"The Banality of Evil": Hussein and Eichmann on Trial

As Saddam Hussein 's execution may be getting closer, the bloody chaos in Iraq is still getting worse and the flaws of his first trial have been getting more attention.1 It is not surprising that critics have been pointing to a "demonization" of the defendant since, from its beginning, the second Bush administration has been obsessed with the "Evil" of Saddam Hussein as a potent continuation of "Nazi Evil." Trying to sell the American public his decision to take the "war on terror" into oil-rich Iraq, the president talked a great deal about this "unspeakable Evil," with or without evidence of WMDs. During the first Gulf war, his father had complained that Hussein was worse than Hitler and, fearing a hellish mess and minding his relatively sober advisors, refrained from invading Baghdad. The comparison irritated Jewish leaders for whom Hitler could not but be absolute "Evil," but the pragmatic older Bush had referred to Hussein's evil acts of aggression in a particular historical situation. To go after something as abstract but potentially incendiary as "Evil" did not suit his, in hindsight, not so bad Realpolitik.

Fudging the distinction between evil acts and "Evil" is one of the reasons for the flaws of the Hussein trial. It was the same for the Eichmann trial almost half a century ago and the term "banality of evil," the provocative subtitle of Hannah Arendt' s report on that trial for the New Yorker, points precisely to this problem. A German-Jewish political thinker and a refugee from the Hitler regime, she would have celebrated her hundredth birthday just about the time of the verdict in the first Hussein trial: death by hanging. She would probably have agreed with the punishment but would have had reservations about the trial's success in documenting and defining his guilt -- as she had in the case of the Eichmann trial. The connection between the trials does not end here since "Nazi Evil" has been an important polarizing motor in both of them. One of Arendt's first observations in her new country was that here one could be an American and a Jew, namely that different cultural and religious traditions did not have to mean different social values and political divisiveness. And yet, Eichmann in Jerusalem, the book Americans today associate most with her name, caused a storm of furious objections in the early Sixties. Almost half a century later, Arendt is still persona non-grata for a majority of American Jews and Israelis.

The term "banality of evil" has lived on and over the decades lost its provocative sting. It is commonly used in connection with particularly bad, evil crimes that may be hard to understand and even harder to judge fairly but are still in the everyday realm of history and politics, not in the realm of absolute "Evil." No matter how horrible, these acts have been committed by mere mortals like the mass murderers Saddam Hussein and Eichmann. Stripped of their power, they are easily disposable and put to death, if that suits the new people in power. In Hussein's case, though, the situation is more complicated and divisive because the reasons for the U.S. invasion of Iraq have been so muddled and the legitimacy of the court that sentenced him questionable -- as was that of the court that sentenced Eichmann in Jerusalem. Among other things, the secular court that tried Hussein was under political pressure to honor the American president's declared conviction that Hussein's execution will stabilize the new Iraq since it will demonstrate the absolute victory of Good, in the guise of Iraqi democracy, over Evil, represented by Hussein's totalitarian rule.2

In cases of dramatic regime change, new regimes have historically demonstrated their legitimacy by the public humiliation and execution of their old opponents, a particularly graphic example being the French Revolution with its avalanche of rolling heads. But in many observers' view, Hussein's trial has taken the new U.S. supported Iraqi regime's desire for legitimacy to a higher level by not only humiliating but also "demonizing" the defendant. This was also for Arendt the core problem of the Eichmann trial: its contemptible, less-than-human defendant had become an allegory for super-human, incomprehensible “Nazi Evil.” Meant to affirm the legitimacy of Jewish statehood, the globally radio- and telecast political show-trial was focused exclusively on unique Jewish suffering and the absolute "Evil" of anti-Semitism. As it was summed up in a 1966 B' nai B'rith-sponsored study "by recalling the barbaric mass murders engineered by Eichmann and his associates, the trial would recall to the world the demonic nature of Nazism in particular and anti-Semitism in general." Invoking the power of "demonic" Nazi Evil in the stories of its victims enacted on the stage of the world, the trial showed Jewish suffering; the Nazi regime's crime was the persecution of the Jewish people. There was no need for the Eichmann's trial to develop a more inclusive and differentiating historical perspective on the Nazi regime and Eichmann’s role in it. "Nazi Evil" covered all of it; as would Hussein's "Evil" in his trial.

