Adolf Eichmann: Banality of Evil

[Immanuel Can]

Levitation?

Repentance. Forgiveness. Regeneration. Hope.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Excuse the bad joke, and numerous who write here are not American, but 'Many who voted for Obama have been severely disappointed'.
________________________

In the face of 'tragic reality' (a basic situation that will always be problematic and difficult, and mortal) there are of course any number of subjective and inner choices a person can make. And not just under the aegis of a Christian philosophy but within the frame of many of the religious philosophies. It seems to me that repentance, forgiveness, regeneration and hope---for a sole individual (chiefly)---is quite good advice and good practice. But in my view it almost becomes absurd if recommended as a general praxis.

The entire structure of life within the conditions of a material/biological framework render a successful outcome impossible. Something, someone, will get devoured. Something, someone, will get turned under. A gain in one area and by some involves a loss for some other somewhere else.

In my own mind and way of seeing things, to discuss an Eichmann, is to discuss ourselves in the context of the unfolding general violence. Such a conversation immediately becomes more meaningful and relevant---and more difficult. And to keep it all somewhat contextualised, but less theoretical, we might employ an example, a way of comparing the recent terrible past and our terrible present.

Here is my example: Unless I am really not seeing things aright, the Middle East region is, if looked at overall, being 'invaded' with the intention of yoking it up with the prevailing Western powers and within that overall system. The process is 'fascistic' if we take that to mean ruthless, direct, and militant. Perhaps in a more remote sense it also has an element of racist underpinning and employs fear and contempt of the (dark) other. Yet we understand it as a 'good'. A consortium of powerful nations has determined it is necessary to effectively destroy any specific member of the region that is being conquered ('remodelled' is the term I use) from becoming a powerful or viable alternative to the prevailing system.

This process, which we have seen unfolding in our world, and which we are complicit in, and participate in, is not unlike the Nazi intention of dominating Europe. Not the same, but similar. This illustrates, in my mind at least, that at the core of all of it a very different principle functions: the straight power principle.

One cannot apply 'repentance, forgiveness, regeneration and hope' in this context. Those things apply to an individual who accepts a whole group of tenets and predicates and they can function in a limited context: a person, a family perhaps, a small community.

[DesolationRow]

Desolation Row.

Indeed I do love Bob Dylan

This thread could go in various directions. I know that not everyone has a spare hour to devote to listening to a talk, yet I am curious if you-all were able to listen to Bowden's talk on Savitri Devi? He raised so many interesting points and pointed to many difficult and knotty problems.

I will try to get around to listening to that in the next couple of days and chime in. I don't doubt that there are some compelling points, but I foresee having a hard time with Savitri Devi, someone who at once was a Nazi supporter and an animal rights enthusiast (wtf?). And who believed that Adolf Hitler was an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

I will try to get around to listening to that in the next couple of days and chime in. I don't doubt that there are some compelling points, but I foresee having a hard time with Savitri Devi, someone who at once was a Nazi supporter and an animal rights enthusiast (wtf?). And who believed that Adolf Hitler was an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu.

I see Bowden's talk on Savitri Devi as a topic as being relevant for other reasons. I would say that it has a great deal to do with how militant idealism even if it is not directly a religious inspiration, or the attempt to impose a religious vision on life, will nonetheless amount to imposition.

I use the verb 'impose' because it describes overriding other wills to impose one's own will. This is a very big deal in our world, as I see things. I know that we are all aware of the 'religious will' and how it functions in the worst case scenarios (the ones we hate easily). Yet it is more interesting to see how our own will, connected as it is to our self-definition as well as our 'metaphysical assumptions' (unexamined) about 'reality', and even 'what reality wants and demands', is right now an active agent in our world(s).

Thus, to examine an extreme case (Devi) and one that seems absurd---Bowden says that any normal modern would see her as 'insane'---shines a light on our own idealism, or lack of idealism, our assumptions about the present, and our assent and complicity in the present.

