Banality of evil

village farmers who participated in the killings and Nuon Chea, the second in command, to get to the truth of what happened and why. Throughout the documentary, connections can be made to the fear of an imagined other as a threat to Cambodia, the banality of evil that fueled the genocide. The documentary shows how normal and almost relatable the village farmers and Nuon Chea are, and through their interactions we can get a sense of how the violence of genocide could have been rationalized. Although Sambath’s

When we think of the word evil, people can associate it with a variety of things because of the many meanings it has. One can think of evil as describing someone who’s abusing power while others think of an event that is morally bad or wrong. I think we can only elusively grasp the concept of evil as a whole because its meaning is shaped by our own experiences and our own judgement. So, what happens when this judgement is warped by our upbringings, society, or tradition? What about when we are told

issues we continue to face in the late 20th and early 21st century. Try as we might, it is quite difficult to understand that the 20th century brought some of the greatest examples of human dignity and expression of good, contrasted with the banality of evil. Playing off the ideas of Freud, we can turn to Victor Frankl to explore the theme of conscious while we look at modern issues of terrorism, ecological crisis, and globalism. Certainly, looking at the compassionate nature of Simone Weill and

controversially discussed how banality, ordinariness and everyday life played an important role in the manifestation of the holocaust in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). In 1961 Arendt reported on Eichmann’s trial in Israel for the New Yorker. Eichmann was a primary organiser of the holocaust and was tried for 15 charges, including crimes against humanity and the Jewish people. Arendt observed that Eichmann himself was not an impressive monster or some Cartesian Evil Genius one would expect to

terribly and terrifyingly normal.” If resistance does not occur, who wins? More normal people will be dragged down, they will lose their sense of ethics, morality, and mindfulness and assist mad men on their path of destruction. Not resisting to evil, like Eichmann allows for morals and ethics to be thrown out the window. People like Joseph

conform and why others disobey: “the righteous among the Nations” A hero is not born but it becomes. The root of evil is fear. Oskar Shindler has passed history as the angel in the hell; credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories. Shindler is perhaps, the best example of Zimbardo reverse argument; evil people turn good. According to history, Schindler was a businessman affiliated to the Nazi party, alcoholic, smoker

Some of these themes include the nature of evil, the role of providence, the definition of humanity, and the power of love. Through these themes, science fiction writers are able to entertain audiences while still expressing their beliefs on these key societal issues. The question of the existence of a God or gods and the nature of evil is presented in most science fiction novels. Mary Doria Russell’s book The Sparrow is one such book, in which evil acts and human suffering lead a devout

II, Hannah Arendt discovered that Adolf Eichmann, who was sentenced to death for devising egregious methods of massive Jews execution, was in fact a passive receptor of authoritative orders from the Nazi regime. She proclaimed the concept of “banality of evil”, noting that “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking in itself is dangerous”. Such fickle and even potentially dangerous orientation of humanity is well demonstrated in An Essay on Man, where Alexander Pope illustrates the constantly errant

In the aftermath of the Jewish Holocaust, an outpouring of eyewitness accounts by both survivors and perpetrators has surfaced as historical evidence. For many, this has determined what modern popular culture remembers about this atrocious event. Emotion obviously plays a vital role in the accounts of the survivors, yet can it be considered when discussing the historical significance of the murder of six million European Jews by the Third Reich? Emotion is the expression of thoughts and beliefs affected

The Instrumental Articulation of Truth through the War on Evils of Terror As Benjamin has shown us violence has existed throughout the histories of time, commonly implemented in an instrumental manner, (if not meant to profess through a mythic, some moral) as (justified) means towards a specific (equivocal) end. In eulogy to UCSCs Hayden White, the onerous work of representation for the historicist is illustrated in his book Metahistory as a “verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse