August 25, 2015--Intimacy of Evil

In her remarkable book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt writes about the "banality of evil." How Adolf Eichmann, though he was responsible for the transport system that herded millions of Jews to concentration camps and their ultimate slaughter, was not in the ordinary sense actively and directly evil, but was a bureaucrat who, in a perverse sense, was carrying out orders as expeditiously and efficiently as possible.

For discussing Eichmann in this way--as a banal functionary and not a passionate anti-semite or a fanatical ideologue--Arendt was widely criticized as not holding him sufficiently responsible for his deeds--that he was, she was interpreted as saying, just doing his job. That his actions were "ordinary."

Quite the contrary--she saw his version of evil in a particularly horrific way--how it was manifested in a very average man which left the suggestion that there is a thin human line between "normality" and there ability to commit unspeakable evil. That someone so ordinary, so inconspicuous could participate so dispassionately in one of history's most heinous collective crimes.

I thought--how different is the evil being perpetrated today by ISIS.

We have been sad and outraged witnesses to their public beheadings and other barbaric crimes against innocent people in the lands they have overrun and subjugated to their merciless rule.

Just last week, in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, ISIS warriors slaughtered the keeper of its more-than-2000-year-old archeological treasures. Treasures considered so noteworthy and historically significant as to be listed a UNESCO World Heritage site.

To ISIS, since the temples and magnificent artifacts predate the advent of Islam, were built before the prophet Mohammed was born, they are the work of infidels and need to be brutally eliminated as do any people who do not embrace or follow ISIS's version of Islam.

Making an emphatic point of this, they hauled 83-year-old Khalid al-Asaad, the keeper of the antiquities for more than 50 years, into the town square and, after ordering all citizens to come forth as witnesses, according to the report in the New York Times, "cut off his head in front of the crowd" and then "his blood-soaked body was suspended with red twine by his wrists from a traffic light, his head resting on the ground between his feet, his glasses still on."

This is not the banality of evil.

This is not the impersonal imposition of slaughter.

This is not evil propagated from a bureaucrat's office or delivered from 30,000 feet.

This is not using current technology to force victims into "showers" and once there dispense with them by the administration of the latest in poison gases and then with bulldozers pushing the mounds of bodies into open trenches where the machines bury the dead and the evidence.

This is not evil where no one is touched. Where everything is by schedule and assisted by state-of-the-art technology.

ISIS's is the intimacy of evil. Not its banality.

These evil-doers hold victims in their arms. With their own hands they hold up victims' heads. And then, in that ugly embrace, cut off their heads. And then place them carefully on the ground, making sure eyeglasses are carefully arranged.

A friend here who is essentially a pacifist wants "to nuke" them. Minimally place enough American "boots on the ground"--even 200,000 if necessary--to kill them all. Kill them all.

I get it.