The issue or fact of the will, as the motor that powers our choices, and then the choices we make and how and why we make them, all gets brought to the fore. "Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." Then get a pretty flag, the best armaments, and a spiffy uniform ... and march yourself out into the world!
________________________________

Dylan is great. You drive a Chrysler?

[Immanuel Can]

Gustav wrote:

In my own mind and way of seeing things, to discuss an Eichmann, is to discuss ourselves in the context of the unfolding general violence.

Indeed. Eichmann was one man. And his trial, if it shows nothing else, shows that the individual cannot swallow up his moral obligations by putting them inside the actions of his society.

This illustrates, in my mind at least, that at the core of all of it a very different principle functions: the straight power principle.

One cannot apply 'repentance, forgiveness, regeneration and hope' in this context.

You may be surprised to hear I agree with you about this, Gustav...there is no solution to the problems of politics without first a solution to the problem of individual humans.

It's like the old "Pogo" cartoon quote, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Society is just a collective, a reflection of who we are individually, but magnified by numbers and emphasized through the power of collective action. Society does not create the impulses that drive it; that is done in the privacy of the individual human heart.

But power is also an expression of this heart...or at least, only a tool employed in service of this heart. And that is precisely why repentance, forgiveness and hope on the social or international stage will never happen without first repentance, forgiveness, regeneration and hope in the individual human heart.

That is what is to be done: to deal with the inside of ME before attempting to deal with the World.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

The individual most certainly can, and more often than not does, 'swallow his moral obligations by putting them inside the actions of society'. Case in point: you. Or your neighbour. Or those of your church. I don't exclude myself necessarily should it seem that I am coming out with an attack. (There is really no way to attack 'the other' in my view since we are only really and always speaking, essentially, to our own self. Keep that in mind for all that follows). It seems to me that if one really wants to examine ethics and morality, one really has to be willing to get down to some of the horrible basics. If that is true then Savitri Devi is really someone to be admired: She took her ethics and morals to the farthest point. Not the area I intend to take my own and yet what her intensity illustrates, again, is that any formal ethics functions like a sword, a cutting tool. Perhaps that is why we wish to do away with hard, cutting edges?

'Moral obligation' is more often than not some oatmealy, sometimes even trite, imperatives that more often than not revolve around the wrong morals. I spent a good deal of time when in Colorado for a few summers listening to Christian talk radio. It is all very tricky and difficult to sort through but in the end the typical American Evangelical focus is incredibly limited to issues of sexual morality and such and cannot---and does not---participate in a full, dynamic, ethical and moral conversation about the reality that we live in. It can't because it doesn't know how. It fails to understand itself---that is the Christian history in Europe and the Medieval underpinning---and thus has little means to analyse itself, or history, or the present.

This seems mean-spirited yet it is not, not really: It perfectly illustrates how it is that typical Christianity totally misses the point of spirituality and the real concerns of ethics and morality. The terrible joke that must be played on the 'typical Christian' to demonstrate the perverse misconstrual of values, is necessary, but after the guffaws the hard questions still remain:

What the fuck are we really talking about? What is really valuable? What is really to be preserved? What really IS the strength of our civilisation, its achievement? What is the real area to focus in and what area should be dismissed? And this question leads invariably, if I am right, to the essential fact that a defined ethics and morality that is this-worldly must have a sharp edge. And the minute that a sharp edge is defined, one is essentially in that borderland of the fascistic. Yoga is self-fascism. Strict Catholicism the same. All disciplines have some part of this ethic. Discipline is in a sense and by definition 'fascistic'.

