Word: arendt
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...Some experts believe that organizations like the NPD may be a driving force behind the rise in violence. A study published recently by the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism, in Dresden, found close links between the NPD and far-right radicals in the eastern state of Saxony, where the NPD entered the regional parliament after winning 9.2% of the vote in a 2004 election. Researchers said there was a steep rise in the number of clashes between far-right groups and left-wing activists after the vote. "The NPD has successfully recruited young people from the violent...
...were purposefully subtler and the conditions less stressful. But the takeaway is no less disturbing: humanity's threshold for cruelty is, like everything else, situational. We seem wired to follow orders, even when they're harmful to others. In her chilling portrayal of Nazi middle-manager Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt famously excoriated this impulse as "the banality of evil." Evil is way too strong a word for the conduct of this study's participants, but it seems clear that despite all of humanity's horror shows over the past decades, we aren't getting the message...
...degree blur the inherent point of the exercise. In the end, Hanna's defense of her crime - she allowed most of her prisoners to die in a fire in a church (hard to imagine a more obvious choice of crime scene) - comes down to, well, yes, what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil...
...deny the validity of Arendt's subtle, brutal reading of what is surely the most terrible event in a modern history that continues to be rife with such horror. But it is an idea that has lost much of its power to arrest our attention in fictional narrative. In some of the early Internet commentaries on this film, people natter on about the effect on the boy of having sex with an older, presumably exploitative woman - as if that's the big moral issue being explored here. Well, it didn't bother Oprah, who selected The Reader for her book...
...banality of evil” was a term coined by Hannah Arendt in her work on the Holocaust to describe how the great atrocities in history are generally not committed by sociopaths or crazy people. Instead, it is the ordinary people who accept the premise of their state and therefore participate in evil while perceiving it as normal. Ultimately, the people who ran my pledging process were not monsters. They were regular college students. Most were nice, accomplished, educated, socially-conscious, and even proclaimed Christians. We all knew each other, and in some cases had developed intimate bonds of sisterhood...