re: #22 goddamnedfrank

I keep thinking lately of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil lately. Her concept of the banality of evil is often misunderstood to mean that the kind of monstrosity exhibited by the nazi’s could be performed by anybody. Instead what she meant was that Eichmann was a type of person who wasn’t sick so much as just unremarkably stupid. That this stupidity is what drove virtually all of his decision making and that the evil of the nazis wasn’t in the hearts of everyone but that the capacity for it also wasn’t exactly rare.

I think it’s also important to remember the flip side of Eichmann:

First there was Reinhard Heydrich who was a brilliant and viscous individual without whom the final solution would have never been half so efficient. It was a horrific price that was paid after his assassination but I have always wondered what might have been had he lived and I can’t help but think the world got off light in the exchange.

The other one I’d mention in this context is Heinz Heydrich, Reinhard’s younger brother. To quote from Wiki: “Heinz Heydrich was an Obersturmführer (lieutenant), journalist and publisher of the soldiers’ newspaper, Die Panzerfaust. He was at first a fervent admirer of Hitler. But before Reinhard Heydrich’s State funeral in Berlin in June 1942, Heinz Heydrich had been given a large packet containing his brother’s files, released from his strongbox at Gestapo Headquarters, 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Berlin. Heinz had shut himself away in his room with the papers. Next morning his wife noticed that her husband had sat up all night burning the documents from the package. Heinz, on leave from the front, could not be engaged in conversation, his wife remembered; he seemed to be elsewhere mentally, and like stone. The files in the package were probably Reinhard Heydrich’s personal files, from which Heinz Heydrich understood for the first time in all its enormity the systematic extermination of the Jews, the so-called Final Solution.[4] Thereafter, Heinz Heydrich helped many Jews escape by forging identity documents and printing them on Die Panzerfaust presses.” Not everyone could ignore then effects of their willful stupidity and could, in the end, find that place where he had to say no. It’s rather like what Camus said, “What is a rebel? Someone who says no. But saying no does not mean giving up: it also means saying yes, with every gesture.” He would later commit suicide when he thought he had been caught but still, in the meantime, he did what little he could to negate his brother’s masterpiece.