Regarding today’s 50th Anniversary of Eichmann’s trial:
In 1963, Hannah Arendt wrote the book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pointing out that Eichmann truly was not a Nazi mastermind. Instead, he was careless and thoughtless, confessing to be a man crunching numbers (human lives) and simply “doing his job” pushing papers. She concludes in her book that the evils of the Holocaust were not radical acts of monsters. Conversely, these were insidiously banal actions of people living in a system of faulty logic. Arendt’s book reminds us that if we continue to live in ways that are thoughtless to the human lives around us, we too may be committing atrocities, all in a day’s work. Arendt, to this day, invites me to be more thoughtful. How easy it is to forget our mutual humanity. If only Eichmann had remembered that simple, profound truth: we are all human, we are all connected.
http://www.salon.com/wires/allwires/2011/01/27/D9L0Q2F80_ml_israel_eichmann_reunion/index.html
