The anatomies of evil

Adolf Eichmann (inside glass booth) is sentenced to death by the court at the conclusion of the Eichmann Trial. Photo: Public Domain

The book was released exactly 60 years ago by a Jewish refugee, one of the greatest philosophers of our time – Hannah Arendt – after the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a man responsible for the death of millions of European Jews, transported to concentration camps, mainly Auschwitz.

Arendt felt that the Eichmann trial provided a unique opportunity to come face-to-face with monstrous evil. However, the longer she observed the small, bald man in a glass booth, the wider the gap formed between the enormity of the evil committed and the man responsible for it. The banality of evil refers to such a small, seemingly everyday family man, who blends into society and yet is capable of a form of evil that shakes us and our beliefs in humanity to their core. Today, as we are faced with the reality of evil again, it is worth revisiting one of the paramount ideas concerning evil and asking whether its banality offers us insights into the evils done by Russians in Ukraine?

My best friends house near Kyiv was robbed by the Russian soldiers as every single house in their village. Apart from stealing PlayStation, creating a mess searching for money,they destroyed Hanna Arendt’s “The Banality of Evil”. They might not know what’s the book is about. pic.twitter.com/N8rkAgD2Kz

— Nataliya Gumenyuk (@ngumenyuk) April 6, 2022

Evil more chilling than the devil

Eichmann’s defence was built on the premise that he was simply following orders. Moreover, he spoke of himself as a good citizen, who under trying circumstances conducted civic duties to the best of his ability, meticulously following orders and rules. Observing Eichmann, Arendt comes to the conclusion that Eichmann was not stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing, yet he did not think. Thoughtlessness, Arendt said, is the inability to reflect on the meaning of one’s actions and make judgements about one’s standing in the world. Even after hearing over 100 testimonies of survivors in the Jerusalem courtroom, Eichmann refused to feel any remorse, which comes from the internal dialogue we have with ourselves, seeing clearly our own actions and comprehending their meaning. It is this kind of thoughtlessness which enabled Eichmann to sit for months on end facing a German Jew, who was conducting the interrogation, pouring out his heart about the injustices of his life, such as not being promoted above the rank of lieutenant colonel in the SS and that it had not been his fault. Moreover, faced with death, he failed to realise the singular exceptionalism of the moment and deflected to ideological clichés. “In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory,” Arendt wrote. “Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was ‘elated’ and he forgot that this was his own funeral. It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

Such a breakdown of personal judgement, according to Arendt, is the origin of this thoroughly organised political evil. Evil that is not done by evildoers, crazy loners or “lost souls”, possessed by the devil but is perpetrated by regular citizens who simply do their job, those who meticulously follow orders, and the bystanders who witness the evil and yet remain shockingly unaffected by it. If there was anything that stood out about Eichmann it was his complete lack of character. As a matter of fact, Eichmann would kill his own father if that was required of him. “Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’,” Arendt concludes. She describes Eichmann as a “joiner”, an enthusiastic member of a movement terrified of the idea of having to live an individual life, or being someone able and willing to stand out as a person, distinct from all others.  

The banality of evil is often misinterpreted as evil reduced to a function. Rather, this sort of evil comes from one’s persistent refusal to be a person, a thinking and judging being, somebody who cares about the world and their own place in it. It is perpetrated by people not pursuing evil, but people who never made a decision whether to be good or bad. As Arendt notes, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but someone for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exists. This banal evildoer is someone who can slip into the role of the good husband and loving father, while going to “work” and gassing children and women. All his identities and roles are assumed and exchanged with certain lightness. Nothingness, a lack of a sense of self is what predisposed Eichmann to become one of the “most proficient” Nazi criminals.

Challenging our humanity

Without the malevolence usually associated with evil, there is something truly mundane and ordinary about it. Hence, Arendt would later note that evil spreads like a fungus, along the surface. It does not need to take root, reaching deep into our sense of self, nor does it require to provide an ideology strong enough to transform or uproot a person and persuade us of evils to be done in the service of some greater good. This is because such persuasion requires someone who would not be apathetic towards the world (even if their idea of the world is one defined by horror, misery or superiority) and a care for oneself in it.

