Hannah Arendt on the Banality of Evil

During this time, the people of Germany were trained to believe that there are other human beings that were of lesser quality than them. People like Adolf Hitler, wanted all the Jews eradicated. He was able to convince enough people that Jewish people are to blame for Germany’s loss of World War I. Hitler enlisted the help of men from Germany to help persecute all the Jewish people. The Jews got treated like their life was worthless and insignificant compared to the Christian Germans. The discrimination done to the Jewish people was more than just simple acts of violence. The Germans truly believed that the Jews deserved this punishment. The dehumanization done during the Holocaust affected the life of many people. One life in particular is Eliezer Wiesel. In his frightening novel Night, Eliezer Wiesel shows how the Nazis degraded millions of innocent people. He shares his experiences in a Jewish death camp called, Auschwitz. In this best selling novel he tells how he was demoralized into something that was less than human. He did not even recognize himself by the end of his journey. “When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy… Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views, that place must-- at that moment-- become the center of the universe” (Nobel Peace Prize). Through his book and his participation in the Jewish community he wants to ensure that

The Holocaust began around 1933 when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and leader of the Nazi Party. During that time, the first concentration camp, Dachau, was established to torture and kill Jewish people. Soon after, in 1935, Nuremberg Race Laws against Jews were decreed and depriving Jews of German citizenship. Germany then invaded Poland, starting World War II in Europe. With the start of World War II came many more concentration camps, and millions of deaths. Six million European Jews lost their lives during this horrific time. Many survivors shared their stories after they were freed, so that the world would know of the horrors they experienced. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, told his story in his book, Night. Elie Wiesel was a teenager during the Holocaust, but lived on into his eighties and continued to speak out against what the Nazi’s did to his family.

Elie Wiesel was a Jewish American born in Romania. His principles were influenced by being raised in a heavily religious and liberal family. In the 1940s, his own country forced his family to flee to the ghettos, and not long after, Wiesel, “a young Jewish boy from a small town,” was captured by Nazis, waking up to the perilous realization of “eternal infamy”(Wiesel). In April 1945, after enduring through starvation and punishment, he was finally liberated.

Arendt explains that the ultimate power of a totalitarian government is the acceptance of the ideology being propagated. The laws that are put into place in totalitarian government are not to empower the people and protect their rights. Instead, the laws tell the people what they must do, not what they must not do. Arendt tells how the law of nature is the foundation for Hitler's Nazis, and the law of history for Russia's communist regimes. According to Arendt, both the Nazi and communist regimes maintained that those laws gave them justification for their cruelty. These laws of nature and history are not permanent or stable. They are in motion to keep history and nature moving, so that it progresses without ever stopping. <p>Arendt claims that these laws of motion sustain the terror fueling the totalitarian government. Arendt says that terror is the realization and execution of these laws with nothing standing in its way. Throughout the selection, Arendt speaks of terror. Terror is essential for the state to keep its power, or else it will fall. According to Arendt, in a totalitarian state terror terminates individuality among the people. Individual men become a mass of humankind, in the eyes of the state. "Terror exists neither for nor against men", claims Arendt, "it substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly

We are all born with a God-given moral compass, but not everyone chooses to use it. Many people have differing opinions on good and evil in the world, but they are often misunderstood. In the book The Round House by Louise Erdrich, Father Travis and Linden Lark have different worldviews on good and evil, which influence protagonist, Joe Coutt’s, actions and the development of his sense of right and wrong. Throughout the book, Joe must learn difficult lessons regarding morality that will greatly affect his future, depending on what decision he makes: good or evil.

Thesis: A key concept to understanding Hannah Arendt’s “Total Domination” is the essence of terror and the importance of concentration camps in maintaining the Nazi totalitarian state.

In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt uses the life and trial of Adolf Eichmann to explore man's responsibility for evils committed under orders or as a result of the law. Due to the fact that she believed that Eichmann was neither anti-Semitic, nor a psychopath, Arendt was widely criticized for treating Eichmann too sympathetically. Still, her work on the Eichmann trial is among the most respected works on the issue to date.

with some evil in it. Better? Why would God being so good and concerned about

Hannah Arendt’s essay suggests she believes that the motives steered by Adolf Eichmann to commit monstrous acts, where “once banal to all human” ( Arendt, Cp). Eichmann was viewed as a demonic monster for his immoral and corrupted mind. Banal evil shares similarities with Radical evil, such that they can both result in extraordinary evil. Unlike radical evil, banal evil can be committed by ordinary people. Eichmann lacked the ability to reflect and he seemed to think in terms of clichés as his goal was to follow Hitler’s orders to undo God’s creation and complete his job successfully and

According to the text On Lying: Writing Philosophical History after the Enlightenment and after Arendt by Sophia Rosenfeld focuses on the works by Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt was a German-Jewish intellectual who fled Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933, lived in Paris as a stateless refugee and Zionist activist until 1941 and then fled to and settled in the United States (Isaac). Hannah Arendt wrote a “Political Lying” essay at the end of the 1960’s and first years of 1970’s. During this time Arendt became an experienced world traveler.

"The sort of person that Eichmann appeared to be did not square either with the deeds for which he was being tried or with the traditional preconceptions about the kind of person who does evil" (Geddes). Throughout the trial, Arendt is conflicted by what she wants to seen when she analyzes Eichmann, and struggles greatly when she finds he does not embody the crude and inhumane thoughts she associated with the history of the Holocaust. It is this absence of the profound hatred of Jews, along with the normalcy he possesses, that creates the emblematic role of banal evil for Adolf Eichmann.

Margaret Canovan argued that Hannah Arendt failed to realize that political opinions too have drawbacks. According to Arendt, different people have different opinions and claims that one political opinion can bring an enhancement on another. Based on this assumption, she adopted Kant’s notion of “judgement,” that is, “to think for the sake of general” into her political thinking. But Habermas rejected her ideas on the ground that it is “monologic.” She seems to have left no room for “rational truth” in political affairs. On the other hand, Canovan also disputed on Habermas’s insistence for fixing his attention on rational consensus. Habermas assumes that “just” society can be institutionalized if political discourse is based on ideal discourse.

I’ll first talk about Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Adolph Eichmann and also talk about how his motives for committing the crimes were a “banality of evil”. Viewing the trial first hand, Arendt bases her analysis of Eichmann of the criminal charges that he is indicted on, his motives for the crimes, and how he tried to defend himself during the trial. The way that Arendt perceives Eichmann is by the fact that he was aware of the seriousness of the crimes that he committed at the trial, but he did not have the "evil" motives that would usually be seen in the type of heinous

What is considered evil depends upon each individual’s view of morality, which constantly changes through the course of that person’s life. Roy Perrett’s “Evil and Human Nature” explains this by elaborating on the customary interpretation of moral evil. This evil, caused by an intentional bad action or harm, opposes another type of evil, natural evil, which occurs without

Her main focus was to comprehend this new category of evil which is committed by thousands of common people without intellect but who are excellent followers, much like robots. Also she never once disagreed that not every Nazi involved in the holocaust was banal. Some of them were acting out of pure hate and projecting it on the Jews (Adorno, projection theory). Of course, there were exceptions like Oscar Schindler who had his own ideology unlike Eichmann who was part of the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as normal. Hannah willingly engaged in the path of enlightenment knowing the bitter consequences she might face. Although Arendt started Eichmann in Jerusalem as a trial report, it became a literary masterpiece and still influences the intellectual community all over the