Word: evil
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...concept of military rule may seem repugnant to the world's established democracies, even when the generals replace such an unfriendly fellow as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah. It is not necessarily evil in Africa, however. Nigeria, the continent's most populous land and one of its most sophisticated, rocked with cheers when the soldiers took over in January, and Ghanaians were still dancing in the streets last week. Far from being resented as oppressors, Africa's new military rulers are almost unanimously hailed as the saviors of their people. Their revolution was inevitable...
...unfavored son; and Johanna to an impossible choice. And they live in a world polarized by the existential isolation of Frantz's attic and the mundane world below. Frantz, to escape his war-time guilt, has tried to assume guilt for all. His rejection of ends-justifies-means ("evil was our only material... Good was the final product. Result: the good turned bad") is almost a Camus-esque rejection of political involvement. But when the father, below, says "it is easy to assume responsibility for everything when you do nothing," Sartre the Marxist repudiates this kind of pure existentialism...
...Allied captors at Nürnberg, the Field Marshal seemed to be the essence of all that was evil in Junkerdom. Tall and taciturn, a monocle screwed tight in one chilly pale eye, his boots gleaming with metronomic precision as he paced the stone floor of his cell, the prisoner never complained and never begged for mercy. When the gallows trap was sprung on Oct. 16, 1946, and Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav Keitel dropped to his death, it is doubtful that he had any regrets. Keitel had long before reached the end of his rope...
...Eichmann demonstrated the banality of evil, Keitel proved its myopia. Actually, the chief of Hitler's high command was neither a Prussian nor a very convincing "war criminal." Keitel was a frustrated farmer who, on his rare wartime leaves, loved nothing more than to muck about his Brunswick estate of Helmscherode, buying new farm implements or hunting roebuck and wild boar. Almost coincidentally, he signed his name to Hitler's orders decreeing the deaths of millions. As another Nazi general wrote of Keitel later, "He was certainly not wicked au fond, as one occasionally reads...
...would accept responsibility for his actions. While more cynical generals like Gotthard Heinrici, commander of the Vistula Army Group, beat a retreat toward the American lines, Keitel went back to Berlin to sign the surrender document that he had never believed would be written. All around him the other evil men of Nazidom were taking the easy way out: Hitler was followed in suicide by Himmler, Goebbels and Goring...