Word: eichmann
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...glimpses I've gotten of Rusty and Andrea Yates make me think of Hannah Arendt's famous phrase "the banality of evil." Arendt's personification of such evil was Adolph Eichmann, the orderly and seemingly mild-mannered Nazi bureaucrat who helped orchestrate the killing of millions. The Yates's, too, in their own way, seemed somehow deeply and disturbingly ordinary...
...crime, surely it is an insult to the principle of law, and to the universality of the horror, to trivialize the deed by stipulating that it was a "hate crime." Further, suppose the people who did the daily work of Auschwitz really were "just following orders"? Was Adolf Eichmann executed in Jerusalem for the state of mind in which he pursued the Final Solution? No doubt quite a few Nazis could honestly claim that they were not anti-Semitic. Who would care to blaspheme by saying, "It's not so much that they killed 6 million Jews, but that they...
This is not the "banality of evil," as Hannah Arendt described Eichmann's bureaucratic Final Solution. The photographs present, rather, a sort of festivity of evil. Well dressed white people - the men in jaunty straw boaters, the women in pretty Sunday dresses, the children (children!) neat as a pin - are posed as they inspect mutilated and naked black corpses. People have brought picnic baskets. The pictures were sent as postcards through the mail...