Arendt's perspective on "Nazi Evil" was universalist: Jews were not the only group to have suffered persecution; among other groups, huge numbers of non-Jewish political opponents, communists and socialists, died in the camps. It was also secularist: the religious concept of Evil had no room, was actually harmful in modern political contexts. Yet, as she learned from her readers' violent objections to her arguments, many of them believed in a profound mystery of "Nazi Evil" where it concerned the mass murder of Jews. In Arendt's view, Eichmann, the "common man and uncommon murderer," had to hang because of his "crimes against humanity," not only against Jews. Though they died in disproportionately large numbers, Jews were one persecuted group among others and shared their history with others. But the great success of the Eichmann trial was based precisely on its single-minded focus on the Jewish catastrophe and in that it contributed considerably to the ever-growing religious-political power of the Holocaust that would detract attention from the horrors of the secular catastrophe of W.W.II. Indeed, invocations of W.W.II as the "good, clean, just war we won" against "Nazi Evil" have increasingly been used to justify unjustifiable U.S. and Israeli wars and war-like interventions in the postwar era, most recently in Iraq.

The events of September 11, 2001 convinced the American president that his divinely approved mission was to stamp out the unspeakable "Evil" of Saddam Hussein and, retroactively Hitler, and spread the Evangelium of American democracy. He believed that Hussein's WMDs existed because they represented "Evil" and Bush was an expert on "Evil." Consequently, and against their constituencies' better instincts, the Democrats let him bomb Iraq.3 On the first day of his first trip abroad, after the premature “fall” of Baghdad in May 2003, Bush visited Auschwitz where he found Nazi gas chambers a “sobering reminder of Evil and the need for people to resist Evil.” On the last day of this trip, he praised the jubilant soldiers in Qatar for their successful invasion of Iraq: "Because of you a great Evil has been ended." References to the hallowed invasion/liberation mission of their grandfathers fighting their way into Germany to stamp out “Nazi Evil,” have become a staple of official pronouncements on the war in Iraq. But the young men and women, high on victory and low on history, would end up paying with their limbs and lives for the explosive ideological division between the pure Good of the American mission and the pure Evil of Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. supported new Iraqi regime put Hussein on trial in Baghdad as a both contemptible and incomprehensibly evil mass murderer, like Eichmann in Jerusalem. There has been little American interest in Iraq's political and social history in the Middle East. But large Islamic populations in this troubled area believe that the "Evil" associated with Hussein is actually America's and Israel's, that it stands for many decades of uninformed and arrogant oppression and that it is not banal. There also has been very little American criticism of the growing political uses of the religious concept of Evil going back to the defeated Nazi regime. These uses have little to do with fighting a misnamed Islamo-Fascist terrorism and a great deal with our super-power habit to see the "Evil" of Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism wherever and whenever we are not unconditionally obeyed. Can we afford the uninformed arrogance of "Good vs Evil" while preaching globalization of democracy and scrambling for oil?

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The reality of accelerating technological and technocratic globalization has made the world much more complicated and confusing than it was at the time of the Eichmann trial and, not surprisingly, increased the desire to believe in the simplicities of "Good and Evil." In the West, it has not only been the rise of fundamentalist Christianity in reaction to the rise of fundamentalist Islam but also the rise of a culture of individualist "spirituality" that supports such desire. Arendt's A Report on the Banality of Evil--the full subtitle of Eichmann in Jerusalem--is still relevant today because she did not win her secularist battle with the political uses of the concept of Evil; more, her arguments demonstrate that it was not winnable. It was not her failure to define and explain the "nature of Evil" since her book was meant to be a "report," not an "account" of "why things happened as they happened." Her definition of Eichmann's ordinariness, she insisted, was nothing but "a faithful description of a phenomenon" from which all kinds of conclusions could be drawn and of which the "most general" was the "banality of evil." Giving her reasons for not responding to individual attacks on her critique of the Eichmann trial, she asserted that "this whole business, with very few exceptions, has absolutely nothing to do with criticisms or polemics in the normal sense of the word. It is a political campaign, led and guided in all particulars by interest groups and government agencies. . . . The criticism is directed at an "image" and this image has been substituted for the book I wrote."4

