Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt – Introduction w/Jesan Sorrells

WEBVTT

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Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons

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from the Great Books podcast episode number

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153.

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What. Responsibilities do civil service bureaucrats

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have to society and culture? Where does

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free will, autonomy and needing to pay your mortgage run up

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against or bump up against ethics and morals?

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Who judges the criminality and deviance of actors who were

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quote unquote just doing what they were told and quote unquote following

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orders? And what responsibility do

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individuals have in checking the power of the government

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by standing a thwart bureaucratic control and yelling

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stop? These and many

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others are some of the questions

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that the post World War II Nuremberg Trials of

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members of the Nazi government of Germany

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sought to answer in order to reassemble

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a world broken by war and shocked into silence

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by the presence of concentration camps.

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But the answers to these questions, provided to a generation

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of Americans and accepted by a couple of generations afterward

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and as quote unquote, just the way things are,

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are now in our time, well over 80

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plus years after World War II being

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deconstructed, particularly as the post World War II

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liberal world order is falling apart or is being

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reassembled, depending upon your perspective everywhere in the

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West. The COVID 19

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pandemic of course, brought many of these questions to the forefront in

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the United States and globally now, particularly for the last

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three generations of people, Gen Xers, Millennials and Gen Zers

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who have never stared the atrocity of the concentration camps

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directly in the face and whose only connection to that world

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is through grainy black and white films or through

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boomer generated hagiographies produced over

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the last 30 years. Confronting the

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terror of bureaucratic disinterested insistence on

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compliance and the ruthless application of state power

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to those who would rebel is new for us

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living now, but would have been very familiar

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to the pre World War II generations that

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eventually had to deal with the consequences of all of that

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at Nuremberg. To

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wit, today on the podcast we will be introducing an

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authority who wrote most of her work in direct and vehement

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opposition to all forms of totalitarianism, both

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fascism and communism. She was

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unapologetically philosophical during a post World

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War II era where women, and in particular

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Jewish women, were just finding their feet in the

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space of political and social philosophy.

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Today we will be looking at the

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major themes and exploring the life of the author

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of Eichmann in Jerusalem Report on the

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Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt

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Leaders look up. We are losing

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by leaps and bounds the lessons of of

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Nuremberg to our detriment

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in the west and today we are going

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to look at Eichmann in Jerusalem, a report on the Banality of

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Evil and we will be reading excerpts

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from from the book. You can get a PDF

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copy of this book online. I would recommend

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picking it up and checking it out

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now. To pick up from Eichmann in Jerusalem

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a report on the Banality of Evil. We’re going to pick up

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in the first chapter of the

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report and then we’ll talk a little bit about

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Hannah Arendt and her background here.

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And I quote for it was history.

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That as far as the prosecution was. Concerned, and that means the prosecutor

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in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in the

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1960s. For it was the history that as far as the prosecution

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was concerned, stood at the center of the trial. It is not

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an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial and not the Nazi

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regime alone, but anti Semitism throughout history.

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This was the tone sent by Ben Gurion and faithfully followed by Mr.

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Hausner, who began his opening address, which lasted through three

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sessions with Pharaoh in Egypt and Haman’s decree, quote

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to destroy, to slay and to cause them to perish. Close quote

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he then proceeded to quote. Ezekiel, quote and when I

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the Lord passed by thee and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said

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unto thee in thy blood live, explaining that these words

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must be understood as, quote the imperative that has confronted this nation

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ever since its first appearance on the stage of history, close quote

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it was bad history and cheap rhetoric. Worse, it was clearly across

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purposes with putting Eichmann on trial, suggesting that

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perhaps he was only an innocent executor of some mysteriously

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foreordained destiny, or for that matter, even of anti

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Semitism, which perhaps was necessary to blaze the

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trail of the blood stained road traveled by this people

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to fulfill its destiny. A few sessions later,

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when Professor Salo. W. Barron of Columbia University had testified to the

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more recent history of Eastern European jewelry, Dr. Servetius

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could no longer resist temptation and asked the obvious questions

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why did all this bad luck fall upon the Jewish people? And don’t you

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think that irrational motives. Are at the basis of the fate of

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this people beyond the understanding of a human

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being? Is there not perhaps something like the

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spirit of the history which brings history forward without the influence of men?

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Is not Mr. Hauser basically in agreement with the school of historical law

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in allusion to Hegel? And has he not shown that

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what the leaders do will not always lead to the aim and

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destination they wanted here? The intention was to destroy

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the Jewish people and the objective was not reached and A new

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flourishing state came into being. The argument

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of the defense had now come perilously close to the newest and

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anti Semitic notion about the Elders of Zion set forth in all

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seriousness a few weeks ago, earlier in the Egyptian national assembly by

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Deputy Foreign Minister Hussein Zulfikar Sabri.

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Hitler was innocent of the slaughter of the Jews. He was a victim of the

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Zionists who. Who had, quote, compelled him to

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perpetrate. Crimes that would eventually enable them to achieve their aim, the

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creation of the State of Israel. Close quote.

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Except that Dr. Sevatius, following the philosophy of history

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expounded by the prosecutor, had put history in the place usually

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reserved for the Elders of Zion.

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Despite the intentions of Ben Gurion and all the efforts of the prosecution,

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there remained an individual in the dock, a person of flesh

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and blood. And if Ben Gurion did not,

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quote, care what verdict is delivered against Eichmann,

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it was undeniably the sole task of the Jerusalem court

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to deliver one. When you read

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Eichmann in Jerusalem, you realize that

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there are two very important. People that are at the center

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of this report. One obviously

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is the person being reported. On and his trial.

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That would be Adolf Eichmann. But the other important

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person is Hannah Arendt.

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Hannah Arendt was born Joanna Arendt on October 14,

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1906 and she died December

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4, 1975. And in case you don’t know anything about

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her, she was a German and American

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historian and philosopher. Now, she

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described herself vociferously as

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a philosopher and she

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also described herself later on, at least initially, sorry, she described

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herself as a philosopher. But as the course of her career

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in writing and in letters and in teaching unfolded,

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she referred to herself more, or thought of herself more

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as a political philosopher. Her works

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cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for

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for those works dealing with the nature of wealth, power and evil,

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as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, tradition,

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and of course, what we’re going to cover today,

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totalitarianism and tyranny.

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Hannah Arendt was raised in a politically

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progressive Jewish but secular family

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and her mother was an ardent social democrat in

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Germany in the 1920s and in the 1930s. As a matter of fact,

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Aren’t was once interviewed by a German program

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in a German language only interview that you could find the link

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to in the show notes below. The player of the podcast

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episode or sorry, the podcast player you’re listening to for this

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episode. And in that interview she was asked about her childhood

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and she was. She said that she was surprised the first time

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she was exposed to a anti Semitism in Germany.

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And that her mother effectively put a

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stop to anti Semitic incidents in school that would occur

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with her between Hannah and.

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And adults, but between Hannah and children.

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Hannah recalled, she was sent out basically to

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forge and figure out how to deal with those anti Semitic incidents

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on her own. After

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completing the secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied

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at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger.

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And she was deeply influenced by

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Heidegger and deeply influenced by Karl

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Jaspers. Martin Heidegger, just so that, you know, was

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a German philosopher and theologian.

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He ran into some problems

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when he vociferously and

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pretty much wholeheartedly went in on becoming

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a part of the National Socialist Party under Hitler.

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And spent a lot of his years in post war Europe

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and in America running around apologizing. Well, not really apologizing,

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running around justifying that decision.

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Arendt was deeply in love with Heidegger. Matter of fact,

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there’s a lot of indication in her biography that he was probably her

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first serious love affair. And he was significantly older,

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older than her at the time. And this love affair

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began when he or she was his

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student at the University of Marburg.

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In 1933, Arendt was

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briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing

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illegal research into anti Semitism. And this was during

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the period of time when Germany was beginning to lock

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down most of its Jewish population and

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was beginning to really turn the crank

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and put pressure on Jews. This pressure, of course,

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would culminate in the development of

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auschwitz in the 1940s,

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when Germany finally declared war on everybody in Europe

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and invaded France. Hannah at that time had

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escaped to France and there she was detained as an alien.

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When Germany invade. She escaped the clutches

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of the Nazis and made her way back to the United

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States. In 1941, when she

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landed in the United States, she did not speak any English. And she taught herself

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over the course of a couple years how to do that. By the way. She

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was a native German speaker, obviously, but she was also

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fluent in French and in English. She

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became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural

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Reconstruction. She also became an American Citizen in

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1950 with the publication of

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the Origins of Totalitarianism. In 1951, her

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reputation as a thinker and a writer was established and an

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entire series of political philosophical works

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followed. She taught at many American universities

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while consistently declining tenure track appointments. She

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didn’t want to be locked down. She had an inherent mistrust of

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institutional and of institutional authority.

