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DWIGHT MACDONALD
ments were given by the Councils' leaders one would like to know. ...
Now I, for one, am not at all sure that the arguments for collaboration
might not have been more logical. ..."
Abel takes the word of an interested party for the contents of "some
eight monographs" he hasn't seen and couldn't have read if he had.
He "would like to know" the arguments for collaboration-one would
think he and Dr. Robinson could have found an hour or two for some
oral translation-and then proceeds to demonstrate just what the argu–
ments must have been. How enviable, such a mind! Miss Arendt's is
comparatively pedestrian: to reach conclusions, it must labor through
court records and other boring data. Abel's needs only one datum, and
that a fascinating one: itself. It is a perpetual motion machine, self–
powered and frictionless, since it has freed itself from outside data (whose
introduction into the mind invariably causes friction since they are not
identical with it ) . The only trouble is that those eight monographs
tum out to be irrelevant to Abel's argument. For Miss Arendt, far from
demanding "outright defiance," is at pains to show it would have been
useless and suicidal. Her objection is simply to the Councils'
existence;
she thinks that Jewish leaders should not have cooperated with the Nazis
to form them: "There was no possibility of resistance, but there existed
the possibility of
doing nothing.
The distinction between passive evasion
and "outright defiance" may be a nuance too subtle for Abel's intellectual
machinery, but it has lately redeemed itself by producing a remarkable
statistic. "Miss Arendt's book was anything but truthful," he writes in a
letter in the
N ew Republic
of April 4th. "It contains no less than 600
distortions of fact, a record, I believe, for a book of 256 pages." Not
587 distortions of fact, not 608, but exactly 600. Dr. Mortimer
J.
Adler,
whose mind has something in common with Abel's, has counted the
Great Ideas of the Western World, but he ended up with an untidy 102.
II
Mr. Bel! and Miss McCarthy have explained at length why Miss
Arendt's Eichmann is more repulsive and sinister than the scarecrow
"monster" rigged up by Prosecutor Hausner and accepted by Mr. Abel.
Even had I not been convinced by Miss Arendt's portrait, it wouldn't
have occurred to me that she was trying to make him look
better;
I
might have thought she had not got a likeness, but not that she was
flattering the sitter.
Her subtitle, "The Banality of Evil," is also objected to. In
Encounter
(January, 1964) Gershon Sholem calls it "a catchword" that
is
not "the
