The banality of evil

In 1963 Hannah Arendt published a book entitled Eichman in Jerusalem, in which she coined the phrase, “the banality of evil”. Her thesis was that great evil isn’t necessarily perpetrated by fanatical sociopaths, but often comes at the hands of the most ordinary individuals. Citing the Holocaust as an example of how great evil can be wrought by even the most mundane of individuals, Ms Arendt’s book should serve as a reminder to civilized individuals worldwide that today’s intensely evil people can be quite unremarkable.

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Yes, there are the cartoon character villains, such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, whose “Mini-me” appearance betrays a maliciousness not seen since Hitler or Stalin, both of whom incidentally were totally unremarkable and very short men who distinguished themselves in terms of their reprobate actions. Another such cartoon character is the late Ayatollah Khomeini, who deposed Shah Reza Pahlavi during the Carter Administration. Khomeini is a dead-ringer for some of the villains who made their first appearance in the Popeye cartoons of the 1930s. It’s easy to laugh at villains who are a caricature of make-believe villains, but that doesn’t minimize the evil they do and the lives they shatter. More mundane yet is Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmedinejad, who has the physical appearance of a factory foreman at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan. Ahmedinejad is a man who imagines himself to be a grand intellectual, but then so was Joseph Goebbels, who like Ahmedinejad, sported his PhD as a beacon of superiority. Like Goebbels, Ahmedinejad wants to live in a world without Jews and is working to reprise the Holocaust, Version 2.0. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez physically resembles a dissolute porter at a third-rate Spanish hotel. Yet his cunning viciousness belies his harmless appearance, as he ever so brashly solidifies his total control over his people and in the process relegates them to lives of penurious poverty. Chavez’s nationalization of much of Venezuela’s industry has not helped the common people. In fact, it has had the opposite effect. Chavez, a former paratrooper in the Venezuelan army, like Ahmedinejad, believes himself to be an intellectual (although he failed to attain a graduate degree from Simón Bolívar University) and like his fellow communist, Fidel Castro, Chavez was a passable baseball player. His end goal is the destruction of the freedom offered by the American system of government and the eventual reemergence of socialism and state control of every aspect of everyone’s lives. Robert Mugabe, the octogenarian president of Zimbabwe who has the demeanor of a rural southern preacher, is especially evil in that he has plunged a country that was once called “the breadbasket of Africa” into a deep economic spiral that has brought on disease and starvation. Zimbabwe’s problems resulting from over 30 years of Mugabe rule can not easily be solved, as his racist-motivated confiscation of white-owned farms and redistribution of those lands to his supporters has resulted in a total depletion of those lands (similar to what occurred in Haiti over 100 years ago) and will insure that Zimbabweans will fester in poverty for generations to come. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is an eye doctor who can’t see Israel’s continued existence. As another sponsor of terrorist activity in the Middle East, Assad has all but destroyed neighboring Lebanon and is thought to be pursuing a robust program of acquiring weapons of mass destruction, despite Israel’s resolute action in bombing Syria’s nuclear facility in September of 2007. Assad is so unremarkable in appearance he may easily be mistaken for an incompetent French bureaucrat. This listing could go on at length to cover dozens more world leaders, but the point is that today evil exists perhaps in greater strength than it did in September of 1939 and it will not go away on its own. Looking at individuals like Castro, Assad, Qadaffi or Ahmedinejad, one can’t readily recognize the depravity of which they are capable by their appearance alone. Having already imprisoned, maimed or killed millions of their own citizens, the stage is set for those of us who are free to meet a similar fate. The big question is: are we ready to deal with them?