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During the course of her career, she had many friendships and she got involved in

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many controversies, including the controversies that we are going to talk

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about today that cover her reporting on the

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trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in the

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1960s. She was

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also consistently buried for many, many years. Her husband

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died before she did, and she died suddenly of a heart

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attack in December of 1975, leaving her

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last work, the Life of the Mind, unfinished.

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If you want to talk about a giant of the

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20th century, an intellectual giant of the 20th century,

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you probably would do well to include

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Hannah Arendt in your list of giants of

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political and philosophical thought of the

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20th century. So just in case you

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don’t know anything about Adolf Eichmann,

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let’s go ahead and pick up from Menality

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of Evil, a report on the

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Menality of Evil by Hannah Arendt. Let’s go ahead and pick up with

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her description of Adolf

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Eichmann. And I quote,

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he was born on March 19, 1906

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in Solingen, a German town in the Rhineland famous for

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its knives, scissors and surgical instruments. 54

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years later, indulging in his favorite pastime of writing his memoirs, he

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described this memorable event as follows.

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Quote Today, 15 years in a day after May 8,

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1945, I began to lead my thoughts back to that 19th of March of the

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year 1906, when at 5 o’ clock in the morning I entered life on

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earth in the aspect of a human being. The

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manuscript has not been released by the Israeli authorities. Harry Mulish

244
00:15:20.650 –> 00:15:24.450
succeeded in studying this autobiography for half

245
00:15:24.450 –> 00:15:27.930
an hour, and the German Jewish weekly Der

246
00:15:27.930 –> 00:15:31.610
Aufbau was able to publish short excerpts from it.

247
00:15:32.730 –> 00:15:36.250
According to his religious beliefs, which had not changed since the Nazi period

248
00:15:36.650 –> 00:15:40.410
in Jerusalem, Eichmann declared himself to be a got gluber,

249
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the Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity, and he refused

250
00:15:44.630 –> 00:15:48.350
to take his oath on the Bible. This event was

251
00:15:48.350 –> 00:15:51.310
to be ascribed to a higher bearer of meaning,

252
00:15:52.030 –> 00:15:55.870
an entity somehow identical with the movement of the universe,

253
00:15:55.870 –> 00:15:59.470
to which human life in itself devoid of higher meaning, is

254
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subject. The terminology is quite suggestive

255
00:16:03.390 –> 00:16:06.850
to call God a hoheran sinister meaning

256
00:16:06.850 –> 00:16:10.570
linguistically, to give him some place in the military hierarchy, since the

257
00:16:10.570 –> 00:16:13.890
Nazis had changed the military recipient of orders, the

258
00:16:13.890 –> 00:16:17.290
Belfenschlemflanger, into a bearer of orders,

259
00:16:17.530 –> 00:16:21.370
a befel strager, indicating as in the ancient bearer

260
00:16:21.370 –> 00:16:25.010
of ill tidings, the burden of responsibility and of importance that

261
00:16:25.010 –> 00:16:28.250
weighed supposedly upon those who had to execute orders.

262
00:16:28.970 –> 00:16:32.680
Moreover, Eichmann, like everyone connected with the Final Solution, was

263
00:16:32.680 –> 00:16:36.240
officially a bearer of secrets, a guy high

264
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mainunstragger as well, which as far as self

265
00:16:39.960 –> 00:16:43.240
importance went, certainly was nothing to sneeze at.

266
00:16:44.440 –> 00:16:48.280
But Eichmann was not very much interested in metaphysics, remaining

267
00:16:48.680 –> 00:16:52.320
singularly silent on any more intimate relationship between

268
00:16:52.320 –> 00:16:56.160
the bearer of meaning and the bearer of orders, and proceeded

269
00:16:56.160 –> 00:16:59.880
to a consideration of the other possible cause of his existence.

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His parents and I quote, they would hardly

271
00:17:04.340 –> 00:17:07.980
have been so overjoyed at the arrival of their firstborn

272
00:17:08.220 –> 00:17:11.860
had they been able to watch how in the hour of my birth, the

273
00:17:11.860 –> 00:17:15.340
norn of. Miss. Miss.

274
00:17:17.660 –> 00:17:21.100
The norn of misfortune. There it is.

275
00:17:21.580 –> 00:17:25.380
In spite of the norn of good fortune, was already spinning

276
00:17:25.380 –> 00:17:29.180
threads of grand grief and sorrow into my life. But a kind

277
00:17:29.500 –> 00:17:33.340
impenetrable veil kept my parents from seeing into the future.

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Close quote. The

279
00:17:36.980 –> 00:17:40.620
misinformation or the misfortune. Sorry, started soon enough. It

280
00:17:40.620 –> 00:17:44.380
started in school. Eichmann’s father, first an accountant for the tramways

281
00:17:44.380 –> 00:17:48.020
and electricity company in Solingen, and after 1913, as an official

282
00:17:48.020 –> 00:17:51.580
of the same corporation, Austria in Linz, had five children,

283
00:17:52.110 –> 00:17:55.830
four sons and a daughter, of whom only Adolf, the eldest, it seems. Was unable

284
00:17:55.830 –> 00:17:59.550
to finish high school or. Even to graduate from the vocational school for engineering

285
00:17:59.550 –> 00:18:03.310
into which he was then put. Throughout his life, Eichmann

286
00:18:03.310 –> 00:18:07.150
deceived people about his early, quote, unquote misfortunes by hiding behind the more

287
00:18:07.150 –> 00:18:10.990
honorable financial misfortunes of his father in Israel. However, during

288
00:18:10.990 –> 00:18:14.630
the first sessions with Captain Abner Lest, a police examiner who was to

289
00:18:14.630 –> 00:18:17.510
spend approximately 35 days with him and who produced

290
00:18:17.510 –> 00:18:21.030
3564 typewritten pages from the 76 recorder

291
00:18:21.030 –> 00:18:24.790
tapes, he he was in an ebullent mood, full of enthusiasm about this

292
00:18:24.790 –> 00:18:27.870
unique opportunity, quote, to pour forth everything I know,

293
00:18:28.910 –> 00:18:32.670
and by the same token, to advance to the rank of the most cooperative defendant

294
00:18:32.670 –> 00:18:36.510
ever. His enthusiasm was soon dampened, though never

295
00:18:36.510 –> 00:18:40.030
quite extinguished, when he was confronted with concrete questions based on

296
00:18:40.030 –> 00:18:43.870
irrefutable documents. The best proof of his initial boundless

297
00:18:43.870 –> 00:18:47.430
confidence, obviously wasted on Captain Less, who said to Harry

298
00:18:47.430 –> 00:18:51.120
Mulish the quote, I was Mr. Eichmann’s father confessor. Close quote

299
00:18:51.280 –> 00:18:55.040
was that for the first. Time in his life he admitted his early disasters,

300
00:18:55.200 –> 00:18:59.000
although he must have been aware of the fact that he thus

301
00:18:59.000 –> 00:19:02.640
contradicted himself on several important entries in all his official

302
00:19:03.120 –> 00:19:06.840
Nazi records. Well,

303
00:19:06.840 –> 00:19:10.680
the disasters were ordinary, since he, quote, had not exactly been the most

304
00:19:10.680 –> 00:19:14.080
hard working pupil, close quote or, one may add, the most gifted.

305
00:19:14.460 –> 00:19:17.900
His father had taken him first from high school and then from vocational school long

306
00:19:17.900 –> 00:19:21.620
before graduation. Hence the profession that appears on all his

307
00:19:21.620 –> 00:19:25.340
official documents, construction engineer, had about as much connection with

308
00:19:25.340 –> 00:19:29.180
reality as the statement that his birthplace was Palestine, or that he was fluent in

309
00:19:29.180 –> 00:19:32.820
Hebrew and Yiddish, another outright lie Eichmann had loved to tell both

310
00:19:32.820 –> 00:19:36.580
to his SS comrades and to his Jewish victims. It was in

311
00:19:36.580 –> 00:19:40.100
the same vein that he had always pretended that he had been dismissed from his

312
00:19:40.100 –> 00:19:43.900
job as a salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company in Austria because of membership of

313
00:19:43.900 –> 00:19:47.710
the National Socialist Party. The version he confided to Captain

314
00:19:47.710 –> 00:19:51.230
Less was less dramatic, though probably not the truth either. He had been

315
00:19:51.230 –> 00:19:54.750
fired because it was a time of unemployment when unmarried

316
00:19:54.750 –> 00:19:58.070
employees were the first to lose their jobs. This explanation,

317
00:19:58.950 –> 00:20:02.750
which at first seems plausible, is not very satisfactory because he lost his

318
00:20:02.750 –> 00:20:06.230
job in the spring of 1933, when he had been engaged for a full two

319
00:20:06.230 –> 00:20:09.910
years to Veronica or Vera Liebel, who later became his wife.

320
00:20:10.390 –> 00:20:13.890
Why had he not married her before, when he still had a good job? He

321
00:20:13.890 –> 00:20:17.570
finally married in March 1935, probably because bachelors in the SS,

322
00:20:17.890 –> 00:20:21.690
as in the Vacuum Oil Company, were never sure of their jobs

323
00:20:21.690 –> 00:20:24.450
and could not be promoted. Clearly

324
00:20:25.170 –> 00:20:28.930
bragging had always been one of his cardinal vices.

325
00:20:30.370 –> 00:20:33.810
While young Eichmann was doing poorly in school, his father left the tramway and

326
00:20:33.810 –> 00:20:37.530
electricity company and went into business for himself. He bought a small mining enterprise

327
00:20:37.530 –> 00:20:40.970
and put his unpromising youngster to work in it as an ordinary mining

328
00:20:40.970 –> 00:20:44.510
laborer, but only until he found him a job in the sales department of the

329
00:20:44.510 –> 00:20:48.270
Oberstresscheikken Electrobrau company, where Eichmann

330
00:20:48.270 –> 00:20:52.030
remained for over two years. He was now about 22 years old and without

331
00:20:52.030 –> 00:20:55.710
any prospects for a career. The only thing he had learned, perhaps, was

332
00:20:55.710 –> 00:20:59.550
how to sell. What then happened was what he himself called his first

333
00:20:59.550 –> 00:21:02.990
break, of which, again, we have two rather different versions.

334
00:21:03.550 –> 00:21:07.310
In a handwritten biographical record he submitted in 1939 to win a promotion in

335
00:21:07.310 –> 00:21:10.710
the SS, he described it as follows. Quote I worked during the years of

336
00:21:10.710 –> 00:21:13.770
1925 to 1927 as a salesman for the Austrian Austrian

337
00:21:13.770 –> 00:21:17.570
Electrobrau Company. I left this position of my own free will as the Vacuum

338
00:21:17.570 –> 00:21:21.290
Oil Company of Vienna offered me the representative, the representation for

339
00:21:21.290 –> 00:21:24.890
Upper Austria. The keyword here is

340
00:21:24.890 –> 00:21:28.330
offered since, according to the story he told Captain Les in Israel,

341
00:21:28.330 –> 00:21:31.810
nobody had offered him anything. His own mother had died when he was 10 years

342
00:21:31.810 –> 00:21:35.450
old and his father had married again A cousin of his stepmother, a man who

343
00:21:35.450 –> 00:21:39.170
he called uncle, who was president of the Austrian Automobile Club and

344
00:21:39.170 –> 00:21:42.910
was married to the daughter of a Jewish businessman in Czechoslovakia had used his connection

345
00:21:42.910 –> 00:21:46.470
with the general director of the Austrian vacuum oil company, a Jewish Mr. Weiss,

346
00:21:46.710 –> 00:21:48.790
to obtain for his

347
00:21:53.910 –> 00:21:57.190
tame, for his unfortunate relation a job as a traveling

348
00:21:57.190 –> 00:22:00.790
salesman. Eichmann was properly grateful.

349
00:22:01.270 –> 00:22:04.790
The Jews and his family were among his private reasons, quote

350
00:22:04.790 –> 00:22:06.950
unquote, for not hating Jews.

351
00:22:08.880 –> 00:22:12.320
Then we’re going to move on a little bit as he moved through the vacuum

352
00:22:12.320 –> 00:22:14.800
oil company and we’re going to skip ahead

353
00:22:16.000 –> 00:22:19.680
for whatever reasons. The year 1932 marked a turning point in his life.

354
00:22:19.920 –> 00:22:23.120
It was in April of this year that he joined the National Socialist Party and

355
00:22:23.120 –> 00:22:26.760
entered the SS upon an invitation of Ernst Kaltenbrunner,

356
00:22:26.760 –> 00:22:30.520
a young lawyer in Linz who later became chief of the head office for Reich

357
00:22:30.520 –> 00:22:33.520
Security, the Reichstagshire

358
00:22:33.520 –> 00:22:36.810
heisChenwat, or the RSHA as I shall call it

359
00:22:36.810 –> 00:22:40.370
henceforth. In one of those whose six main

360
00:22:40.370 –> 00:22:44.090
departments, Bureau 4, under the command of Heinrich Mueller, Eichmann

361
00:22:44.090 –> 00:22:47.610
was eventually employed as the head of section B4. In court.

362
00:22:47.610 –> 00:22:51.090
Eichmann gave the impression of a typical member of the lower middle classes. And this

363
00:22:51.090 –> 00:22:54.890
impression was more than borne out by every sentence he spoke or wrote

364
00:22:54.890 –> 00:22:58.730
while in prison. But this was misleading. He was rather de

365
00:22:58.730 –> 00:23:02.480
classe son of a solid middle class family and it

366
00:23:02.480 –> 00:23:05.880
was indicative of his come down in social status that while his father was a

367
00:23:05.880 –> 00:23:09.600
good friend of Kaltenbrunner’s father, who was also Linz lawyer, the

368
00:23:09.600 –> 00:23:12.600
relationship of the two sons was rather cool.

369
00:23:13.720 –> 00:23:16.880
Eichmann was unmistakably treated by Kaltenbrunner as his social

370
00:23:16.880 –> 00:23:20.640
inferior. Before Eichmann entered the party and the SS, he

371
00:23:20.640 –> 00:23:24.400
had proved that he was a joiner. And May 8, 1945, the official

372
00:23:24.400 –> 00:23:28.200
date of Germany’s defeat, was significant for him, mainly because it then dawned upon him

373
00:23:28.790 –> 00:23:32.230
that thenceforward he would have to live without being member of something

374
00:23:32.950 –> 00:23:36.710
or the other. I sensed that I would have

375
00:23:36.710 –> 00:23:39.990
to live a leaderless and difficult individual life.

376
00:23:40.550 –> 00:23:44.030
I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and

377
00:23:44.030 –> 00:23:47.750
commands would any longer be issued to me. No pertinent ordinances

378
00:23:47.910 –> 00:23:51.510
would be there to consult. In brief, a

379
00:23:51.510 –> 00:23:54.480
life never known before lay

380
00:23:55.120 –> 00:23:58.960
before me. One of the things that jumps out.

381
00:23:58.960 –> 00:24:02.160
To you about Eichmann and

382
00:24:02.320 –> 00:24:06.000
Arendt is their

383
00:24:07.760 –> 00:24:11.440
weird parallels. They were both from

384
00:24:11.440 –> 00:24:14.640
the same generation of Germans.

385
00:24:15.600 –> 00:24:19.440
You know, Eichmann was born in. In. In 1906,

386
00:24:20.180 –> 00:24:23.940
as was Aaron, actually. They were only separated by

387
00:24:23.940 –> 00:24:25.940
birth by only about six months.

388
00:24:27.940 –> 00:24:31.660
They both came up during the exact same time in Germany

389
00:24:31.660 –> 00:24:34.900
and yet they had fundamentally different lives.

390
00:24:35.619 –> 00:24:39.220
Hannah Arendt was raised as an

391
00:24:39.220 –> 00:24:42.420
intellectual in a Jewish

392
00:24:42.660 –> 00:24:46.180
subculture in Germany that was operating

393
00:24:47.440 –> 00:24:50.920
at its moral, philosophical and some would even say its

394
00:24:50.920 –> 00:24:54.560
theological height. There’s a quote from

395
00:24:54.560 –> 00:24:58.400
her. She said this about her upbringing quote. My early intellectual

396
00:24:58.400 –> 00:25:01.840
formation occurred in an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to

397
00:25:01.840 –> 00:25:05.440
moral questions, we were brought up under the assumption

398
00:25:05.680 –> 00:25:09.280
Das morlische verstett Schick van Scheblest.

399
00:25:09.760 –> 00:25:12.990
Moral conduct is a matter of course,

400
00:25:13.710 –> 00:25:17.230
close quote. That idea that moral

401
00:25:17.230 –> 00:25:19.950
conduct is a matter of course

402
00:25:20.510 –> 00:25:23.590
influenced how Arendt would look at her

403
00:25:23.590 –> 00:25:26.670
contemporary, her social peer,

404
00:25:28.590 –> 00:25:32.390
Adolf Eichmann, when he was eventually put

405
00:25:32.390 –> 00:25:35.710
in the dock after being kidnapped in Argentina

406
00:25:36.590 –> 00:25:40.420
by the Mossad. The

407
00:25:40.660 –> 00:25:43.780
getting of Eichmann is a whole other. A whole other

408
00:25:44.100 –> 00:25:47.900
episode. And we may cover that at some point in time in the. In the

409
00:25:47.900 –> 00:25:51.380
future. What I really want to focus on today, or we should focus on today,

410
00:25:51.380 –> 00:25:55.020
is one of the main themes, one of the main ideas in Eichmann in

411
00:25:55.020 –> 00:25:58.700
Jerusalem. And the main idea, the first main idea that really jumps out to us

412
00:25:58.700 –> 00:26:01.860
about this book is this idea of reportage.

