re: #229 HappyWarrior

Oh I don’t deny he was a fanatic. He certainly was. I need to read more though on her theory though and get the book. I just really thought she meant by banality that this was a fairly regularly guy with a stable home life doing this stuff and nothing else. Banality as I said though isn’t the word choice I’d use. I prefer ordinary.

Let’s go to the primary source:

I also can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book; for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not lago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III “to prove a villain.” Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the S.S. and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted. In principle he knew quite well what it was all about, and in his final statement to the court he spoke of the “revaluation of values prescribed by the [Nazi] government.” He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity - that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is “banal” and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace. It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and, moreover, standing beneath the gallows, should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that these “lofty words” should completely becloud the reality - of his own death. That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man - that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it

Arendt fell for Eichmann’s self-representation at the trial as a thoughtless bureaucrat. She says he had no motives at all, except promotion. That’s not what the evidence indicates though:

Eichmann stated on tape 17 that “there are still a whole lot of Jews enjoying life today who ought to have been gassed” (Stangneth, p.265). Most tellingly, on tape 67, when Eichmann mistakenly thought the taping had concluded, he stated that “if 10.3 million of these enemies had been killed, then we would have fulfilled our duty” (audio here). An earlier excerpt from that same conversation identifies this 10.3 million as coming from the Korherr Report and says that “[if] we had killed 10.3 million, I would be satisfied, and would say, good, we have destroyed an enemy” (Stangneth, p.304).

In his analysis of the war, Eichmann blames Weizmann, whom he calls the “Fuehrer” of world Jewry (see p.11 of trial submission T/1393). He states that “As things are now, since perfidious fate has left a large proportion of these Jews alive, I tell myself that fate so ordained. I must bow to fate and to providence” (trial transcript).

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2014/09/eichmann-before-jerusalem-bettina.html

Those are the motives right there. Contra Arendt he fully realized what he was doing and he did it with gusto. Banal was he not.