their competitors. In fact, they often seem more tragicomic than demonic, in those early years.
Why do I read books about the past and this tormented period of history? Aside, that is, from that old chestnut that "History repeats itself. Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to relive them." (variously quoted by many authors, it was originally written by philosopher George Santayana as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfill it."). I read them because they give us insight into what we are today, they reinforce the memory of those dark days and strengthen my belief that this must never happen again.
I read them because, too, the time was interesting. The modern era really begins at the end of WWI, when the feudalistic monarchies of Europe was swept away in a revolution of political change. You could even date the modern era from the Russian Revolution, which began felling the royal dominoes. But it was also the first era of mass media. And there are lessons in that, too - lessons we should have learned about state control of the media that seem to have been forgotten or ignored in America under the Bush regime.
Radio stations blossomed in the 1920s, providing a new and exciting vehicle for communication never experienced before. Radio let people in their homes could hear events as they occurred even though they were half a wold away. People could experience entertainment, politics, religion, sports and news in the comfort of their living room. And many gathered around radio sets nightly to while away the evening listening. A political message could reach millions quickly - gone were the days when campaigning from the back of trains was the way to spread the word. Radio won over millions.
Goebbels made his first radio broadcast to the nation in 1932. That same month, Hitler recorded a grammophone record of an eight-minute speech. The party sold 50,000 copies of it in a very short time.
Multi-media campaigns also came into existence in the 1920s. Savvy propaganda masters like Goebbels combined radio with print in a devastating attack on the senses. You could not go anywhere without either seeing or hearing an appeal for the party. It was injected into the very fabric of daily life.
Print itself was energized by the development of the offset press, a new, fast and efficient method of printing that had only been introduced in 1903, quickly replacing slower and larger lithographic presses, and soon allowing even the smallest and most insignificant political party to run a printing shop out of a basement office (the effect of portable technology would be repeated in the mid-1980s when desktop publishing allowed anyone with a computer to create professional-looking publications, and a decade later when the Internet gave everyone the ability to comment online).
Although they started with newspapers, once they got into power, the Nazis produced hundreds of regular propganda magazines, swamping Germans with a tidal wave of images and articles that related everything from entertainment to shopping, from raising children to gardening to their Nazi philosophy. Its universal impact was only matched by the cultural control in the Soviet Union.
What is actually surprising about this period is that the fledgling technology of television, developed and tested in the late 1920s, was never taken seriously, and treated as much more than a curiosity until after WWII, when it exploded into the pop culture.
Instead, movie theatres were the popular form of mass entertainment. The first "talkie" - a movie with a synchronized soundtrack was only released in 1927. By 1929, talkies were the standard everywhere and a night at the movies was a part of the regular social life.
Movie theatres were not just for films - they were the entree, for sure, but the appetizer and dessert were the shorts - often newsreels or "infotainment" films (sometimes propaganda). The Nazis produced weekly newsreels for public consumpttion (Die Deutsche Wochenschau) from 1939 on. Plus they produced numerous feature films about their cause, the soldiers, special units, battles, etc., as well as "entertainment" propaganda that usually vilified Jews. Leni Reifenstahl's infamous 1934 film, Triumph of the Will, is an early example of Nazi film propaganda.
The Nazis so skillfully manipulated the public in part because the public was unprepared and had no experience dealing with propaganda on that scale. But the same was true in the Soviet Union, Italy, Argentina, Japan, in fact all of the successful dictators of the decades between wars are those who learned quickly to use the new media to their advantage. Even in the democracies, politics shifted to mass broadcasting - seen most effectively in Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaigns. But in the democracies, media was not state-controlled, so at least at times counterpoint could be heard and read, as long as the source could afford to buy a time slot.
Anyway, suffice to say this is both an interesting period and interesting subject to me. When we bow our heads on Remembrance Day and murmur "lest we forget," I take that to heart. We always have to learn about the roots of this madness; what turned ordinary people into thoughtless monsters, how could an undeucated and generally unsophisticated group of fanatics galvanize a nation and send it spinning into the most horrific war ever seen? And, too, how could ordinary humans be mesmerized to perform acts of extraordinary evil, acts that a normal conscience would not permit?
Read's excellent book is a window into this past, into a fascinating yet frightening world.[/indent]