Looking though the collection of testimonies of Holocaust perpetrators, such as Vaclovas Klimas, what stands out is their detachment from their own actions. Like many others similar to him, he talks about the killing of Lithuanian Jews as if he was transporting wood from the forest to the factory, rather than small town residents to their death in the forest. He accepted his fate as a killer with chilling calmness, just like Eichmann accepted that his civil duties now were being tried as crimes against humanity. Of central importance here is a disregard for who one is, a good citizen and/or a criminal, as well as an ability to remain completely unaffected by horrible crimes perpetrated and injustices witnessed. This detachment separates these perpetrators from the Shakespearean villains who relish in the idea of destroying a world or take delight in the suffering of others.

Evils like the Holocaust challenge our own humanity. Not only because of scale, nature or cruelty. As humans we feel a perpetual need to understand, especially something so violating as evil. And yet, as we peel back the layers, we have nothing to grab on to. The banal evil cannot be comprehended by evil motives, self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment or lust for power. It spreads like fungus because there is no end it aims to achieve, no impulse it longs to satisfy. It is wholly unlike someone’s taste for revenge, for instance.

The unbearable lightness of being a Russian

Arendt’s banality of evil falls between two opposite perspectives – secular and theological. For our secular political imagination, evil is a rather challenging concept. It offers a sociological/scientific deconstruction of evil, determining political, social, cultural and historical explanations of evil. It makes it rather difficult to talk about evils challenging our bounds of knowledge and understanding. That is why when we start thinking about evil, rather than just crimes, we often reach into the religious imagination.

As Paul Kahn notes: “Approaching evil, we still feel that we are beyond the boundaries of our ordinary forms of experience and explanation. Evil is not just some deficient form of behaviour or a forgetting of the rules. For this reason, the inquiry into evil does not start within the profane and everyday but starts instead with those experiences that touch upon the sacred.” Indeed, while evil may be fuelled by conditions like mass terror and repressions, there remains something deeper than mere social and political circumstances.

Together these perspectives capture the mundane as well as transcendental in evil. However, both also tend to disregard the human agency at the core of it. The theological perspective suggests that evil is the work of the devil, as if a person is possessed. It also tends to focus on statesmen and leadership as true evildoers and disregards ordinary people. Evil would never have reached a mass scale and would not be transformed from crimes, usually committed on the fringes of society in the dark of night, into state policy, if it relied only on the hands and minds of the ill-willed, or fanatics and sadists. The secular one turns evil into a faceless, sort of Kafkaesque process. Big, bureaucratic, mechanical states allow for evils like concentration camps because they rely on the processes and functions of bureaucracy. However, following Arendt, it can be argued precisely that because the state relies on so many functions, then the evils done at the scale of the state require a significant number of ordinary collaborators. The mass incarceration and rapid and systematic rise of torture chambers all around the occupied territories of Ukraine, as well as forced-labour camps, require a multitude of people duly executing their functions. This evil requires collecting, constructing, counting, transporting, and legislating for it to come to fruition.

Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, according to Arendt, manifested through the incapability to form authentic speech, replacing speech with ideological clichés. The people across Russia today are insistent on repeating such clichés about the eternal fight against Nazism. There is nothing personal in the way ordinary citizens on the streets of Russia reflect on the war, ignoring the discontent between the fight against fascism and the reality of the destruction of entire cities and burying people under rubble. One day it is a fight against fascism, a defence against NATO attack, the next it is either an existential fight for the Russian soul or a limited “military operation”. One day the Ukrainians are brothers needing saving, the next they are the antichrist. All these rationalisations are indeed like fungus, all surface and no substance, which needs to take root, persuade and mobilise to gain support. It spreads along the surface, among people who lack any care for truth and understanding and merge good with evil, truth with fiction, and render any human judgement about what is happening futile. It is the mass indifference towards the evils committed in one’s name that allows for the crimes to continue legitimising them as a state policy.

