94
MARY McCARTHY
This Miss Arendt never tries to explain." But he did suspect; he even
knew, and this knowledge, his "conscience," lasted for about four weeks.
Eichmann's conscience is the center of her book and explicitly the
theme of several chapters. Clearly Abel is aware of this since he
alludes to the subject himself, glancingly, in a typical misparaphrase:
"... 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." What
he says in this sentence is that Miss Arendt explains Eichmann's un–
suspicious conscience by the compliancy of the Jews. She does not; the
compliancy of the Jewish leadership (not the Jews) was one of many
factors she cites that contributed to the extinction of Eichmann's con–
science, but the chief responsibility for this, as I read it, outside of
Eichmann himself, lay with respectable German society, which remained
almost totally silent at the time and only came forward later to wash
its hands of the affair.
As the reader can see, the attempt to correct Abel on one point at
once brings up another and leads, if one will let it, into a maze.
It
is
like arguing with a hydra.
But I must at least touch on his final charge: the damning evidence
he has discovered, where it was lying low, in
The Origins of Totalitarian–
ism.
Frankly, I am not competent and do not have the time or space
to get to the bottom of this. But supposing Abel is right and there is a
contradiction between the earlier book and the present one, what would
it prove? That she was right then and wrong now or vice versa? His
triumphant tone seems to announce that she was wrong both times,
which is impossible, at least in the terms in which he states her argu–
ments-that the totalitarian state was "all-powerful" and that it was
not. However, I do not think she said it was "all powerful" and certainly
would not take his word for it. In any case the passage he quotes is
about totalitarian
terror,
not about the totalitarian state. And where the
terror ruled-in the camps, prisons, and ghettoes-Miss Arendt in
Eichmann and Jerusalem
does not propose that anyone could have
done anything but obey.
To be fair, though, to Abel, it does seem to me that Miss Arendt's
views about totalitarian rule are not as pessimistic as they were when
Stalin was still alive. But to change one's views somewhat, in the
light of new evidence and new events (as she does in her chapters
on Hungary in the new edition of
The Origins),
is a normal consequence
of thought and does not call for you to "recant" or "retract." Unless
Abel and those who agree with him are running a private Inquisition
or police state.
