Hannah Arendt was a German Jewess born in the early 1900s who's life work as a political philosopher has been well chronicled [1]. In her controversial book entitled "Eichman in Jerusalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil," Arendt coins this phrase that has been often quoted and often misinterpreted.
The basic premise of her analysis of Eichmann as the leader of the Nazi's "final solution" of exterminating the Jewish race was that for Eichmann it wasn't a matter of deep hatred for Jews nor an existential evil that motivated him. As she watched the Eichmann trial unfold, Arendt concluded that it was a lack of deep-seated intellectual reflectiveness over Hitler's delusional Judeophobic propaganda that was at the core of his actions. Eichmann was just simply following the Nazi "party line" without thought, without feeling in carrying out his quest. Whether one agrees with Arendt's assertion or not, the precedence she set by coining the phrase "The Banality of Evil" was a seminal one.
Fast forward nearly 50 years from the Eichmann trial to the year 2011 and we find ourselves in a new era, or should I say ever-continuing era, of delusional Judeophobia and Jew-hating. Amongst this era's loudest voices is the one emanating from due east of Jerusalem in Iran. We have all heard time and again the now repetitive foments of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his calls to "wipe Israel off the map" and his mantra of holocaust denial. To Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs of Tehran, Israel and its Western partners are the cause of all the world's ills. His latest delusional rant blaming Western Europe for "stealing the clouds" in order to create drought in his beloved Iran is continued evidence of his progressive slide into the abyss of his own psychotic mind. [2]
But what of the rest of us - leaders, politicians, and the masses of the civilized world? How do we assess the ravings of a lunatic?
The definition of "banal" and its use in the context of our understanding of modern evil is the key that unlocks the answer to this seemingly innocuous question. Similar to what occurred prior to World War II, our world is distracted, facing a number of issues that certainly afford our every attention: economic crises, political and civil unrest, active conflagrations, natural and environmental disasters and, for good measure, the wedding of a King-to-be. The fact that one lunatic despot continues a musical chime of idiocy becomes banal: defined as "trite, hackneyed, commonplace, devoid of freshness or originality." In modern language: "it ain't no big deal."
The masses have become mesmerized into a trance-like numbness that allows us to no longer define evil as such - we laugh it off or just stop paying attention at all. Of course, only a few well-positioned political elite knew the dangers of the Hitler-led Third Reich prior to WW2. The rest of the world was not inundated with his vitriol day in and day out and the occasional newsreel was not as impactful as today's plethora of information through television and the internet. So who can blame the world's masses for the holocaust that followed?
Unlike Nazi Germany, whose populace for the most part bought the party rhetoric hook, line and sinker - it is not the people of Iran that have grown to "accept" the vision of their "duly elected" leader and his Mullah puppeteers. The majority of Iranians know full well the mess that filled the void when the Shah was evicted from Persian society.
Today, however, we have a whole new group of people who have been duped into submission by the Banality of this new Evil - THE ENTIRE PLANET. Oh, we see the United Nations, emasculated as it might be, and a few of its member nations, threaten Iran with sanctions and even carry out some of them. While quite harmless and essentially trivial to the leaders of Iran, the sanctions are not even a fly in the holy ointment of their Messianic fervor.
So back to the question at hand: what of this raving lunatic and the regime that he fronts for? Their march towards completely tipping the scales of power in an already imbalanced and highly volatile region continues daily without even a blip on the Richter Scale of concern for the rest of the world. After all, it seems as if it is only those "damn Jews" that these looney-tunes hate. The Jews are the only ones sounding the alarm. "It's Israel's problem - not ours. Let them deal with it." Oh, really? Have we become so denervated to any sense of impending doom...so extinguished by repetition or whimsicality to even care? I fear the answer is a clear and resounding YES!!
The world is nearing the point of no return - or should I say KNOW return - as we approach the nuclear age of The Islamic Republic of Iran. Unlike the the days prior to Hitler's holocaust, the whole world KNOWS it is coming. And, really, unless we restructure both our thinking AND feeling processes, understand the basic premise of Hannah Arendt's treatise on Adolf Eichmann and truly, deeply reflect over what this will really mean for the Middle East, for Israel and for the ENTIRE WORLD, we will be sorry for sure. As we have over the deaths of 6 million Jews and many million non-Jews - I fear the same fate will unravel and we will weep in retrospective horror and shame at its consequences.
So, this is a choice we all have to make. One can stay mesmerized and numb in preparation for the next holocaust. Or, one can sound the trumpet and sound it continually. I choose the latter. I will blow it as often and as hard as I possibly can - while their is breath in me.