413
00:26:03.220 –> 00:26:06.880
For those of you who maybe are too young to

414
00:26:06.880 –> 00:26:10.480
understand or experience this word, reportage is

415
00:26:10.480 –> 00:26:14.320
what individuals as diverse as Hunter Thompson, all the way

416
00:26:14.320 –> 00:26:17.640
to Joan Didion and of course James Baldwin and Hannah

417
00:26:17.640 –> 00:26:21.440
Arendt engaged in in the middle part of the 20th century

418
00:26:21.520 –> 00:26:25.120
in America. 20th century journalism in

419
00:26:25.120 –> 00:26:28.800
America, from Walt Duranty all the way to the

420
00:26:28.800 –> 00:26:32.630
folks who brought us the Pentagon Papers, used to be about

421
00:26:32.790 –> 00:26:36.630
investigative journalism. Now investigative

422
00:26:36.630 –> 00:26:40.470
journalism, the kind that we no longer have, even though we

423
00:26:40.470 –> 00:26:43.910
have the Internet, that journalism was deep,

424
00:26:44.070 –> 00:26:47.790
well researched, and journalists went out and sought

425
00:26:47.790 –> 00:26:51.510
to understand the nature of the situation that they were

426
00:26:51.510 –> 00:26:55.190
investigating in order to report on that situation back to the

427
00:26:55.190 –> 00:26:58.390
public. Investigative journalist reports were long,

428
00:26:58.550 –> 00:27:01.810
detailed and in depth. But then there’s

429
00:27:01.810 –> 00:27:05.650
reportage. And reportage was different. Reportage was where

430
00:27:05.970 –> 00:27:09.610
the, the reporter or

431
00:27:09.610 –> 00:27:13.410
the writer, usually a person with some writing

432
00:27:13.410 –> 00:27:16.730
chops, usually a person of some fame, maybe a

433
00:27:16.730 –> 00:27:20.290
novelist or even a political theorist like Arendt,

434
00:27:20.930 –> 00:27:24.290
would be invited by a journalist

435
00:27:24.290 –> 00:27:27.010
organization to turn their,

436
00:27:28.580 –> 00:27:32.020
their skills in novel writing, their skills in essay writing,

437
00:27:32.580 –> 00:27:36.100
their proven skills in political theorizing to

438
00:27:36.100 –> 00:27:39.940
a particular topic that a pure journalist maybe wouldn’t be

439
00:27:39.940 –> 00:27:43.260
able to handle. And this is what Hannah Arendt was engaged in. She was engaged

440
00:27:43.260 –> 00:27:46.900
in reportage around the Adolf Eichmann trial.

441
00:27:47.780 –> 00:27:51.500
She was sent by the New Yorker in 1961 to cover the

442
00:27:51.500 –> 00:27:55.260
Eichmann trial. And of course, her original reporting was published in

443
00:27:55.260 –> 00:27:58.838
the New Yorker in the 1960s,

444
00:27:59.108 –> 00:28:02.840
1962, 1963, that is

445
00:28:02.840 –> 00:28:05.680
when about when her reporting, her reporting came out.

446
00:28:07.600 –> 00:28:11.280
Now the thing you got to understand about Hannah Aaron, the thing that influenced

447
00:28:11.280 –> 00:28:15.040
her reportage and influenced how she developed

448
00:28:15.040 –> 00:28:18.640
her reporting around Eichmann’s trial, was that

449
00:28:18.640 –> 00:28:21.760
she never saw herself As a political leftist,

450
00:28:22.640 –> 00:28:25.840
she also never saw herself as politically Jewish.

451
00:28:26.550 –> 00:28:30.390
She instead saw herself primarily as an individual going to

452
00:28:30.390 –> 00:28:33.110
report on an event that had happened to.

453
00:28:34.310 –> 00:28:37.590
To another. Another individual, and

454
00:28:37.910 –> 00:28:41.750
she and a group of individuals. And being set apart

455
00:28:41.750 –> 00:28:44.950
from the atrocities

456
00:28:45.350 –> 00:28:48.710
of World War II, she was able to

457
00:28:48.870 –> 00:28:52.140
prioritize political oversight, social

458
00:28:52.380 –> 00:28:55.580
questions. This consistent

459
00:28:55.580 –> 00:28:59.300
prioritization of the political over the social was one of the

460
00:28:59.300 –> 00:29:03.060
many, particularly in her reportage, in her books and even in

461
00:29:03.060 –> 00:29:06.660
her political essays and philosophies, was one of the things that

462
00:29:06.660 –> 00:29:09.700
consistently got her into trouble and generated

463
00:29:09.700 –> 00:29:13.380
controversy around her all the way from her first book, the

464
00:29:13.380 –> 00:29:16.620
Origins of Totalitarianism, all the way to

465
00:29:17.420 –> 00:29:19.260
Eichmann in Jerusalem.

466
00:29:23.270 –> 00:29:25.990
Because of the nature of how Aaron

467
00:29:26.390 –> 00:29:29.990
interpreted her own existence. She

468
00:29:29.990 –> 00:29:33.710
was. She was. She was deeply

469
00:29:33.710 –> 00:29:37.310
interested in the surroundings of the trial of

470
00:29:37.310 –> 00:29:41.030
Adolf Eichmann. And she attempted in her reportage to

471
00:29:41.030 –> 00:29:44.470
explain how ordinary people, and this is one of her core ideas,

472
00:29:44.710 –> 00:29:48.470
became actors in totalitarian systems. This

473
00:29:48.470 –> 00:29:51.710
was considered by some to be an apologia. And

474
00:29:52.030 –> 00:29:55.390
this was where the phrase was coined, the banality

475
00:29:55.630 –> 00:29:59.150
of evil. Arendt,

476
00:29:59.150 –> 00:30:02.870
quite frankly, when she went and saw Eichmann in the

477
00:30:02.870 –> 00:30:06.630
dock, was shocked by how normal looking a

478
00:30:06.630 –> 00:30:10.190
bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann was. Yes,

479
00:30:10.190 –> 00:30:13.510
Arendt was locked up by the Gestapo. And yes, she first heard about

480
00:30:13.510 –> 00:30:17.350
Auschwitz living in America as a refugee in

481
00:30:17.350 –> 00:30:21.030
1943 and was stunned by

482
00:30:21.030 –> 00:30:24.750
the fact of Auschwitz. Yes, she helped

483
00:30:24.750 –> 00:30:27.870
many organizations establish

484
00:30:28.670 –> 00:30:32.270
and resettle Jewish refugees in the State of Israel.

485
00:30:32.910 –> 00:30:36.350
No, she did not think of herself as a Zionist

486
00:30:36.430 –> 00:30:40.270
per se, but she did think of herself as someone who supported

487
00:30:40.270 –> 00:30:43.260
the Jewish people and as an individual Jew,

488
00:30:43.820 –> 00:30:47.540
not as a representative of humanity, not as a representative

489
00:30:47.540 –> 00:30:51.300
of the German state, but as a representative of the

490
00:30:51.300 –> 00:30:54.580
Jewish people. And she was still

491
00:30:54.580 –> 00:30:58.380
shocked by how normal a bureaucrat Eichmann

492
00:30:58.380 –> 00:31:02.060
was in the dock. He was not, much to her

493
00:31:02.060 –> 00:31:05.780
surprise, a slavering monster. Nor was he

494
00:31:05.780 –> 00:31:09.630
a cold, calculating sociopath like Goebbels or even

495
00:31:09.790 –> 00:31:13.630
Heinrich Himmler. He was fundamentally,

496
00:31:14.430 –> 00:31:17.750
and this is the. Thing that we all still struggle with and this is why

497
00:31:17.750 –> 00:31:21.510
we will be. Reading the Banality of Evil probably for the remainder of

498
00:31:21.510 –> 00:31:24.910
this century. He was fundamentally a

499
00:31:24.910 –> 00:31:28.350
nobody from nowhere.

