Oldal 109 [109]
Arendt touches on the essence of this: “the trouble with Eichmann
was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were
neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are, terribly
and terrifyingly normal.” (Arendt 1964 p.129) Also he was like so
many other people. Yes: that is the banality of evil. An evil person
is like any other person. Any and other. Here we find smallness
in every sense: a lack of broadening, a neutrality emerge. This
“person,” in any other circumstance, would be a simple church
servant, a postal worker, a minor clerk, or an electrician nobody
cares about, who would perish anonymously and vanish into a
hole in history. It was the situation—fascism, the revolution of the
failures, the little people suffering with inferiority complexes, which
put people like this into a position as though they were someone.
Eichmann said: his role in the Final Solution „was an accident”
and ,potentially almost all Germans are equally guilty”. (Ibid)
This failure is a miserable nobody and nothing, who exists in such
a way that they simultaneously do not. Eichmann is exactly this.
Arendt continues, “this normality was much more terrifying than
all the atrocities put together for it implied.” (Ibid) The takeaway
from Wannsee is that we legalize illegality, or from Gratiano’s
perspective we correct the flaws in the law, such as the too-lenient
Nuremberg Laws. As he said, “for thy life let justice be accused.”
As though there were a need for this, as though we really should
follow the thinking of Shakespeare’s character. Even though they
say the law is only good to serve a collapsed and infinitely base
idea. But it can be overturned openly if it is wanting. This makes
it seem as though the law does count for something after all, as
though the Nazi regime were not a system of “legalized illegality”
(Radbruch again). It is as though law has some sort of meaningful
role, even though the Kantian categorical imperative suggests the
exact opposite.
The harder form of this is the provocation in regard to the
“other,” the transformation of that into an enemy, whether in the
case of Jews in non-Jewish environments or Hungarians where
they are the minority. Nietzsche, who is considered the harbinger