In 600 BCE, after his Jewish brethren were completely blind-sided by the Babylonians who stormed the nation, destroyed the Holy City, murdered thousands and exiled an entire people, the Prophet Jeremiah whaled at the myopia that led his people to such a fate. Jeremiah bemoaned their sin and callousness toward evil as the cause of this horrific event in Jewish history:
From the Middle East Media Research Institute: "An article posted April 24, 2011 on Gerdab, the website of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), envisions the day after Iran's first nuclear test. The article states that Iran's first controlled nuclear explosion will not disrupt the daily lives of Iranians, but will only boost their national pride. However, it says, in the Arab world, in the West and in Israel, it will sow a sense of fear mingled with respect for Iran's achievement. The article makes satirical comments on Iran's charged relations with the Arabs and with the West.
The basic premise of her analysis of Eichmann as the leader of the Nazi's "final solution" of exterminating the Jewish race was that for Eichmann it wasn't a matter of deep hatred for Jews nor an existential evil that motivated him. As she watched the Eichmann trial unfold, Arendt concluded that it was a lack of deep-seated intellectual reflectiveness over Hitler's delusional Judeophobic propaganda that was at the core of his actions. Eichmann was just simply following the Nazi "party line" without thought, without feeling in carrying out his quest. Whether one agrees with Arendt's assertion or not, the precedence she set by coining the phrase "The Banality of Evil" was a seminal one.
Fast forward nearly 50 years from the Eichmann trial to the year 2011 and we find ourselves in a new era, or should I say ever-continuing era, of delusional Judeophobia and Jew-hating. Amongst this era's loudest voices is the one emanating from due east of Jerusalem in Iran. We have all heard time and again the now repetitive foments of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his calls to "wipe Israel off the map" and his mantra of holocaust denial. To Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs of Tehran, Israel and its Western partners are the cause of all the world's ills. His latest delusional rant blaming Western Europe for "stealing the clouds" in order to create drought in his beloved Iran is continued evidence of his progressive slide into the abyss of his own psychotic mind. [2]
But what of the rest of us - leaders, politicians, and the masses of the civilized world? How do we assess the ravings of a lunatic?
The definition of "banal" and its use in the context of our understanding of modern evil is the key that unlocks the answer to this seemingly innocuous question. Similar to what occurred prior to World War II, our world is distracted, facing a number of issues that certainly afford our every attention: economic crises, political and civil unrest, active conflagrations, natural and environmental disasters and, for good measure, the wedding of a King-to-be. The fact that one lunatic despot continues a musical chime of idiocy becomes banal: defined as "trite, hackneyed, commonplace, devoid of freshness or originality." In modern language: "it ain't no big deal."
The masses have become mesmerized into a trance-like numbness that allows us to no longer define evil as such - we laugh it off or just stop paying attention at all. Of course, only a few well-positioned political elite knew the dangers of the Hitler-led Third Reich prior to WW2. The rest of the world was not inundated with his vitriol day in and day out and the occasional newsreel was not as impactful as today's plethora of information through television and the internet. So who can blame the world's masses for the holocaust that followed?
Unlike Nazi Germany, whose populace for the most part bought the party rhetoric hook, line and sinker - it is not the people of Iran that have grown to "accept" the vision of their "duly elected" leader and his Mullah puppeteers. The majority of Iranians know full well the mess that filled the void when the Shah was evicted from Persian society.
Today, however, we have a whole new group of people who have been duped into submission by the Banality of this new Evil - THE ENTIRE PLANET. Oh, we see the United Nations, emasculated as it might be, and a few of its member nations, threaten Iran with sanctions and even carry out some of them. While quite harmless and essentially trivial to the leaders of Iran, the sanctions are not even a fly in the holy ointment of their Messianic fervor.
So back to the question at hand: what of this raving lunatic and the regime that he fronts for? Their march towards completely tipping the scales of power in an already imbalanced and highly volatile region continues daily without even a blip on the Richter Scale of concern for the rest of the world. After all, it seems as if it is only those "damn Jews" that these looney-tunes hate. The Jews are the only ones sounding the alarm. "It's Israel's problem - not ours. Let them deal with it." Oh, really? Have we become so denervated to any sense of impending doom...so extinguished by repetition or whimsicality to even care? I fear the answer is a clear and resounding YES!!
The world is nearing the point of no return - or should I say KNOW return - as we approach the nuclear age of The Islamic Republic of Iran. Unlike the the days prior to Hitler's holocaust, the whole world KNOWS it is coming. And, really, unless we restructure both our thinking AND feeling processes, understand the basic premise of Hannah Arendt's treatise on Adolf Eichmann and truly, deeply reflect over what this will really mean for the Middle East, for Israel and for the ENTIRE WORLD, we will be sorry for sure. As we have over the deaths of 6 million Jews and many million non-Jews - I fear the same fate will unravel and we will weep in retrospective horror and shame at its consequences.