500
00:31:29.150 –> 00:31:32.910
Back to the book. Back to Eichmann in

501
00:31:32.910 –> 00:31:36.470
Jerusalem, a report on the Banality

502
00:31:36.710 –> 00:31:40.550
of Evil. And I pick up here from the

503
00:31:40.550 –> 00:31:44.350
postscript and I quote, there

504
00:31:44.350 –> 00:31:48.190
is, of course, no doubt the defendant and the nature of his acts as

505
00:31:48.190 –> 00:31:52.030
well as the trial itself raised problems of a general nature which go far

506
00:31:52.030 –> 00:31:55.830
beyond the matters considered in Jerusalem. I have attempted to

507
00:31:55.830 –> 00:31:59.390
go into some of the Problems in the epilogue, which ceases to be simple

508
00:31:59.390 –> 00:32:02.580
reporting. I would not have been surprised if people had found my treatment

509
00:32:02.580 –> 00:32:06.100
inadequate. And I would have welcomed a discussion of the general

510
00:32:06.100 –> 00:32:09.900
significance of the entire body of facts, which could have been all the

511
00:32:09.900 –> 00:32:13.140
more meaningful the more directly it referred to the concrete events.

512
00:32:13.780 –> 00:32:17.340
I also can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the

513
00:32:17.340 –> 00:32:20.860
subtitle of the book. For when I speak of the banality of

514
00:32:20.860 –> 00:32:24.340
evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level,

515
00:32:25.300 –> 00:32:28.460
pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.

516
00:32:29.420 –> 00:32:33.260
Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing

517
00:32:33.260 –> 00:32:36.700
would have been farther from his mind than to determine, with

518
00:32:36.860 –> 00:32:39.900
Richard iii, quote, unquote, to prove a villain.

519
00:32:40.940 –> 00:32:44.340
Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal

520
00:32:44.340 –> 00:32:48.100
advancement, he had no motives at all. And

521
00:32:48.100 –> 00:32:51.900
this diligence in itself was in no way criminal. He certainly would never have murdered

522
00:32:51.900 –> 00:32:55.610
his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the

523
00:32:55.610 –> 00:32:58.610
matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.

524
00:33:00.370 –> 00:33:04.210
It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months

525
00:33:04.210 –> 00:33:07.650
on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation,

526
00:33:07.970 –> 00:33:11.650
pouring out to his heart the man, or pouring

527
00:33:11.650 –> 00:33:15.210
out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that

528
00:33:15.210 –> 00:33:18.860
he reached only the rank of Lieutenant colonel in the ss and that it had

529
00:33:18.860 –> 00:33:21.340
not been his fault that he was not promoted

530
00:33:22.460 –> 00:33:25.540
in principle. He knew quite well what it was all about. And in his final

531
00:33:25.540 –> 00:33:29.260
statement to the court he spoke of the reevaluation of the values

532
00:33:29.260 –> 00:33:32.620
prescribed by the Nazi government. He was not

533
00:33:32.620 –> 00:33:35.660
stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness,

534
00:33:36.300 –> 00:33:40.100
something by no means identical with stupidity, that predisposed

535
00:33:40.100 –> 00:33:43.420
him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is

536
00:33:43.990 –> 00:33:47.790
banal and even funny, if with the best will in the

537
00:33:47.790 –> 00:33:51.070
world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from

538
00:33:51.070 –> 00:33:54.710
Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.

539
00:33:55.750 –> 00:33:59.390
It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and moreover standing

540
00:33:59.390 –> 00:34:02.750
beneath the gallows should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard

541
00:34:02.750 –> 00:34:06.590
at funerals all his life, and that these lofty words should completely

542
00:34:06.590 –> 00:34:10.280
be cloud the reality of his own death. That such remoteness from

543
00:34:10.280 –> 00:34:13.840
reality and such thoughtlessness can wreck more havoc than all the evil instincts

544
00:34:13.840 –> 00:34:17.680
taken together which perhaps are inherent in man. That was, in

545
00:34:17.680 –> 00:34:21.520
fact the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it

546
00:34:21.520 –> 00:34:24.880
was a lesson neither an explanation of the phenomenon

547
00:34:25.360 –> 00:34:27.360
nor a theory about it,

548
00:34:29.200 –> 00:34:33.040
seemingly more complicated, but in reality far simpler than examining the

549
00:34:33.040 –> 00:34:36.890
strange interdependence of thoughtlessness. And evil is the question of what kind

550
00:34:36.890 –> 00:34:40.010
of crime is actually involved here. A crime, moreover, which all agree is

551
00:34:40.010 –> 00:34:43.850
unprecedented. For the concept of genocide, introduced explicitly

552
00:34:43.850 –> 00:34:47.370
to cover a crime unknown before, although applicable up to a point, is not fully

553
00:34:47.370 –> 00:34:50.890
adequate for the simple reason that massacres of whole peoples are not

554
00:34:50.890 –> 00:34:54.450
unprecedented. They were the order of the day in antiquity.

555
00:34:54.690 –> 00:34:58.530
And the centuries of colonialization, imperialism provide plenty of examples of

556
00:34:58.530 –> 00:35:01.900
more or less successful attempts of that sort of sort. The

557
00:35:01.900 –> 00:35:05.100
expression administrative massacre seems better to fill the bill.

558
00:35:05.900 –> 00:35:09.660
The term arose in connection with British imperialism. The English deliberately

559
00:35:09.660 –> 00:35:12.700
rejected such procedures as a means of maintaining their rule over India.

560
00:35:13.900 –> 00:35:17.620
The phrase has the virtue of dispelling the prejudice that such monstrous acts can

561
00:35:17.620 –> 00:35:21.020
be committed only against foreign nation or a different

562
00:35:21.020 –> 00:35:24.700
race. There is the well known fact that Hitler began his mass

563
00:35:24.700 –> 00:35:28.510
murders by granting mercy deaths to the quote, unquote incurably ill,

564
00:35:28.590 –> 00:35:32.110
and that he intended to wind up his extermination program by doing away with, quote

565
00:35:32.110 –> 00:35:35.950
unquote, genetically damaged Germans heart and lung patients to start.

566
00:35:37.070 –> 00:35:40.230
But quite aside from that, it is apparent that this sort of killing can be

567
00:35:40.230 –> 00:35:44.070
directed against any given group, that is that the principle of selection

568
00:35:44.070 –> 00:35:47.550
is dependent only upon circumstantial factors. It is quite

569
00:35:47.550 –> 00:35:51.310
conceivable that in the automated economy of the not too distant future,

570
00:35:52.200 –> 00:35:56.040
men may be tempted to exterminate all those whose intelligence

571
00:35:56.040 –> 00:35:58.680
quotient is below a certain level.

572
00:36:00.760 –> 00:36:04.560
In Jerusalem, this matter was inadequately discussed because it is actually very difficult

573
00:36:04.560 –> 00:36:08.239
to grasp jurisdictiously. We heard the

574
00:36:08.239 –> 00:36:11.720
protestations of the defense at Eichmann was, after all, only a tiny cog in the

575
00:36:11.720 –> 00:36:15.560
machinery of the Final Solution and of the prosecution, which believed it had

576
00:36:15.560 –> 00:36:19.290
discovered in Eichmann the actual motor. I myself attributed

577
00:36:19.290 –> 00:36:22.610
no more importance to both theories than did the Jerusalem court, since the whole cog

578
00:36:22.610 –> 00:36:26.370
theory is legally pointless, and therefore it does not matter at all what order

579
00:36:26.370 –> 00:36:30.090
of magnitude is assigned to the cog named Eichmann. In its

580
00:36:30.090 –> 00:36:33.650
judgment, the court naturally conceded that such a crime could be committed only by a

581
00:36:33.650 –> 00:36:37.490
giant bureaucracy using the resources of government. But insofar as

582
00:36:37.490 –> 00:36:40.610
it remains a crime, and that, of course, is the premise of for a trial,

583
00:36:40.850 –> 00:36:44.650
all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court

584
00:36:44.650 –> 00:36:48.350
forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to

585
00:36:48.350 –> 00:36:52.150
say, into human beings. If the defendant

586
00:36:52.150 –> 00:36:55.270
excuses himself on the ground that he acted not as a man, but as a

587
00:36:55.270 –> 00:36:58.550
mere functionary whose functions could just as easily have been carried out by anyone else,

588
00:36:58.710 –> 00:37:02.550
it is as if a criminal pointed to the statistics on crime which set

589
00:37:02.550 –> 00:37:06.270
forth that so and so Many crimes per day are committed in such and

590
00:37:06.270 –> 00:37:09.830
such place, and declared that he only did what was

591
00:37:09.830 –> 00:37:13.590
statistically expected, that it was mere accident

592
00:37:13.590 –> 00:37:17.120
that he did it and not somebody else, since, after all,

593
00:37:18.560 –> 00:37:22.240
somebody had to do it. Of course,

594
00:37:23.200 –> 00:37:27.000
it is important to point, it is important to the political and

595
00:37:27.000 –> 00:37:30.840
social sciences that the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps

596
00:37:30.840 –> 00:37:34.480
the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries

597
00:37:34.480 –> 00:37:38.240
and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus

598
00:37:38.240 –> 00:37:42.030
to dehumanize them. And one could debate long

599
00:37:42.030 –> 00:37:45.870
and profitably on the rule of nobody, which is

600
00:37:45.870 –> 00:37:49.670
what the political form known as bureaucracy

601
00:37:50.710 –> 00:37:52.630
truly is.