Yet, it is not just wilful ignorance that allows for such evils but a complete misreading of the human condition, as well as the subjectivity and power that comes not from the barrel of a gun or violence but from a sense of our own humanity. For example, when the Russian soldiers encountered a lone soldier, Oleksandr Matsievskyi, in the woods, they did not simply shoot him at point-blank range (after Oleksandr calmly professed his unshakable allegiance to Ukraine) but they also filmed and posted a video online of the killing. It is an act of misplaced self-praise, a total misreading of human power.

Other stories of such misreading of the human condition emerge throughout the testimonies of captured Ukrainians, as perpetrators threaten and torture people demanding that they betray their leadership. It is as if the idea of personal resistance is unintelligible to the occupiers. The simple idea that Ukrainians have their own convictions, that they can choose pain or even death over the order to sing the Russian anthem, seems incomprehensible. This is how evil impacts not only its victims but the perpetrators. The extreme violence and cruelty displayed by the Russian soldiers shows disregard for their own humanity. They are detached from the weight of human suffering in various moments, such as a mother having to bury her son in her own backyard, or a child digging through the rubble, searching for dead parents. These scenes do not crush or deform their souls. This violence in turn forms a sort of cycle. As perpetrators chip away at their humanity, the more detached they become from the human world, and the easier it may become to continue destruction.

The evil that is spread by Russians in Ukraine is perpetrated and amplified not by the sadists or anti-Ukrainian fanatics, but precisely a lack of care for one’s own subjectivity. One moment you are on Ukrainian soil, torturing school teachers and librarians, the next you are back home a decorated Russian veteran butchering your own grandmother. There are no boundaries between permissible and forbidden, because there may not be a person in the middle who would care one way or the other. The lines between good and evil are fused, not only because of propaganda, but due to a lack of care for one’s humanity. One has to care for oneself and the world in order to resist the conflation of truth with fiction, of good with evil, of justice with crimes.

Salvation of humanity

In her heated debate with Gershom Scholem on the nature of evil, Arendt notes that only good can be radical. It ought to take root in a person who, in turn, achieves and nurtures their humanity by caring for the world around them. A care which Arendt failed to spot in Eichmann. What unifies the stories of the Righteous Among the Nations is not the fact that these people had better moral guidelines, a habit of moral tradition or vastly different circumstances to consenting and collaborating citizens. Rather, they are bound by a strong sense of self, the impossibility to live with oneself after having done nothing. When faced with impossible choices, they chose to act to preserve the world of compassion, love, friendship, sacrifice and sharing. In parallel, the most powerful images from Ukraine are not the ones that show the destruction but display of humanity – solidarity, perseverance, bravery, love, preserving humanity in the face of soul-crushing and corrupting evils. Good comes not from “being on the right side of history” or good ideas, but from the refusal of Ukrainian people to be defined by the pain, loss, destruction and horrors of evils inflicted upon them.

The last thing worth mentioning is that the idea of the banality of evil came out of a direct encounter with it and its senselessness, not a philosophical meditation over the nature of evil. This provides a key to our own relationship to evils today. When we bear witness to the many faces of evil, its relentless ways to destruct, crush and destroy, and the mere violation of trust in humanity and human reason; all reasons seem small and banal in comparison. No evildoer is great in the face of the suffering he/she imposes. Maybe the truth is that great evils are not only perpetrated by everyday men but also that there are no ideas big enough to justify the evils perpetrated. The banality of evil captures the sense that in the face of its reality and consequence, all reasons that attempt to justify it are insufficient.

Simona Merkinaitė is a chief project officer with the East European Studies Centre in Vilnius. She is also completing a PhD focusing on Hannah Arendt at Vilnius University.

Hannah Arendt, Russia, Russia's war against Ukraine, Ukraine