So, this is a choice we all have to make. One can stay mesmerized and numb in preparation for the next holocaust. Or, one can sound the trumpet and sound it continually. I choose the latter. I will blow it as often and as hard as I possibly can - while their is breath in me.
In 600 BCE, after his Jewish brethren were completely blind-sided by the Babylonians who stormed the nation, destroyed the Holy City, murdered thousands and exiled an entire people, the Prophet Jeremiah whaled at the myopia that led his people to such a fate. Jeremiah bemoaned their sin and callousness toward evil as the cause of this horrific event in Jewish history:
Jer. 4:19-21
O my soul, my soul.
I am pained in my very heart.
My heart makes a noise in me;
I cannot hold my peace,
Because you have heard, O my soul,
The sound of the trumpet,
The sound of the trumpet,
The alarm of war.
Destruction upon destruction is cried,
For the whole land is plundered.
Suddenly my tents are plundered,
And my curtains in a moment.
For the whole land is plundered.
Suddenly my tents are plundered,
And my curtains in a moment.
How long will I see the standard,
And hear the sound of the trumpet?
And hear the sound of the trumpet?
From the Middle East Media Research Institute: "An article posted April 24, 2011 on Gerdab, the website of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), envisions the day after Iran's first nuclear test. The article states that Iran's first controlled nuclear explosion will not disrupt the daily lives of Iranians, but will only boost their national pride. However, it says, in the Arab world, in the West and in Israel, it will sow a sense of fear mingled with respect for Iran's achievement. The article makes satirical comments on Iran's charged relations with the Arabs and with the West.
The following are excerpts from the article:[3]
"The day after Iran's first nuclear test will be an ordinary day for us Iranians. But many of us will have a new gleam in our eyes.
"It's a fine day. The hour is 7:00 AM. The sun is not yet fully up, but everything is already clear. Many countries in the northern hemisphere are starting their day. It's the first dawn after Iran's nuclear test. It's an ordinary day.
"Yesterday, an underground nuclear explosion took place, probably [somewhere] in the deserts of central Iran, where the Americans and some of the [other] Western countries once wanted to bury their nuclear waste. The blast was not so powerful as to cause much damage to the region, but not so weak as to cause the Iranian nuclear scientists any problem in their experiment.
"It's an ordinary day, and just like on any [other] day when there is news from Iran – which is 90% of year – we see reports on the foreign news websites, and they read as follows:
"Reuters: 'Iran Detonates Its Nuclear Bomb.'
"CNN: 'Iran Detonates Nuclear Bomb.'
"Al-Jazeera: 'Iran Has Tested Its Second Nuclear Bomb.'
"Al-'Arabia: 'A Shi'ite Nuclear Bomb Has Gone Off.'
"Yahoo News: "Nuclear Explosion in Iran."
"The Jerusalem Post: 'The Mullahs Have Obtained Nuclear Weapons.'
"The Washington Post: 'Nuclear Explosion in Iran; Shock and Anxiety in Tel Aviv.'
"The local [Iranian press] will also shower this achievement by the Hidden Imam and the Leader [Khamenei] with words of praise, as follows:
"Kayhan: 'Iran Has Tested Its First Nuclear Bomb.'
"Jomhouri-ye Eslami: 'Iran Carries Out Successful Nuclear Test.'
"Iran [a popular pro-Ahmadinejad daily]: 'On President's Orders, Iran Tests All-Iranian Nuclear Bomb.'
"Ettelaat: 'Iran Detonates Long-Awaited Nuclear Bomb'...
"It will be a news storm, but it will not disrupt normal [daily] life in Iran. Employees will come to work and punch the clock on time, or [at most] a little late. Bakers will not bake unsubsidized bread. Broadband Internet will function as usual, and even this storm will not make it any cheaper, nor will it cause [Iranian] TV to rethink its policy on the airing of foreign programs.
"The day after Iran's first nuclear test will be an ordinary day for us Iranians, but many of us will have a new gleam in our eyes – a gleam of national pride and might.
"[Koran 8:60:] 'And prepare against them what force you can and horses tied at the frontier, to frighten thereby the enemy of Allah and your enemy'"
So, I ask the question: will we be an accomplice in this new and modern Eichmann-esque version of The Banality of Evil? I submit that by saying and doing nothing, we are, in fact, choosing to be the de facto Adolf Eichmanns of today's Hitlerian movement in the halls of Tehran. Will you turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to this clear and present danger? Or will you be one of those who sounds the alarm loud and clear? It's your choice. Yes, this is a call to be deeply reflective. But, it is also a call to action.
And, without question, if you are a believer in the God who moves on behalf of the intercession of humble, faith-filled people devoted to eschewing evil, it is a clear call to pray - earnestly, fervently, continually!
Endnote:
