The media is full of stories about “systematic risk” to our financial system and efforts to put “firewalls” around potential contagions from spreading, but the idea of systematic risk with regard to social relations within a country and the real risk of ethnic cleansing within even developed countries is of equal importance. The recent release of documents on Adolph Eichmann are disturbing, echoing the horror that ambitious people placed in sensitive positions are “conscientiously” doing their job. The most perplexing aspect of Eichmann in Jerusalem is its study of human conscience, for Eichmann had a conscience, it was just not functioning in the expected way….
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As Hannah Arendt said “Intent to do wrong” was not, proved against him. He was not “morally insane” for in his own “muddled” way he distinguished between right and wrong, and even more frightfully, the results of psychological tests showed that he was not a “monster” but almost excessively normal. Think of all these institutions in the financial crisis and the lives they ruined who lacked “intent” to do wrong. As Arendt asserted, A root of evil can be uprooted, which she meant when speaking of destroying totalitarianism. However, the evil perpetrated by an Eichmann can spread over the face of the earth propagating like a “fungus” since it possesses no tangible or identifiable root.
Eichmann was not stupid; he knew but did not think what he was doing, not in the past and not in his trial in Jerusalem.According to Arendt, He contradicted himself constantly, but he did not lie; his conscience did not bother him; and he did not suffer from remorse: “He knew that what he had once called his duty was now called a crime, and he accepted this new code of judgment as if it were nothing but another language rule”. The string of bankers brought up to testify on Capitol Hill followed an identical pattern; Oliver North; Kissinger; the list is endless only the victims are identifiable.
According to Raul Hilberg, the “banality of evil”, Arendt’s phrase, did not exist among top decision makers who were conscious and aware of what they were doing. Hate was not even a necessary ingredient to ensure the smooth functioning of the persecution machine; it came down to technical problems and mundane business matters. Essentially, there was an active core of hatred, but it was draped around an effusive halo of indifference , the two combined to prove more than capable of fueling this enterprise of extermination.
According to Hilberg, Eichmann’s initiatives in finding “pathways” through the bureaucracy were active and deliberate, and these built on “the all-encompassing readiness” of bureaucrats themselves who in turn found the German people as a whole not unwilling. Taken together, said Hilberg, these disclose a pointed malevolence in the policies and actions constituting the Holocaust that was not banal at all.
…Newly declassified tapes released by the German government reveal that Adolf Eichmann, one of the masterminds of the Holocaust, was supremely unrepentant about his role in the deaths of millions of innocent Jews and others during the Third Reich. In fact, Eichmann, from the presumed safety of underground exile in A
tina, brags about being part of the decision-making process that doomed millions….….According to the Daily Mail, Eichmann said the biggest mistake he made was not killing all of the Jews. “We didn’t do our job properly,” he told a reporter in Buenos Aires after the war. “We could have done more.”Eichmann, who fled to Argentina and changed his name, found it difficult to remain silent about who he really was and what he’d done during the Hitler years. He repeatedly met with Willem Sassen and Eberhard Fritsch, two reporters with Nazi connections, and sat for regular interviews at Sassen’s home. When being interviewed, Eichmann used the alias Ricardo Klement.
In one tape, he boasts about being part of the Nazi decision making process. “I didn’t just take orders,” he said, contradicting his later testimony at a war crimes trial in Israel. “If I had been that kind of person, I would have been a fool. Instead, I was part of the thinking process, I was an idealist,” he said….Read More:http://morallowground.com/2011/04/13/newly-declassified-adolf-eichmann-tapes-we-could-have-killed-more-jews/
As for Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil, Hilberg stressed that Arendt never understood “the pathways that Eichmann found in the thicket of the German administrative machine for his unprecedented actions. … There was no ‘banality’ in this ‘evil.'” Furthermore, Arendt separated “Jewish leaders from the Jewish populace” to account for Jewish cooperation in the destruction. However, Arendt’s response to Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jewry was negative. Writing to Karl Jaspers in 1964, Arendt wrote: “His book is really excellent, but only because it is a simple report. A more general, introductory chapter is beneath a singed pig” . Hilberg does not let Arendt off the hook. Hilberg stated that Arendt reestablished ties with a lover from her days as a student, namely Martin Heidegger, and sought to rehabilitate him. Hilberg’s point is obvious. Read More:http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Hilberg/Meieron.html
ADDENDUM:
Norman Finkelstein:Prior to publication of The Holocaust Industry Hilberg had himself denounced American Jews for resorting to the “blackmail weapon” against Europe. His disgust for the megalomaniacal Edgar Bronfman and the irredeemably vulgar Rabbi Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress, which orchestrated the shakedown, is barely disguised in the recently updated Yale edition of his study.
The charges Hilberg and I independently leveled back in 2000 have since been vindicated. The $1.5 billion extracted from the Swiss banks bore no relationship to the pittance they actually owed, while Holocaust survivors have complained of receiving only a pittance of the fully $20 billion extracted from Europe in their names.
Recent revelations get worse. A report by Israel’s state comptroller found that Israel’s record on Holocaust compensation “is far behind Germany and other countries in Europe.” While Singer was denouncing secret Swiss bank accounts, he was squirreling away WJC monies in his own secret Swiss bank account and allegedly had also filched Bronfman’s piggy bank of a half million dollars….
…Hilberg didn’t truck in the pieties of what became the Holocaust industry that exploited the colossal suffering of Jews for political and financial gain. He rejected the notion that the Nazi holocaust sprang uniquely from virulent anti-Semitism and concomitantly maintained that “Jews were only the first victims” of the German bureaucracy’s genocidal juggernaut, which also targeted Gypsies and Poles, among others. He reckoned Jewish resistance to be negligible but Jewish cooperation (which however he distinguished from collaboration) to be significant, while he reckoned the total number of Jewish victims at closer to 5.1 million. Read More:http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=3&ar=102
Read More:http://pathstoutopia.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/on-raul-hilberg-and-hannah-arendt/
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Adolph Eichmann began his emigration plans using the Judenrate and Dr.Lowenherz in Vienna, the Nazis used the Jewish leaders in most European cities and the ghettos of the Eastern Occupied Territories and Poland to provide a census of their Jewish populations. These Judenrate were also required to provide lists of names — Jews to be transported to the death camps — and to provide Jewish police to enforce the collection of their people. It would not have been possible for the Nazis to have killed so many Jews in such a short time without the co-operation of the Junderate. This is an awkward historical truth, as revealed by historians such as Raul Hilberg and Hanna Arendt. As historian Raul Hilberg states:
…”As time passed by, the Jewish councils became increasingly impotent in their efforts to cope with the welfare efforts of their task, but they made themselves felt all the more in their implementation of Nazi decrees. With the growth of the destructive function of the Judenrate, many Jewish leaders felt an almost irresistible urge to look like their German masters. In March 1940 a Nazi observer in Krackow was struck by the contrast between the poverty and filth in the Jewish quarter and the business like luxury of the Jewish community headquarters, which was filled with beautiful charts, comfortable leather chairs, and heavy carpets. In Warsaw the Jewish oligarchy took to wearing boots. In the Lodz ghetto “dictator” Rumkowski printed postage stamps bearing his likeness and made speeches which contained expressions such as “my children,” “my factories,” and “my Jews.” It would appear that the desire to live often overruled all moral considerations. Read More:http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/r/rose-martin/p2wc.html