602
00:37:55.110 –> 00:37:58.550
So we will cover that idea of the rule of

603
00:37:58.550 –> 00:38:01.670
nobody from nowhere and tie it into

604
00:38:03.350 –> 00:38:07.120
the upcoming rule, at least in the west, of

605
00:38:07.120 –> 00:38:10.200
all of us, by the wonderful

606
00:38:10.200 –> 00:38:13.920
vicissitudes of large language model

607
00:38:13.920 –> 00:38:17.600
algorithms in our next episode, where we will talk

608
00:38:17.600 –> 00:38:21.440
with Tom Libby and Harvey Seifer

609
00:38:22.000 –> 00:38:25.800
about the banality of

610
00:38:25.800 –> 00:38:29.280
evil. But just to introduce,

611
00:38:29.440 –> 00:38:33.240
Just to keep with the theme of this particular episode, where we’re really focusing on

612
00:38:33.240 –> 00:38:35.940
introducing the themes of the book,

613
00:38:37.460 –> 00:38:41.220
I think the larger idea here, the larger

614
00:38:41.220 –> 00:38:44.300
leadership lessons that we can take from Eichmann in

615
00:38:44.300 –> 00:38:46.100
Jerusalem, are these.

616
00:38:48.260 –> 00:38:51.860
So if we look at Hannah Aaron,

617
00:38:51.860 –> 00:38:54.940
right, if we look at her as a writer, we look at her as a

618
00:38:54.940 –> 00:38:58.580
political theorist. If we look at her as a woman,

619
00:38:59.300 –> 00:39:03.100
probably she would not describe herself as a feminist. She never used that

620
00:39:03.100 –> 00:39:06.620
language. She probably thought it was mostly ridiculous

621
00:39:06.700 –> 00:39:10.140
because she had never been withheld, at least not in her

622
00:39:10.140 –> 00:39:12.780
estimation, ever been withheld, or been.

623
00:39:13.820 –> 00:39:17.660
Or been pushed back or not been allowed to enter any place where a man

624
00:39:17.660 –> 00:39:21.340
was allowed to enter. Much like Zora Neale Hurston

625
00:39:22.140 –> 00:39:25.500
before her, she probably would have looked askance

626
00:39:25.820 –> 00:39:27.580
at being called a feminist.

627
00:39:29.910 –> 00:39:33.510
But if you look at Hannah Arendt’s work and you look at

628
00:39:34.950 –> 00:39:38.590
her, particularly her reportage here on Eichmann, on the

629
00:39:38.590 –> 00:39:42.390
Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the last trial

630
00:39:42.710 –> 00:39:46.310
of Nuremberg, Hannah Arendt was consumed

631
00:39:47.190 –> 00:39:50.710
by thinking and writing about the threats to human freedom

632
00:39:51.110 –> 00:39:54.960
presented by scientific abstraction and bourgeois

633
00:39:55.200 –> 00:39:59.000
morality. Intellectually, she was an

634
00:39:59.000 –> 00:40:02.560
independent thinker, a loner, and not a joiner, separating

635
00:40:02.560 –> 00:40:06.040
herself from schools of thought and even attempting. To separate herself from

636
00:40:06.040 –> 00:40:09.440
ideology. What this means is,

637
00:40:10.480 –> 00:40:13.640
while it made her unique when the New Yorker called her up in

638
00:40:13.640 –> 00:40:17.360
1961 and probably correctly sent

639
00:40:17.360 –> 00:40:21.160
her to Jerusalem, it also virtually guaranteed that there was

640
00:40:21.160 –> 00:40:24.740
going to be a controversial controversy of some kind, based on

641
00:40:24.740 –> 00:40:27.940
some conclusion that she were to draw from

642
00:40:28.580 –> 00:40:32.420
staring at Eichmann finally as. Again, as a

643
00:40:32.420 –> 00:40:36.140
person who had been arrested by the Gestapo, finally staring at

644
00:40:36.140 –> 00:40:37.780
Eichmann in the face.

645
00:40:39.940 –> 00:40:43.460
And this is the thing that we don’t

646
00:40:43.860 –> 00:40:47.700
get right. We particularly don’t get

647
00:40:47.700 –> 00:40:51.250
it. 80 years away from the horrors of World War

648
00:40:51.250 –> 00:40:54.290
II. What is it like to actually

649
00:40:54.930 –> 00:40:57.970
look at your perpetrator?

650
00:40:59.010 –> 00:41:02.690
Not of a small crime, not of a robbery or murder.

651
00:41:02.690 –> 00:41:06.530
And I don’t want to minimize those crimes because they do impact people. But

652
00:41:07.010 –> 00:41:09.650
when we’re talking about state level criminality,

653
00:41:11.250 –> 00:41:14.620
those crimes are minimal. What is it like

654
00:41:15.500 –> 00:41:19.140
to stand in the dock and stare at this

655
00:41:19.140 –> 00:41:22.140
person and realize

656
00:41:23.980 –> 00:41:25.740
that they’re just another human being,

657
00:41:27.820 –> 00:41:31.420
they aren’t Satan himself. And

658
00:41:31.420 –> 00:41:34.660
yes, in your mind you might have built them up and they’ll do until Satan

659
00:41:34.660 –> 00:41:38.340
gets here. But then Satan turns

660
00:41:38.340 –> 00:41:41.640
out to be just a little ruffled

661
00:41:42.040 –> 00:41:45.800
man. And not just any kind of little ruffled man,

662
00:41:45.880 –> 00:41:48.360
a little ruffled thoughtless man.

663
00:41:49.800 –> 00:41:53.320
This was Eichmann’s true crime. He was not a critical thinker.

664
00:41:54.120 –> 00:41:57.960
He was eager to conform and eager to comply with little

665
00:41:57.960 –> 00:42:00.920
thought to rebellion and little consideration

666
00:42:01.560 –> 00:42:05.240
of the knock on effects of his actions. Not only

667
00:42:05.240 –> 00:42:08.980
did he not want to think think, not only was he lacking

668
00:42:08.980 –> 00:42:11.340
curiosity about himself,

669
00:42:12.940 –> 00:42:15.260
he was unable to think.

670
00:42:16.540 –> 00:42:20.140
He had no theory of mind,

671
00:42:21.260 –> 00:42:25.020
not just theory of mind about other people, but theory of

672
00:42:25.020 –> 00:42:26.380
mind about himself.

673
00:42:29.180 –> 00:42:32.620
This of course does not obviate his responsibility

674
00:42:33.560 –> 00:42:36.760
or his accountability for the actions he took.

675
00:42:37.560 –> 00:42:41.240
This is one of the unique features of being human beings, right?

676
00:42:41.560 –> 00:42:44.920
We expect other human beings to be accountable

677
00:42:45.320 –> 00:42:48.840
and accept consequences for the actions they take. Which is why

678
00:42:48.840 –> 00:42:52.440
AI is going to be so horrific by the way,

679
00:42:52.840 –> 00:42:56.640
if we truly do let the genie all the way

680
00:42:56.640 –> 00:43:00.260
out of the bottle and begin to allow it to make decisions

681
00:43:00.340 –> 00:43:04.180
for us. Because there will be an appeal to

682
00:43:04.180 –> 00:43:07.940
nobody from nowhere. LLMs don’t

683
00:43:07.940 –> 00:43:11.700
have a mind. They have no theory of mind. Thus we do not expect them

684
00:43:11.700 –> 00:43:15.379
to accept consequences for their actions. Thus any actions

685
00:43:15.379 –> 00:43:19.220
that they quote, unquote take from their quote, unquote decision making will just

686
00:43:19.220 –> 00:43:22.580
be called natural.

687
00:43:24.020 –> 00:43:27.170
Just like we don’t expect the wind or the

688
00:43:27.170 –> 00:43:30.770
hurricane or the tornado or the storm

689
00:43:31.170 –> 00:43:34.930
to pay out the insurance. When it destroys

690
00:43:34.930 –> 00:43:38.530
your house, your property or kills your family.

691
00:43:39.570 –> 00:43:43.010
We just say it was an act of God and move on.

692
00:43:44.130 –> 00:43:47.650
But Eichmann was not God, by the way.

693
00:43:48.050 –> 00:43:51.250
Eichmann was not God in the way that Stalin was not God.

694
00:43:51.970 –> 00:43:55.570
Hitler was not God. Goebbels was

695
00:43:55.570 –> 00:43:58.930
not God. Mao was not God.