I have been reading Samuel Francis and his 'Essential Writings on Race'. (This all stems from interest in the American Civil War). In one of his essays he critiques a book by James Russell called 'The Germanisation of Early Medieval Christianity: A Socio-historical Approach to Religious Transformation'. (Oxford, 1994) In brief, what he desires to bring to the fore is the question of whether a religious modality will be 'world-accepting' or 'world-rejecting'. Obviously, early Christianity was pathologically world-rejecting and was also founded in a totally destructive hallucination, or death-wish, of neurotic fantasy that imagined the whole wide world would come to a cataclysmic end which really seemed only to cover over a psychological will to see a fantasy of resentment and submerged hostility play out on a cosmic level. In short to see one's enemies tortured in the hands of their loving God. The whole vision is so rife with contradictions that it becomes nearly impossible to consider it in rational terms. The only way to go through it is, perhaps, as a Jungian, and this is to restate that it is therefor 'all psychological'.

(From a review of James Russell's book):

• "Russell situates this "reinterpreting" of Christian belief and ritual not in active attempts by Germanic peoples to resist or reformulate the message disseminated to them but rather in the sociohistorical circumstances attendant on the conversion itself. The book is divided into two parts of roughly equal length, the first of which Russell uses to construct what he terms a "sociohistorical model" of religious change. Social or ideological structures particular to a given society may, he argues, incline that society to a specific form of religious expression; similarly, psychological factors (e.g. anomie or alienation arising from increasing urbanization or perceived "status dissonance") may also affect the types of cult to which individuals and communities are drawn. Societies marked by alienation or despair, or in which the bonds of community or family are weak, are predisposed by these sociopsychological characteristics towards what Russell calls "world-rejecting" religions—cults which are, in other words, soteriological and/or eschatological in nature and "universal" in their message and intended audience. (Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity are all offered as examples of such religions.) Conversely, societies which are relatively stable, enjoy a high degree of familial and communal cohesion, and deemphasize individual priorities in favor of group identification and interests, incline towards "world-accepting" "folk religiosities"—cults in which the locus of the sacral is the folk community itself. (Confucian ancestor worship, Shintoism, Arabian tribal cults, and Celto-Germanic paganism are the main examples here.) Such "folk-religious" societies, Russell argues, have no interest in soteriological promises of redemption in another world. If adherents of "world-rejecting" religions like Christianity are therefore ever to succeed in converting persons living in such cultures, they will have to modify their essential message in order to "accomodate the predominantly world-accepting ethos and world-view" of those societies (p. 103)."

(I think it has to be mentioned that Ancient Greek culture, in it early manifestations, tended to be 'life-affirming' and 'world-affirming' in the very best senses possible. Everything of tangible value and fundamental to our civilisation has come out of this focus. And much that is destructive has come from what is 'world-negating'.)

Part of saying such wicked things about Christianity is, in my view, to force us (one, someone, them, me) to reconsider what is really the mainly valuable thing about Christianity: What was done in a thousand year period when Christian (Eastern) doctrines ran up against, and were also transformed by, European paganism. In my view it is not that Christianity needs to extricate itself from this unholy blending of body fluids and return to some 'essence' or 'purity' that is said to be or understood as 'original': there is no 'original', it is all revisionist, and much of it is a strange game that is played within novelised visions of a world that never actually existed, nor will ever exist: and right there is another hurdle-of-absurdity to overcome if one want to approach a 'core of value' in the Christian traditions.

I say: Trash the lovey-dovey horse-shit, the false-universalism and the horrid false-piety, and undertake the harder work of defining a vibrant and demanding ethics and morality in a realistic, a life-affirming, and a non-sentimental post-Christianity. There is no other 'Christianity'. It is all 'post'! Christianity needs to ensconce itself within paganism---that is to say within real people in real time---and needs to jettison a vast amount of fluff and putridity that has grown up around it like weeds. Further: Christ would do very well to be revisualsed not as a weak, faggy fluff-bunny who never raises his voice and never wakes up with an erection, but very much the opposite: first a man, and second a vital man with living and real concern for ...

