Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny

In EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM, Adolf Eichmann came off as a plain, inarticulate, incongruously normal little man. The phrase, "banality of evil" came to stand for it. That phrase has been widely misunderstood as encapsulating some profound, counterinuitive insight about the Holocaust. It does not. It is merely Arendt's observation specific to Eichmann, and to all the little cog-in-the-machine people whom he epitomized.. It has mostly been forgotten that the Mossad mission to Argentina in '56 was intended to capture Eichmann and Dr. Josef Mengele together. But Mengele dropped out of sight, to surface later in Brazil. He was never brought to justice. He drowned accidentally off a gorgeous Brazilian beach while vacationing in 1979. Because he exhibited essential elements that Eichmann lacked--perversion of a privileged, cultured upbringing as well as science and medicine--he ought to have been the man on trial in the glass booth. Had that succeeded, we would have heard far less about "banality of evil" down through the years.