by Edward S. Herman
The concept of the banality of evil came into prominence
following the publication of Hannah Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which was based on the
trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt's thesis was that people
who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, a top administrator in
the machinery of the Nazi death camps, may not be crazy fanatics at all,
but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their
state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good
bureaucrats.
Normalizing the Unthinkable
Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way
rests on "normalization." This is the process whereby ugly, degrading,
murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as "the
way things are done." There is usually a division of labor in doing and
rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing
done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death
(sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the
implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better
crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments
that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of
defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to
normalize the unthinkable for the general public. The late Herman Kahn
spent a lifetime making nuclear war palatable (On Thermonuclear War,
Thinking About the Unthinkable), and this strangelovian phoney got very
good press. ~
In an excellent article entitled "Normalizing the
unthinkable," in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of March 1984, Lisa
Peattie described how in the Nazi death camps work was "normalized" for
the long-term prisoners as well as regular personnel: "[P]rison plumbers
laid the water pipe in the crematorium and prison electricians wired
the fences. The camp managers maintained standards and orderly process.
The cobblestones which paved the crematorium yard at Auschwitz had to be
perfectly scrubbed." Peattie focused on the parallel between
routinization in the death camps and the preparations for nuclear war,
where the "unthinkable" is organized and prepared for in a division of
labor participated in by people at many levels. Distance from execution
helps render responsibility hazy. "Adolph Eichmann was a thoroughly
responsible person, according to his understanding of responsibility.
For him, it was clear that the heads of state set policy. His role was
to implement, and fortunately, he felt, it was never part of his job
actually to have to kill anyone."
Peattie noted that the head of MlT's main military
research lab in the 1960s argued that "their concern was development,
not use, of technology." Just as in the death camps, in weapons labs and
production facilities, resources are allocated on the basis of
effective participation in the larger system, workers derive support
from interactions with others in the mutual effort, and complicity is
obscured by the routineness of the work, interdependence, and distance
from the results.
Peattie also pointed out how, given the unparalleled
disaster that would follow nuclear war, "resort is made to rendering the
system playfully, via models and games." There is also a vocabulary
developed to help render the unthinkable palatable: "incidents,"
"vulnerability indexes," "weapons impacts," and "resource availability."
She doesn't mention it, but our old friend "collateral damage," used in
the 1991 Persian Gulf War, came out of the nukespeak tradition.
(con't) The Banality of Evil