696
00:43:59.250 –> 00:44:03.050
Pol Pot was not God. The members of the Khmer

697
00:44:03.050 –> 00:44:06.570
Rouge were not God. Saddam

698
00:44:06.570 –> 00:44:09.690
Hussein was not God. And the

699
00:44:09.690 –> 00:44:13.410
Ayatollahs in Iran, no matter how religious

700
00:44:13.410 –> 00:44:16.530
sounding the name Ayatollah is are not

701
00:44:17.260 –> 00:44:17.660
God.

702
00:44:22.060 –> 00:44:25.420
Thus they cannot commit acts of

703
00:44:25.580 –> 00:44:26.060
God.

704
00:44:29.900 –> 00:44:33.620
Eichmann should unsettle us as leaders. His presence in the

705
00:44:33.620 –> 00:44:37.260
world should unsettle us as leaders, particularly if we merely

706
00:44:37.260 –> 00:44:40.660
favor uncritical action from our leaders and from

707
00:44:40.660 –> 00:44:44.510
ourselves. If we merely want people to just do things and get stuff

708
00:44:44.510 –> 00:44:47.990
done. He was, as

709
00:44:48.550 –> 00:44:52.070
Arendt wrote, terribly and terrifyingly

710
00:44:52.390 –> 00:44:53.030
normal.

711
00:44:55.910 –> 00:44:59.750
Arendt examined the question of whether evil is radical or

712
00:44:59.750 –> 00:45:03.510
simply a function of thoughtlessness. A tendency of ordinary people to

713
00:45:03.510 –> 00:45:07.190
obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a

714
00:45:07.190 –> 00:45:10.570
critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions. And

715
00:45:10.880 –> 00:45:14.600
there’s a tie in here to both 1984 and to

716
00:45:14.600 –> 00:45:18.200
animal Farm, which we will be covering here on the

717
00:45:18.200 –> 00:45:20.160
show coming up shortly.

718
00:45:21.840 –> 00:45:25.200
Why is it that certain people just can’t

719
00:45:25.200 –> 00:45:29.040
critically think? They can’t critically walk through

720
00:45:29.280 –> 00:45:32.960
what’s happening. They can’t critically question motives

721
00:45:32.960 –> 00:45:36.160
or have empathy for others.

722
00:45:41.580 –> 00:45:45.100
Eichmann shrouded his actions in bureaucratic

723
00:45:45.100 –> 00:45:48.620
morality, and he, and even Aaron

724
00:45:48.620 –> 00:45:51.900
noted this. Spouted mindless cliches.

725
00:45:52.780 –> 00:45:56.180
He was smooth brained in his approach to

726
00:45:56.180 –> 00:45:59.700
critical thinking. He was about as sharp as a

727
00:45:59.700 –> 00:46:03.460
marble or bowling ball. He

728
00:46:03.460 –> 00:46:07.180
was the ultimate example. His. His bureaucratic morality and mindless

729
00:46:07.420 –> 00:46:10.620
cliches were the ultimate example of what

730
00:46:10.620 –> 00:46:14.380
Winston, the character Winston, becomes at the close of

731
00:46:14.380 –> 00:46:17.979
the story or the book, the novel 1984 by George

732
00:46:17.979 –> 00:46:21.740
Orwell. He was a compliant automaton,

733
00:46:22.060 –> 00:46:25.700
spouting newspeak or Hitlerisms, whatever you want to call

734
00:46:25.700 –> 00:46:28.880
it, and desperately seeking to be understood, understood

735
00:46:29.760 –> 00:46:33.200
and of course, given grace that he does not deserve

736
00:46:33.840 –> 00:46:37.680
when caught. Leaders.

737
00:46:38.080 –> 00:46:41.040
There’s some lessons here, some cautions and some

738
00:46:41.440 –> 00:46:44.800
massive red flags that you should be paying attention to,

739
00:46:46.480 –> 00:46:50.000
particularly as you hire people, as you fire people,

740
00:46:50.400 –> 00:46:54.040
and even as you promote people, most especially,

741
00:46:54.190 –> 00:46:57.230
especially as you promote people, in particular

742
00:46:58.190 –> 00:47:01.710
in bureaucratic agencies where

743
00:47:01.790 –> 00:47:05.550
thoughtlessly filling out the box and being compliant

744
00:47:05.550 –> 00:47:09.110
and not rocking the boat is more

745
00:47:09.110 –> 00:47:12.910
important than actually engaging

746
00:47:13.790 –> 00:47:16.750
with reality, with

747
00:47:17.230 –> 00:47:17.870
courage.

748
00:47:21.800 –> 00:47:25.520
So by reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, what problem are we seeking

749
00:47:25.520 –> 00:47:29.160
to solve as leaders? What problem that is

750
00:47:29.160 –> 00:47:32.880
bedeviling us? Are we seeking to use this book as a resource, as a

751
00:47:32.880 –> 00:47:35.880
guide, as a map to the territory,

752
00:47:36.840 –> 00:47:40.360
to be able to help us figure out what actions to take,

753
00:47:41.880 –> 00:47:45.720
what posture to take, or even what mindset to have

754
00:47:46.570 –> 00:47:50.210
when we’re approaching not only leadership but also other

755
00:47:50.210 –> 00:47:53.450
aspects of our lives? What problem

756
00:47:53.850 –> 00:47:57.650
are we looking to Eichmann in Jerusalem, a report on the

757
00:47:57.650 –> 00:47:59.370
banality of evil to solve?

758
00:48:01.290 –> 00:48:04.930
Well, I think the biggest problem that we are looking for this

759
00:48:04.930 –> 00:48:07.850
book to solve is the problem of never forgetting.

760
00:48:10.170 –> 00:48:13.980
We are, as I have said repeatedly during this episode today,

761
00:48:13.980 –> 00:48:17.660
we are currently in 2025. And of

762
00:48:17.660 –> 00:48:21.340
course, because this is a podcast and it’s audio, and it will live on the

763
00:48:21.340 –> 00:48:24.900
Internet until I take it down, or in perpetuity,

764
00:48:24.900 –> 00:48:28.340
whichever comes first, at some point in the future,

765
00:48:28.900 –> 00:48:32.620
someone will hear this, and you will

766
00:48:32.620 –> 00:48:36.140
be able to count the years, the decades,

767
00:48:36.140 –> 00:48:39.870
and maybe even, dare I say, the centuries

768
00:48:40.110 –> 00:48:43.790
after World War II. And as the decades have

769
00:48:43.790 –> 00:48:47.630
rolled by, as the decades have increased, from staring at the horrors

770
00:48:47.630 –> 00:48:51.390
of the concentration camps or the firebombing of Dresden

771
00:48:52.510 –> 00:48:55.870
or the firebombing of Tokyo, or even

772
00:48:56.750 –> 00:49:00.430
the nuclear holocaust at

773
00:49:01.710 –> 00:49:03.870
Nagasaki and Hiroshima,

774
00:49:05.430 –> 00:49:09.230
as we have moved far away from that, as it

775
00:49:09.230 –> 00:49:12.910
fades into historical memory, as the people

776
00:49:12.910 –> 00:49:16.550
who actually fought it have now all

777
00:49:16.550 –> 00:49:20.030
died and only their voices recorded and otherwise

778
00:49:20.030 –> 00:49:22.070
remain. And soon those will fade.

779
00:49:23.750 –> 00:49:27.470
We have a new generation of people in the world who

780
00:49:27.470 –> 00:49:30.990
have, and I don’t think we estimate this

781
00:49:30.990 –> 00:49:34.430
correctly, who do not have one iota of

782
00:49:34.430 –> 00:49:37.630
emotional connection to any of these

783
00:49:37.870 –> 00:49:41.590
events. Just like there

784
00:49:41.590 –> 00:49:45.350
are people who are being born now who have not one iota

785
00:49:45.350 –> 00:49:48.910
of emotional connection to the events of September 11,

786
00:49:50.990 –> 00:49:53.310
one iota of emotional connection

787
00:49:54.750 –> 00:49:57.540
to the events of

788
00:49:58.260 –> 00:50:01.700
1989 at Tiananmen Square, not one

789
00:50:01.700 –> 00:50:05.500
iota of emotional connection to the

790
00:50:05.500 –> 00:50:09.060
events of the Iraq wars or the Afghanistan

791
00:50:09.060 –> 00:50:12.620
wars. There are people being born

792
00:50:12.620 –> 00:50:16.460
right now and living right

793
00:50:16.460 –> 00:50:20.300
now who will view all of this and listen to all of this

794
00:50:20.300 –> 00:50:24.000
as mere history and wonder what

795
00:50:24.000 –> 00:50:25.880
all the trouble was.

796
00:50:28.760 –> 00:50:32.160
Never forget is the motto around the Holocaust. But never

797
00:50:32.160 –> 00:50:35.480
forgetting, like I said, means sometimes not remembering correctly.

798
00:50:37.000 –> 00:50:40.600
And the past was just as complicated and just as

799
00:50:40.600 –> 00:50:44.360
multifaceted as the present is. With just as many human

800
00:50:44.360 –> 00:50:48.190
foibles, sins, and problems we experience

801
00:50:48.270 –> 00:50:52.070
in the current age, the

802
00:50:52.070 –> 00:50:55.550
individual will always have trouble critiquing the

803
00:50:55.550 –> 00:50:59.070
society, whether that

804
00:50:59.070 –> 00:51:02.350
society is the society of the 1930s in Germany,

805
00:51:02.750 –> 00:51:06.550
the 1970s in America, or the

806
00:51:06.550 –> 00:51:09.070
two or the 2000s. Globally.

807
00:51:11.470 –> 00:51:14.610
Courage has always been in short supply. Apply

808
00:51:16.930 –> 00:51:20.570
the challenge represented by the outcome of both the Nuremberg trials and

809
00:51:20.570 –> 00:51:24.130
the trial of Adolf Eichmann. And this is the big

810
00:51:24.850 –> 00:51:28.410
challenge, by the way. The big challenge is that secular

811
00:51:28.410 –> 00:51:32.130
human justice is no replacement for our deep need,

812
00:51:32.370 –> 00:51:36.170
our deep human need for some type, some

813
00:51:36.170 –> 00:51:39.250
method, some way of cosmically

814
00:51:39.250 –> 00:51:42.990
reassembling the universe and

815
00:51:43.310 –> 00:51:46.870
inserting back to it what is right and what is

816
00:51:46.870 –> 00:51:50.270
just. This is why, ever since

817
00:51:50.270 –> 00:51:53.950
2010, the calls from the social justice warriors,

818
00:51:55.150 –> 00:51:58.590
the changing of speech, the altering

819
00:51:58.750 –> 00:52:02.110
of the social contract between people in

820
00:52:02.110 –> 00:52:05.830
America and between groups of people in America

821
00:52:05.830 –> 00:52:08.690
has been so far fraught with

822
00:52:09.570 –> 00:52:13.290
problems. We actually don’t have a good conception

823
00:52:13.290 –> 00:52:16.730
of what justice means, particularly if we don’t have

824
00:52:16.730 –> 00:52:20.290
religious language to describe it. If we don’t have the

825
00:52:20.290 –> 00:52:24.050
correct language, we can’t actually describe what we want.

826
00:52:24.930 –> 00:52:28.290
And secular humanism at a philosophical level

827
00:52:29.090 –> 00:52:31.410
only partially slakes our thirst.

828
00:52:32.860 –> 00:52:36.380
Secular human justice doesn’t have room for forgiveness

829
00:52:36.940 –> 00:52:40.620
or restoration, bringing people back together in

830
00:52:40.620 –> 00:52:44.140
community. It only has room for

831
00:52:44.140 –> 00:52:47.540
judging based on facts, making a

832
00:52:47.540 –> 00:52:51.220
determination based on the facts at hand, and

833
00:52:51.220 –> 00:52:54.900
then rendering a punishment and then calling

834
00:52:54.900 –> 00:52:55.820
that justice.

835
00:53:01.030 –> 00:53:04.790
In the west, as we round up towards 80

836
00:53:04.790 –> 00:53:08.390
plus years since the horrors of the Holocaust were thrust upon

837
00:53:08.390 –> 00:53:11.910
us, and we round up on 90 plus years past

838
00:53:11.910 –> 00:53:15.510
pogroms, gulags and the secret police of communism,

839
00:53:17.350 –> 00:53:21.110
we realize, I think, or we are going to have to teach

840
00:53:21.110 –> 00:53:23.590
a new generation of people to realize that

841
00:53:25.080 –> 00:53:27.320
all of these methods, all of these,

842
00:53:28.600 –> 00:53:32.400
these tools are merely, not merely, but they

843
00:53:32.400 –> 00:53:36.000
are somewhat politics just taken

844
00:53:36.000 –> 00:53:39.839
up by other means. With

845
00:53:39.839 –> 00:53:43.400
the distance that we have of approaching a century

846
00:53:43.560 –> 00:53:47.200
from the original events that set us on this

847
00:53:47.200 –> 00:53:50.590
path, antisemitism is on the rise. And that’s to

848
00:53:50.660 –> 00:53:53.700
disturbing. As well as an increasing in

849
00:53:53.700 –> 00:53:57.380
leveraging of bureaucratic morality and

850
00:53:57.380 –> 00:54:00.660
mindless cliches in order to justify

851
00:54:00.900 –> 00:54:04.660
state violence. And by the way, this is not a critique of the

852
00:54:04.660 –> 00:54:07.980
left from the right or a critique of the right from the left. This is

853
00:54:07.980 –> 00:54:10.820
a critique of human beings

854
00:54:11.860 –> 00:54:13.540
using these tools

855
00:54:16.270 –> 00:54:18.750
in order to engage in politics,

856
00:54:19.950 –> 00:54:22.350
in order to accomplish political ends.

857
00:54:23.630 –> 00:54:27.270
It’s almost like giving a four year old a

858
00:54:27.270 –> 00:54:30.670
knife and expecting them

859
00:54:30.910 –> 00:54:34.310
to cut the cheese rather than cut

860
00:54:34.310 –> 00:54:37.910
themselves. And only by a miracle do they

861
00:54:37.910 –> 00:54:41.670
avoid losing some fingers. And we call that a

862
00:54:41.670 –> 00:54:45.330
victory. You

863
00:54:45.330 –> 00:54:48.290
got to take the knife away from the four year old.

864
00:54:51.330 –> 00:54:55.170
And I think that’s the biggest solution, right? You have to take the knife of

865
00:54:55.170 –> 00:54:58.850
politics by other means away from people who do

866
00:54:58.850 –> 00:55:02.450
not have the education and the knowledge and the

867
00:55:02.450 –> 00:55:06.250
emotional connection to utilize it correctly. Or another way

868
00:55:06.250 –> 00:55:10.100
of saying this is we have failed

869
00:55:10.100 –> 00:55:13.500
in our responsibility in the west to mature people

870
00:55:13.820 –> 00:55:16.140
into being serious adults.

871
00:55:17.100 –> 00:55:20.700
Serious adults do not cotton antisemitism

872
00:55:21.180 –> 00:55:24.940
in any form. Serious adults do not

873
00:55:24.940 –> 00:55:27.900
cotton pogroms, nor do they cotton

874
00:55:27.900 –> 00:55:31.340
gulags or thought policing or cancel

875
00:55:31.340 –> 00:55:35.020
culture. Serious adults do

876
00:55:35.020 –> 00:55:38.180
not cotton behavioral tracking

877
00:55:38.980 –> 00:55:42.740
or large language models that are currently

878
00:55:42.740 –> 00:55:46.500
being used to outsource our minds so that

879
00:55:46.500 –> 00:55:49.700
we can sit around and watch more Netflix.

880
00:55:54.020 –> 00:55:57.780
But we don’t have that. And that’s the hardest part, right?

881
00:55:59.950 –> 00:56:03.230
We don’t have that because we’ve abdicated. In a different direction.

882
00:56:03.950 –> 00:56:07.390
And thus I must come to the conclusion that there is no solution

883
00:56:07.870 –> 00:56:11.230
to these problems. Because they are problems of the human condition.

884
00:56:11.870 –> 00:56:15.510
They are problems of human sin. Whether that sin is

885
00:56:15.510 –> 00:56:19.310
laziness or violence. Whether that sin is pride

886
00:56:19.470 –> 00:56:23.270
or lust of power. Whether that sin is greed for

887
00:56:23.270 –> 00:56:26.520
material resources or

888
00:56:26.600 –> 00:56:30.200
avarice and jealousy. Because someone else has something

889
00:56:30.360 –> 00:56:33.240
that you do not. And these

890
00:56:33.720 –> 00:56:36.200
problems, these problems of human sin.

891
00:56:37.480 –> 00:56:40.440
All coming together in the collision between

892
00:56:40.760 –> 00:56:44.280
Adolf Eichmann and Hannah Arendt.

893
00:56:45.160 –> 00:56:49.000
All these problems cannot be eliminated by

894
00:56:49.000 –> 00:56:52.770
political means. It’s the wrong

895
00:56:52.770 –> 00:56:56.610
tool. Politics is, and justice is, and

896
00:56:56.610 –> 00:56:59.730
the law is. They are the wrong tools

897
00:57:01.090 –> 00:57:04.450
to accomplish a spiritual goal.

898
00:57:10.850 –> 00:57:11.490
And, well,

899
00:57:17.820 –> 00:57:18.700
that’s it for me.