Eichmann and KSM

Photo of Adolf Eichmann via <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adolf_Eichmann.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


There is still a lot to talk about regarding the upcoming 9/11 trials and Spencer Ackerman’s comparison of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s appearance in a US federal court to Adolf Eichmann’s 1962 trial in Jerusalem. Like Spencer, I want to be careful not to equate Al Qaeda and the Nazis or to compare anything to the horror of the Holocaust. But Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the nature of political evil are useful in a lot of contexts, and this is one of them.

Spencer says in his excellent post that KSM’s rantings at his trial will seem farcical. But he misreads Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem when he says this:

I suspect we’ll have an Eichmann-in-Jerusalem moment—and sorry for the unfortunate Nazi/al-Qaeda analogy; al-Qaeda are not the Nazis; but I couldn’t really think of any other parallel—except instead of the banality of evil, we’ll see the lunacy and vanity and self-absorption of it.

 

This is wrong because “lunacy and vanity and self-absorption” are banal in the very sense that Arendt meant the word. Arendt uses the term “banality” to encompass many different meanings. One of the definitions of banality—and one that Arendt definitely intended to imply—is triteness. And the kind of lunacy and vanity and self-absorption that KSM embodies is incredibly trite.

Like so many of the -isms that have previously challenged democratic capitalism, Al Qaeda’s Islamism doesn’t make a serious attempt to deal with the reality of just how powerful America is and how appealing American ideas really are. KSM’s—and Al Qaeda’s—critique of the West isn’t just divorced from reality. It’s also clichéd. When Osama bin Laden goes on his rants, he’s usually just regurgitating the same stuff that extremists of all stripes have said about American power or global capitalism or “the Jews” (or all three) for a century. Reality-free craziness is as banal as it gets.

Arendt argued that one of Eichmann’s defining character traits was “a lack of imagination”:

[Eichmann] merelynever realized what he was doing…. He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical to stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the great criminals of that period.

Arendt says it’s “banal” and “even funny” that Eichmann was so out of touch with reality that he didn’t realize the slaughter of millions of people might be wrong. He was thoughtless in the sense that he couldn’t think—”He was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” KSM is thoughtless in the same way. He is so vain and self-absorbed that he has planned his “triumphant” speech (sure to come up at his trial) for a decade. It has apparently never occurred to him that when he actually explains what he did and why he did it people may not rush to take up his cause.

Arendt did not even believe that Eichmann had the ability, in any normal sense of the word, to tell the difference between right and wrong. “The case rested,” she wrote, “on the assumption that the defendant, like all ‘normal persons,’ must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was ‘no exception within the Nazi regime.'” She believed he was “neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical…. [but simply] perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong.”

Arendt’s not alive today to weigh in on KSM and Eichmann. But I’m sure she would have seen great similarities between the two men’s mindsets. Despite all the flaws in Eichmann’s trial, Arendt ultimately decided he deserved the death penalty. I suspect she might come to a similar conclusion about what KSM deserves.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate