Hannah Arendt introduced the phrase “the banality of evil”, as the subtitle to her book on the trial of Eichmann, one lesson of which was how massive tragedies can mushroom from the banal  actions of individuals “just doing their job”.[1]

She wrote:

“The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them. […] Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

Even the greatest evil can be stopped or limited, but that requires constant alertness to “alternate facts”, deliberate disconnecting from reality, the dehumanising of those we do not much like or undertsand, and the consequent creeping encroachments of mundane bureaucracy on individual liberties, all done in the holy name of “safety of the citizenry”,  or “our national interest”. Ben Franklin wrote:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

The lesson was learned in Eichmann’s time. Evil can indeed be stopped or limited. While the Nazis succeeded in murdering two thirds of Europe’s Jews (in some countries the figure was 90%), Denmark, Finland and Bulgaria actively opposed or thwarted deportation of their Jewish population; in each case the majority survived. [2]

Opposing bureaucratic or political dehumanising requires courage and often being prepared to lose friends, to be socially isolated, criticised, bullied, bankrupted or even die.

In our present comfortable Western existence, many  of us are not prepared to pay the least of these prices and if that continues we will not deserve our safety, nor will we be able to keep it.

[1]    Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil; see also Christopher R Browning, Ordinary Men.

[2]     Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin. Why the Jews? The reason for Antisemitism. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 146 and 148-149:  Poland: 3 million of a population of 3.3 million Jews; Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia 228,000 of 253,000.