The Evil of the Unthinking Man
"Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think."
The quote included as the subtitle to this article was made by one mister Adolf Eichmann, high-ranking member of the German SS and a man who is commonly cited as one of the leading architects of the Holocaust. It was his duty, handed down from the Führer himself, to first identify and then transport, huge numbers of prisoners to concentration camps across Europe – an unprecedented logistical undertaking that he conducted with competence, professionalism, and we are told, little apparent animus toward those condemned to the trains.
This at least, was the opinion of Hannah Arendt, writer, philosopher, and lens through which the English-speaking world most commonly views the Nazi war criminal. Writing in her 1963 publication, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, she documents how her protagonist, following his exile to Argentina and subsequent abduction at the hands of Mossad, was imprisoned, tried, and controversially executed by the state of Israel. The portrait she paints is chilling in its ordinariness. Far from the snarling psychotic or ideologically-possessed zealot many readers had hoped for, the man Arendt sees in the witness stand is little short of the archetypal nonentity. Balding and bespectacled, curiously bird-like between his Israeli guards, Eichmann submitted to his role within the Nazi’s machinery of murder, not out of some unbridled wickedness or warped moral convictions, but instead through the instinctive obedience and shallowness of thought that distinguishes the thoroughbred bureaucrat.
Admittedly, not everyone agrees with Arendt’s assessment of Eichmann. For that matter, not everyone agrees her assessment of evil. Upon its publication, Eichmann in Jerusalem was greeted with considerable backlash, not least among Arendt’s fellow Holocaust survivors, who accused the author of presenting the Jews as complicit in their own persecution, as well as showing undue sympathy toward her subject matter. It’s hard not to see their point. Horrors of the Holocaust aside, I have, throughout the course of my background reading, come across several statements by Eichmann which would seem to suggest that his enthusiasm for Hitler’s Final solution was rather more full-throated than Arendt (and certainly the defendant’s testimony), was willing to acknowledge. Nevertheless, whether or not Eichmann was merely the status-obsessed jobsworth the writer claims him to be, I think we can all recognize, in Arendt’s humdrum depiction, the kind of quintessential dullard who, given conducive circumstances, can become the unwitting executor of a quite inhuman evil.
And recently, it seems as though there has been a reemergence of these Little Eichmanns. Of course, it may sound harsh to compare petty enforcers of CDC diktats to the pencil pushers behind Soviet ‘de-Kulakization’, or to the administrators of the Khmer Rouge’s barbarous ineptitude. It would certainly be unwarranted to claim that today’s Covid-enabled tyranny has yet reached the depths of degradation endured beneath the boot-heel of those regimes. What it is less egregious to say, however – indeed, it is our civic duty to point out – is that even when the true motivations of Ardern, Macron, and others of their ilk became undeniable, still there remained, deep within their infrastructures of control, legions of underlings willing to carry out their duties with practiced amorality and unerring, Eichmann-like thoughtlessness.
