[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_08

H. Arendt, A report of the Banality of Evil, 1963

The message of the book is "evil is nothing special," the "bad guys" don't feel evil, and there is a subtle difference between them and the "good guys." For those who grew up with Walt Disney cartoons and American action movies, it is a difficult concept to understand and accept. Even Christian morality, for those who have, directly or indirectly, received this type of education do not help understand nuances between the opposites, nor is the history of the Church, which burned alive anyone who disagreed with its holy – and only - version of the Truth.

For decades, a large part of the Western World has been guided by a Manichean inspiration: on the one hand, the righteous, the heroes, the Good; on the other, all their opposites. Without too many shades of gray in the middle and without too much understanding toward those who take the “wrong side.” This moral structure, like any other moral structure, is functional to current political divisions: the "good," that is, those who have that specific ethical code, believe in certain values, share the same outlook on the world, and are in the same political party; the “bad guys” in the other. It is not a thought pattern that supports the complexity of reality with all its blind spots and contradictions.

Hannah Arendt talks about the Nuremberg trials, but the Nazis questioned in the dock could be any other contemporary officer or bureaucrat; atrocities, war crimes and genocides, unfortunately, are not a closed chapter of the past but a daily renewed reality. Whoever kills and whoever allows killing is not a demonic creature with a refined mind who has hatched an ingenious evil plan, nor a bloodthirsty monsters without god and a heart, but they are ordinary people carrying out their job, carrying out an order, carrying out paperwork.

Evil is banal, Arendt reminds us, because it is not “evil” as anyone is used to imagine it. Anyone can become a Nazi in war. If morality is functional in politics, then the "good" is what is functional to a party, a state, or an alliance, and "killing the enemy", whoever they are, ceases to be a horror and becomes self-defense, necessity, or victory.