Banality Of Evil Poem by gershon hepner

Banality Of Evil

Rating: 5.0


Dividing, as the Panama Canal
divides the continent into two parts,
what’s evil from what’s basically banal,
implies some monsters are not off those charts
devoted to the people who’re mere cogs,
as if the crimes that they have chosen are
to them like items from a catalogue,
or fantasies in films that are near-noir.
I question those who think that the apparent
main factor in the crime of genocide
of Jews was mere banality. Ms. Arendt,
with Heidegger perhaps preoccupied,
seemed quite unable to distinguish evil
from something far more trivial. I don’t mean
to say that I believe there is a devil,
but Eichmann’s no mere ghost of Haloween.

Inspired by John Gray’s review of David Cesarini’s Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, in the Independent, August 20,2004which Cesarini argues with Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann’s crimes as reflecting “the banality of evil”:
Eichmann may always remain an indistinct figure, the exact contours of his life blurred by the myths and controversies that surround him and by his own lies and evasions, but Eichmann: his life and crimes enables us to form a clearer picture than ever before of a pivotal figure in 20th-century history. In this powerful and revelatory book, David Cesarani shows how Eichmann became actively and directly implicated in genocide - in the horrible but useful terminology coined after Rwanda, how he became a 'genocidaire'. Contrary to a well-entrenched myth, Eichmann was not a misfit who joined the Nazis from a sense of grievance. He was an ambitious bourgeois in many ways typical of his time and place. As Cesarani observes, Eichmann 'only joined when the Party had made an electoral breakthrough and achieved respectability. Prior to that time, the Nazis were the misfits, not Eichmann.'
Eichmann did not begin as a radical anti-Semite. Like most people in his milieu, his view of Jews was formed by the pervasive influence of Christian anti-Semitism; but the genocidaire who in his Argentine hide-away expressed regret at not killing all the world's Jews was the product of a complicated mixture of circumstances and choices. When, in 1934, Eichmann became a member of the Nazi Security Service (SD) , it was a weak and marginal organisation that had no particular interest in Jews. However, by 1937 Eichmann had absorbed the Nazi fantasy of a Jewish conspiracy against Germany. In 1939, he played a key role in the ethnic cleansing of half a million Poles and Jews from western Poland. By the time of the Wansee Conference in January 1942 (which he helped to arrange) he was a fully-fledged genocidaire. In 1944, he proposed a 'total solution of the Jewish problem in Hungary', involving the deportation of nearly half a million Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most were immediately murdered.
From being a conventional middle- class careerist, Eichmann had become a moral monster. If there is a lesson that Cesarani wishes to draw from this metamorphosis, it is that there was nothing inevitable about it. 'Eichmann had to learn what it meant to be a genocidaire, ' he writes 'and then chose to be one.' Cesarani's book is a sustained and at times savage attack on Hannah Arendt's view of Eichmann as a cog in the Nazi machine. Noting that Arendt attended only the first few days of Eichmann's testimony in Jerusalem, Cesarani suggests she used him to validate her theory of totalitarianism. In her seminal study The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) , Arendt had portrayed the totalitarian state as a perversely rational bureaucracy in which personal responsibility had all but disappeared. In placing such heavy emphasis on the absence of responsibility, Arendt came perilously close to endorsing Eichmann's plea that when he committed his crimes, he was only obeying orders.In fact, as Cesarani points out, Nazi Germany was far from being the precisely calibrated, well-oiled machine pictured in Arendt's theory. Like other totalitarian states it was largely chaotic, with rival agencies pursuing often conflicting policies. Nazi officials often had considerable freedom of action, and when Eichmann claimed he never did anything but unthinkingly follow orders, he was lying.


10/25/09

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Marieta Maglas 26 October 2009

Excellent abstract poem, deep ideas well embedded to convey the message, thank you for sharing..........10++++++++++

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Ying Escalona 26 October 2009

after all, not all in good is good, and not all in bad is bad.

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Catrina Heart 26 October 2009

Hats off to this beautiful piece with completion of the notes..........Thanks!

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