176. Murder—up close and at a distance

In 1960, Israeli operatives captured Adolph Eichmann in Argentina, and brought him to Jerusalem for trial. Eichmann had been a Nazi leader in sending millions of European Jews into exile and death camps, and was a major figure in the “final solution”—to rid Germany entirely of Jews. 

 

The 1961 trial was broadcast world-wide, Eichmann testifying and watching from a glass booth. The social historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt covered the trial for the New Yorker Magazine, and in 1963 published the story in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Many Jewish leaders of the day harshly criticized Arendt, herself a Jewish refugee from Germany who had escaped before the War, for being soft on Eichmann, for understanding and explaining him.

 

What I recall—and it has been over 50 years since I read the book—is that the word in the title, “banality,” was used to describe Eichmann as, in many ways, a “normal,” even prototypically normal, human being. The fear she raised is that someone the court psychologists found normal by their measurements, someone who had been a less than stellar student but an outstanding bureaucrat who saw inferior humans as abstractions, had been capable of carrying out the atrocities that we now call the Holocaust. 

 

There were lesser Eichmanns of course, the people who stood Jews—and Gypsies, homosexuals, and communists—up in front of open pits and shot them to bury them; those who filled the gas chambers, who put people on meat hooks into ovens. And there were those who lived “normal” lives in villages within smelling distance of the camps. (After liberation, General Eisenhower took an entire village to a death camp and made them dig graves.)

 

I remember and write this today because of Ukraine. Yes, Putin is responsible for the holocaust that is happening before our screen-glued eyes. But what of the functionaries between Putin and the soldiers on the ground? And what of the soldiers themselves, who tied hands behind backs and shot people, who shot children in the streets? And what of those who launched and continue to launch long-distance missiles at hospitals and schools? 

 

When we consider the bureaucrats and these practitioners of long-range destruction of cities and people in Ukraine, does it come too close for us to leaders who sent soldiers and drone strikes that brought destruction to Afghanistan and Syria?

 

We fear a nuclear holocaust—rightfully so. But we and the world must learn how to stop the killing done by everyday soldiers and mobs—and by bureaucrats following orders and casting destruction from safe distances where the targets are only images on screens. 

 

We must do more than stand by until forced—metaphorically—to dig the graves of the victims.