Was the child or teacher evil? Of a species of corrupt, perhaps, but evil? Well… given the chance, the woman and the boy had already dehumanized “the other”, and would stoop to truely evil deeds in the right circumstances. Banal? I think not. I was the banal one, which is why I’m still ashamed.

To be confronted with what you believe in your heart to be unjust (evil as well) and to not act is the stain. For the various species of perpetuator there is only one burden in the end, and it isn’t what they must pay for their role in the evil, for that burden is theirs, not ours. Our burden is what we did or didn’t do upon realizing our own role (if any).

Evil is evil and people do evil things because they often choose to do so, knowing they should not. Even St Paul was not immune. He said so himself. We are wrong to attribute the choice to being “sick” or genetically deviant.

Collective institutions make it easier to go along with evil, particularly if the moral base of society and individuals has been fractured. The topsy-turvydom of the German experience of Weimar and the inflation stood conventional wisdom and morality on its head. The wisdom of saving until you could afford something became the wisdom of spending any money as quickly as possible on anything before it became worthless. The laws of the currency reform tended to favour corporations at the expense of personal savings. The thrifty, moral, forward-looking lower middle class was particularly affected.

Yet it all comes back to the individual’s response and choice. “People like us don’t do things like that” was the British feeling at the time when Nazi atrocities became known- probably right in general. Now I don’t think so. Situational ethics has done to us morally what defeat in war and utter chaos and beggary did to Germany.

When our children were at school, they asked me to give them a letter so that they could go on an outing with friends. When I said I was not telling lies for this, they were puzzled. Other parents were doing it. I hope that the resulting lecture put them right but obviously my example and principles had not percolated through sufficiently for them to realise this was just not done in our family.
You only have to think of the Gas Board official who recently failed to pass on to Social Services the name of an old couple who had been cut off “because it would contravene the Data Protection Act” to realise how close we are the “official” German mentality which just stamped the papers and got on with the job of “resettling” the Jews.

Evil is evil and people do evil things because they often choose to do so, knowing they should not. Even St Paul was not immune. He said so himself. We are wrong to attribute the choice to being “sick” or genetically deviant.

Collective institutions make it easier to go along with evil, particularly if the moral base of society and individuals has been fractured. The topsy-turvydom of the German experience of Weimar and the inflation stood conventional wisdom and morality on its head. The wisdom of saving until you could afford something became the wisdom of spending any money as quickly as possible on anything before it became worthless. The laws of the currency reform tended to favour corporations at the expense of personal savings. The thrifty, moral, forward-looking lower middle class was particularly affected.

Yet it all comes back to the individual’s response and choice. “People like us don’t do things like that” was the British feeling at the time when Nazi atrocities became known- probably right in general. Now I don’t think so. Situational ethics has done to us morally what defeat in war and utter chaos and beggary did to Germany.

When our children were at school, they asked me to give them a letter so that they could go on an outing with friends. When I said I was not telling lies for this, they were puzzled. Other parents were doing it. I hope that the resulting lecture put them right but obviously my example and principles had not percolated through sufficiently for them to realise this was just not done in our family.
You only have to think of the Gas Board official who recently failed to pass on to Social Services the name of an old couple who had been cut off “because it would contravene the Data Protection Act” to realise how close we are the “official” German mentality which just stamped the papers and got on with the job of “resettling” the Jews.

I agree with what you said about the use of terror in creating holocausts, but I think you only have half the story. These governments, or at least the really effective ones, do not say only “We’ll rape, torture, and kill you if you don’t participate in our genocide.” They also say, “Look at these filthy subhumans. Not only are they not like us, they could pollute our bloodline or kill us if we don’t get them first.” In other words, they use the carrot of solidarity and superiority as well as the stick of terror.

The point I think is not whether we should excuse the perpetrators, thatidea, personally speaking, has never entered my head. (Although you would be right in asking: what should be our attitude to Bradey and Hindley? Once you let psychology in……..what happens?).

Actually, I find a strange similarity between this topic, and the debate I had with ‘Laura’ over the Parmalat scandal: to what extent are we all complicit? This I take it is Arendt’s strong point. The hard-and-fast division between the perpetrators and the mere spectators breaks down once you realise that evil, all too often, is itself banal.

When people, NORMAL PEOPLE, are denied access to ‘normal’ communications channels, they can be led to believe they are suffering an isolated case. Couple this with brutal shows of strength, with ‘abnormal’ communications which share the message ‘if you betray our leaders, our leaders will rape/imprison/kill YOU!’, as was done in Iraq and USSR and Cambodia and socialist states elsewhere, and we’re faced again with the banality of evil: normal, wannabe-good people are forced into situations where they fear for their own lives (for good reason) and partake in evil done to others, that they preserve themselves momentarily.

This is, however, in marked contrast to the pogroms visited on Baha’i martyrs since 1844.

Recall that the Holocaust occurred in an era when there was something called the “eugenics movement.” Many although not all of the proponents of eugenics were entirely sincere in their belief in the appropriateness of conscious manipulation of the human gene pool. See:

http://www.georgetown.edu/research/nrcbl/scopenotes/sn28.html

and

http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/

for background information. I do not know about the scope and popularity of eugenics in continental Europe in the 1920′s and 30′s; but I know that it was popular in the USA, to an extent that is hardly credible now. For example, in 1918 there was a proposal to add a diagnosis of “social inadequacy to the 1920 Federal Census. This would have created a registry of all citizens deemed to be “socially inadequate.”

It may be that a prerequisite for another holocaust would be a resurgence in such a beleif system as eugenics, along with a pseudoscientific basis and a suitably charismatic proponent.

This, I should think, would argue strongly for an insistence on the part of all scientists that their work not be subverted for political purposes.

The bureaucrats who helped send millions to their deaths were completely committed to what they were doing. Nazi hatred was irrational and was justified and inspired by ideology. The Nazi functionaries were conscious of what they were doing and proud to be doing it. Liberated from any constraints they used modern means (technocratic methods) to achieve anti modern ends (racial superiority). It was the ends they sought which allowed them to rationalise the culling of those ‘unfit’, convinced that what they were doing would make their world a better place.