268
DWIGHT MACDONALD
labels in serious discussion, but I can see no other explanation for the
virulence and unfairness with which
Eichmann in Jerusalem
has been
attacked. A hitherto respected political thinker is treated like a suspect
in a police court. She uses irony, for instance, a dangerous device if the
reader, from stupidity or calculation, insists on reading it straight. (In
this case, I'd call it calculated stupidity.) "Should anyone be blamed
for raising an eyebrow to the suggestion that Eichmann loved the Jews?"
Mr. Musmanno inquires. Mr. Podhoretz paraphrases Miss Arendt: "it
even called for a certain idealism to do what Eichmann and his cohorts
did," though on pp. 37-38 she explains just what she means by Eich–
mann's "idealism." "Miss Arendt in this connection," he continues,
"quotes the famous remark attributed to Himmler/' which he then trans–
cribes dead-pan; one gets the impression she drew on Himmler for a
definition of idealism. Mr. Abel is solemnly foolish, as usual: "Now Miss
Arendt's effort to present Eichmann as a convinced adherent of the
Zionist idealogy is, as Marie Syrkin has shown, completely unconvincing.
For quite obviously a man in charge of the extermination of all European
Jewry could hardly have been committed 'forever' to the Zionist ideo–
logy." Obviously. One might expect even Miss Arendt to see
that.
It is often implied, in these reviews, that to say the Jewish leader–
ship shouldn't have cooperated with the Nazis is to say they are equally
guilty, much as certain Catholics claim that Hochhuth's
The Deputy
displaces the guilt for the death camps from the Nazis onto the Pope.
This is such nonsense, logically, that I can't but see prejudice: to criticize
people for not speaking out against a crime (the Pope) or for mistakenly
trying to moderate it by assuming some of the control (the Jewish
Councils) is not to minimize the responsibility of those who actually
commit the crime. The fault of the Pope and the Councils was that they
compromised with an evil that was as close to being absolute as anything
is in this imperfect world. But it was the Nazis alone who kilIed the Jews.
I t is an interesting, and depressing, historical exercise to imagine
what the reactions would have been to a book like this in the thirties,
when all of us, from Miss McCarthy to Mr. Abel, despised national and
racial feelings and were hot for truth, justice and other universals. The
suggestion that certain people and institutions should be exempt from
criticism would have embarassed everybody (except the Stalinists). But
the death camps have cast their shadow. Even Daniel Bell concludes
on what seemed
to
me a false note. "Many of Miss Arendt's strictures
are correct, if one can live by a universalistic standard." "In this situation,"
he continues, "one's identity as a Jew, as well as a
philosophe,
is relevant.
The agony of Miss Arendt's book is precisely that she takes her stand