Her critics' unanimous demands that she show loving solidarity with her people and embrace the truth and mystery of fated Jewish suffering meant an a priori rejection of any rational, relatively objective analysis of the trial. Responding to the fact of an overwhelming number of uncommonly hostile reviews, Mary McCarthy's review of Eichmann in Jerusalem, "The Hue and Cry," emphasized the importance of Arendt's ability to analyze clearly the flaws of that successful sensationalist political show-trial, an intellectual achievement she found "morally exhilarating:""The reader 'rose above' the terrible material of the trial or was borne aloft to survey it with his intelligence." 5 But the goal and the strategies of the trial had been the opposite, namely to engulf readers or viewers in these” terrible materials" so that they would completely identify with the witnesses who had become their stories of unspeakable horror. The defendant's death sentence would be clear from the beginning because an overwhelmingly powerful "Nazi Evil" was there for all to see and hear in the witnesses' unquestionably true stories: it would leave no room for half-way normal legal protocols of investigation and interrogation.

Arendt, of course, shared McCarthy's belief in the power of intelligence, the readers' and the writer's, and she confessed to her "something I have never admitted, namely that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria. And that ever since I did it, I feel--after twenty years [since the war]--light-hearted about the whole matter. Don't tell anybody; is it not proof positive that I have no 'soul'?"6 She was excited about solving the puzzle of Eichmann in her critique of his trial that had failed from the beginning because it "was built on what the Jews had suffered, not what Eichmann had done." The most important of the many irregularities and abnormalities of the trial was the charge itself: the crimes committed against the Jewish people. 7 Jews saw the historical catastrophe of W.W.II not as a recent "unprecedented crime of genocide," but as "the oldest crime they knew and remembered," that is, "exclusively in terms of their own history.”

One of Arendt's central concerns was that the participants in the trial never arrived at "a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared, to the prosecution and judges alike, as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history." 8 The real issue of the Eichmann trial had been for her the question "what kind of a man was the accused and to what extent can our legal system take care of these new criminals who are not ordinary criminals?" 9 An international court, Arendt thought, would not have indicted this "new criminal" for organizing the murder of millions of Jews but for "crimes against mankind committed on the body of the Jewish people."10 But Israel's desire to indict Eichmann exclusively for crimes against the Jewish people, the motivation for their abduction of Eichmann and unconditional rejection of an international court, had made this argument a moot question.

In preparation for the Nuremberg trials, Telford Taylor had introduced the terms "atrocities" and “crimes against humanity” for the "unprecedented crime of genocide." The distinction between “war crimes" and “crimes against humanity” was not clearly drawn at the Nuremberg trials because of the nature of that particular war, the way it was fought on the Eastern front, and of the regime that had fought it. In addition, the extraordinary nature of the “war crimes” and of the "crimes against humanity" had been politically preestablished rather than legally established during the trials. This is also true for Hussein's political show-trial: he will hang for "crimes against humanity" established in the first trial; and for the "genocide" of Kurds in the second trial--if he has not already been executed by then, or died of natural causes. It won't help him that the number of civilians killed by his regime is small in relation to that of civilians killed during the United States's illegal (by international law) invasion and occupation of Iraq; and that the legitimacy of the victor's law might seem somewhat dubious.

Despite having served, for six decades, as the international gold standard for the trial of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity," the Nuremberg trials have had their fair share of criticism regarding political independence, impartiality and legal procedures. In general, use of the rather unclear but powerfully evocative terms "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" has contributed to a reintroduction, at least metaphorically, of the religious concept of Evil into modern secular legal procedures where they concern truly bad, evil deeds like Eichmann's or Hussein's. Looming larger than life, “crimes against humanity” suggest some unspeakably, mysteriously different badness that tends to obscure the historical context in which a specific crime was committed by a specific person.

Arendt might have had this in mind when she set against the exclusively Jewish focus of the Eichmann trial her notion of a "crime against mankind committed on the body of the Jewish people." Much quoted, this "brilliant" formulation was both too general and too specific to support her arguments against the "demonic nature" of Nazi persecution of Jews and of Antisemitism. Whether she realized that problem or not, she did know that she needed to "understand" Eichmann, the "common man and uncommon murderer," who became for her (and for many of her open-minded readers) something like the original model, the type of the "new criminal." Though "understanding" was one of the key concepts of Arendt's political thought, it did not reach out to that contemptible man's psychological-political identity in its historical context. She would never be interested in the complex, messy, coincidental interdependencies of nature and nurture because she separated so sharply the political from the social sphere. Eichmann was very much a product of the political polarization and chaos of the Weimar Republic and of the political order, as he saw it, created by the Nazi regime, but this is not how she saw him. She pared him down to "the new criminal's" existential inauthenticity, unable to think for himself because of the Nazis' totalitarian political coordination, Gleichschaltung, that had left no support system or frame for independent thinking.

