AESTHETICS OF EVIL
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they phrase what the Nazis required them to say with pathos or
with resignation?)
But out of
all
these sad stories nothing emerges to prove Miss
Arendt's charges against the leaders of the Jewish Councils: only a
picture of these leaders which renders their actions both inexplicable
and ugly. The strangest and most shocking feature of Miss Arendt's
accusations is that they are never political, never moral. To make
moral or political judgments one has to investigate and discuss the
actual political and moral alternatives, and this Miss Arendt has
not done in attacking the leaders of the Councils. Her judgment of
them is, I think, fundamentally an aesthetic one.
II
Miss Arendt's judgment of Eichmann too is fundamentally an
aesthetic judgment. And this is the reason he comes off so much
better in her book than do his victims- to the great surprise of so
many of the author's readers.
If
a man holds a gun at the head
of another and forces hitn to kill his friend, the man with the
gun will be aesthetically less ugly than one who out of fear of
death has killed his friend and perhaps did not even save his
own life. But one wonders: Is a purely aesthetic judgment the
proper one to make in such a case? And if we turn from a matter
like the killing of one or two men by a single murderer, however
devilish, to the extermination of approximately five million people,
does it seem proper that the executioner and
his
host of victims
should be judged in aesthetic rather than in moral or political terms?
In aestheticizing Eichmann, Miss Arendt was aided by a fact
of experience which Simone de Beauvoir called attention to in
analyzing the trial of Laval after the war, a trial not so dissimilar
to Eichmann's, since in both cases the verdict was a foregone con–
clusion. In which case, how could it be just? But Madame de
Beauvoir's point was a different one. She pointed rather to the
fact that the Laval on trial was not the same man who had
enjoyed power. In the defendent's box there was a weak, tired
old man, one not even convinced that what he had done politically
was right. Because he was so weak, with the press and the people
against him, he could be tried, sentenced, and executed. But the
Laval whom it was important
in
the name of justice to try, sentence,
