Good Friday Sermon: The Banality of Evil - A Cautionary Tale
by fishhead
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Thu Mar 24th, 2005 at 10:37:06 CDT
Around this time three years ago, I read a remarkable book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt's inquiry into the nature of evil. I read it in the wake of the events of 9/11, and events since then have brought it to mind again and again since then.
The subject of the book, Adolf Eichmann, was an unexceptional civil servant, who happened to be in charge of organizing the transportation of Jews to the Nazi death camps. Israeli agents kidnapped him in Argentina in 1960, and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial for war crimes. What comes across clearly and chillingly in this book is just how ordinary and inoffensive the defendant was. It is the story of a man who became an accomplice to mass murder, not through the force of his will, but through the force of acquiescence and denial. It is the story of what Arendt calls "the banality of evil."
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Eichmann began his career resettling German Jews abroad. Smuggling Jews to Palestine, Eichmann told himself that he was helping to realize Zionist aspirations. But as the anti-Jewish policies of Hitler became more and more draconian, this self-delusion became harder to maintain. The turning point for Eichmann's conscience came at a conference in January 1942, at which the parameters of the Final Solution were, at last, fully and explicitly revealed to him and to others in the upper echelon of the civil service. "At that moment," he told the court, "I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt." Being confronted with the complete support of the leadership, and of the civil service itself for Hitler's plan, well, who was he to judge? Who was he, in his words, "to have my own thoughts in the matter"?
Arendt shows us that the seeds of evil are sown in the hearts of ordinary people, like Adolf Eichmann. They sprout unnoticed, and when they are noticed, are often not weeded out, but merely given another name. The Holocaust did not begin at the killing centres in Eastern Europe - rather, it ended there. It began with laws depriving Jews of political rights. When the laws failed to solve the "problem," forced emigration was introduced. Then "concentration" of the Jewish population was tried. Only in the end, the solution became one of mass killing. The failure to stop it appears, in many respects, to have resulted from an unspoken conspiracy of obedience. A German army physician who witnessed the killing of Jews in Sevastopol wrote that those who offered their lives in resistance would face a silent, anonymous death. Such a one "would have sacrificed his life in vain" - a sacrifice, not morally meaningless perhaps, but practically useless.
BUT IT IS NOT USELESS
At Eichmann's trial, one witness discussed a man named Anton Schmidt, a German sergeant in charge of a patrol in Poland. While there, he ran into members of the Jewish underground, and he helped them, supplying forged papers and trucks, with no expectation of favours or bribes. This went on for five months, when Schmidt was arrested and executed. During the brief time it took to tell this story, a hush settled over the courtroom "as though the crowd had spontaneously decided to observe the usual two minutes of silence in honour of the man named Anton Schmidt." Amidst all this darkness, a shaft of light had burst in, and Arendt thought to herself, "how utterly different everything would be today...if only more such stories could have been told."
The example of Schmidt and others shows the deception in the thinking that positive action against evil is a practically useless sacrifice. It is true that totalitarian governments try to erase all traces of deeds, good and evil. Yet all those efforts to erase the evidence, to erase people - and, yes, to erase peoples - are doomed to failure. The story will be told. As Arendt puts it, "while under conditions of terror most people will comply...some, like Anton Schmidt, will not." Just as while the Final Solution could have happened anywhere, it did not happen everywhere, even in areas under German military control, like Denmark, which defied the Nazi edicts. It is not practically useless to make this planet fit for human habitation.
If we could erase what we know of Jesus, and travel back to Jerusalem that fateful Passover week, what would we see? We'd see a populist leader, a Galilean wonder-worker on trial for his life. We'd hear that he had an opportunity to escape, or at least bargain for a lesser sentence, but instead that he had placed himself in a position where his execution was assured. Like the army physician in Sebastopol, we may have paused to ask ourselves why this man would have thrown his life away, why he would have made a sacrifice so practically useless, even if, perhaps, morally virtuous. Yet we do know that the effect of that sacrifice was to free humanity from the burden of evil, to know the truth, and to allow that truth to set us free.
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