Eichmann, in Arendt's perspective, was uncommonly common, grayness itself, the essence of banality. If his deeds were evil, the man who had committed them was an evil nothing; so was Hussein once he was on the run and in his “spider hole.” In this, Arendt's "understanding" of Eichmann was not so different from that of the people who abducted Eichmann and trapped Hussein and put them on trial to hang them. But Eichmann's deeds were done in a context--the end stage of a total war--that was not banal, even if the banal man was not capable of understanding, not to speak of judging that context. That end stage meant more than being incapable of thinking independently because it had radically changed human beings. In his association with Auschwitz, which for her was "of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past," Eichmann as a hyper-modern version of ideological mass murderer fit neither the religious concept of Evil nor the secular concept of banality. His bad (evil) deeds may indeed have seemed to reflect elements of both in that his ideological (utopianist) motivations could be said to have been semi-religious--which could not be said of Hussein's murderous brutality in the service of clan power.

Arendt touched on this problem when she summed up Eichmann’s dilemma in a lecture: “Eichmann said he recognized that he had participated in what was perhaps one of the greatest crimes in history, but, he insisted, if he had not done so, his conscience would have bothered him at the time. His conscience and morality were working exactly in reverse. This reverse is precisely the moral collapse that took place in Europe.”11 Yet this “reverse” is also the most common inversion of morality in wartime when killing the perceived enemy becomes the greatest cultural value. At the same time, as Arendt seemed to point out herself in her reference to Auschwitz, this end stage of a hyper-modern technological war of heretofore unheard-of dimensions was anew phenomenon. But when she tried to understand the new phenomenon of Eichmann, the uncommon mass murderer of civilians, she did not do so in the context of the new extreme situation in which he had acted. Instead she invoked Nazi totalitarianism in her attempts at a "clear understanding" of the general nature of Eichmann's deeds, an invocation that undermined rather than supported her paradoxical combination of common and extraordinary, the banality of Evil.

Arendt’s achievement in Eichmann in Jerusalem was her insistence on a clearly secular, therefore particular and incomplete understanding of even the worst human deeds instead of generalizing and demonizing them. Presenting Eichmann’s crime as the "banality of evil,” she did emphasize this secularity and readers open to her arguments accepted it and adopted the phrase to fit their individual judgments. Her own judgment of the criminal Eichmann's uncommon commonness, his archetypical "banality,” was ostensibly meant to shed more light on his specific guilt. And yet, it might also have detracted from the terror of that new crossing of the borders of human "morality” that had served to separate civilization from the state of nature.

Arendt’s distinction and then connection between the “common man” and ”uncommon murderer,” his banality and his evil deeds, might actually have encouraged some of her readers to demonize rather than historicize the deeds of Eichmann because it obscured one of the most important insights of her own analysis of Eichmann’s guilt, his new criminality. He had acted in the extraordinary situation of a moral no-man's land where such mass-murder of civilians was common; as was the Allies’ mass-murder of civilians by fire-bombing. Moreover, in this shared no-man’s land at the end stage of that total war, Eichmann became an uncommonly guilty murderer only after Germany’s unconditional surrender; as the Allies becameuncommonly innocent heroes only after their unconditional victory. It was a victory that erased, beyond the shadow of a doubt, all suggestions of Allied war crimes. Despite her secularist, universalist perspective on the trial, Arendt did not, and probably could not, deal with that issue because the horror of Nazi persecutions had been so overwhelming, the Allied victory so absolute, and the narrowly Jewish focus on Eichmann's guilt so persuasive to large audiences. She had enough problems with her readers as it was. The rise of the Jewish Holocaust's cultural und political power in the postwar era, to which Eichmann's trial had contributed considerably, required emotional empathy to the exclusion of sober historical information and rational analysis. And this exclusion has contributed considerably to the many serious political problems caused by this power. The trial of Saddam Hussein as a part of the American invasion of Iraq is one of them.

Related Links

Corey Robin: Dragon-Slayers (concerns the use people have made of Arendt's theories)