AESTHETICS OF EVIL
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comical individual. I think her reasons for regarding him in that way
are not to be found in her biography of him, but in her book which
said that totalitarianism is all powerful.
It
is not, as events have shown.
In insisting in her new book that Eichmann was mediocre, she
is
still
insisting, despite the historical facts, that totalitarianism can do
anything.
As
God can speak even through a beast, so the modem
dictatorial state can use any kind of human being as its instrument:
Nazism used the mediocrity Eichmann.
s
But no state can be as power–
ful as Miss Arendt thought "The Totalitarian State" to be; no state,
whatever its form, can have the power over its own nationals that
the Nazis-by what I think was an accident of history--exercised
almost exclusively against the Jews of Europe. Modem states, whatever
their form, cannot rely on no matter what kind of person for no
matter what function. Certainly the Jewish intellectual elite of Europe
could not have served the Nazis as did the infamous Jewish police
recruited from the scum of the ghettos. But why does Miss Arendt
think
then that anyone else could have done Eichmann's job and
done it just as well? In that contention I hear the assertion
once again of her incorrect theory about the totalitarian state:
It
is
divine or devilish; it can do anything. She claims that Eichmann
was commonplace and mediocre; but by the power of the totalitarian
state he was able to exterminate a whole people. Should the Jews
have resisted? So Miss Arendt claims now, but in fact, according to
her view of what happened, the Jews of Europe were so compliant
that Eichmann, their executioner, was even denied the opportunity
to be conscience stricken as he sent them off to die. Eichmann
according to his story did not even know that the Jews objected to
dying until Kastner pointed out to him that they did. So for Miss
Arendt there was no imperfection in the working of the totalitarian
machine. And since all moral and political criticisms of the totali-
3. People like to think Eichmann mediocre; I think they also like the idea of
Miss Arendt, implied by her subtitle, that evil can be banal. Why do they?
Perhaps they are flattered to believe that in the ordinary and dulling conduct
of their lives they are at the very least doing something wrong. In any case,
evil is not banal, but a "half-way house" between the banal and the good,
as A. N. Whitehead pointed out. The world, he insisted again and again-I
think he would have included Nazi-occupied Europe as belonging to it–
"never takes a holiday from metaphysical first principles."