Well, the beginning of a definition---the act of defining, the act of deciding, the act of separating, the act of recombining---is precisely the area where one will always find oneself in the thick of all the most serious, and the hardest, ethical and moral problems. Perhaps you are right then and it should all be left up to the management team at Walmart USA or ... as it happens ... Walmart Earth. A manufacturing and distribution system that not only attends to the physical structure upon which everything rests, but will eventually assume responsibility for ideas, for ways-of-seeing, and which will mediate the very lens through which 'reality' is viewed. Is this not metaphysical in the most important sense?

But anyway the fucking bullshit and typically picayune Christian conversation, and its bullshitty universalist area of concern, has to be blown out of human consciousness ... somehow ... I don't know how.

Samuel Francis wrote (in the essay noted above): 'Organised Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it'.

Whoa, Sam, what's gotten into you man?

The cool thing about direct and contentious statements (any sort of statement really that takes a stand in something) is that they force a person to define a position in relation to it. I do not fully understand what he means. But I will say that our present culture is very certainly a Christian culture even if it seems to be rejecting the forms of Christianity or even its tenets. I just watched a Swedish film, 2005, called 'As It Is In Heaven'. (I advise you to locate a bucket nearby before you open this link). If I am forced to explain the plot, with all its sentimental inversions of Christian tropes, I will end up violently vomiting again so please excuse me as I will refrain.

But in a telling sense, at least in my view, this is what Christianity is, and what its vision is, and in a sense too where it leads: sentimental tripe. If this is the focus one will, inevitably, lose the trail to constructing an ethics and a morality that can actually effect something in the world. In every single manifestation of Evangelical Christianity---every one!---that I have experienced so far ... this is where it leads. It gets feminized and sentimentalised and perversely idealised.

[Immanuel Can]

The individual most certainly can, and more often than not does, 'swallow his moral obligations by putting them inside the actions of society'. Case in point: you. Or your neighbour. Or those of your church. I don't exclude myself necessarily

Wow. Well, somebody's unhappy about something, that's for sure.

I'm actually kind of with you, but not so much with the solution. You conclude...

It gets feminized and sentimentalised and perversely idealised.

I agree that we need more moral fortitude and a more demanding ethic, but not that we're going to get it simply from "manning up" and becoming more "pragmatic" and "unsentimental." The culture that produced the Holocaust was not particularly "feminized" or "sentimentalized," whatever else it was, and it had a pretty vigorous and demanding view of morals. It was masculinized, and not a bit soft. It was also monument of evil and cruelty.

I think the problem goes deeper than that. Human nature, whatever glories can be attributed to it, is also clearly capable of rank foulness and dark evils. We need some answer to that, I think.

"Try harder" isn't that answer.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

I hope that you will understand that to get to the essences here---and on these fora in general---requires cutting through the muck. It would be a mistake to see my post, above, as being directed at you, or anyone, or as having malicious intent. As I say it is really---ultimately---directed at myself. 'Myself' is the only locale where 'repentance, forgiveness, and regeneration' can occur. I have taken those themes because I find value in them, but as I said at the end of our last rather long and fruitful exchange: Everything has to be reconsidered. I am defining 'repentance' very differently ... and regeneration too. But so does 'traditionalism'.

I am fully aware that nazism, and Italian fascism too, operated in the realm of defining the male, and masculine, and that all warrior cultures do this. And too that we now have a 'soft' alternative, a sentimentalised and feminized alternative. Everyone on this list, and every member of our culture, has been influenced by these shifts, these transvaluations. I make no claim about what is right or good. I just think that the entire conversation is damned interesting. I am beginning to see it as the core and principle conversation of our age. And I mean this, as you know, after a reading of Richard Weaver and in the sense that Ideas Have Consequences.

I agree that we need more moral fortitude and a more demanding ethic, but not that we're going to get it simply from "manning up" and becoming more "pragmatic" and "unsentimental."

I would say that it has much more to do---quite literally---with 'manning up' and with 'pragmatism' and resisting sentimentalism (though not sentiment) than with anything else. Also, it has to do with establishing, rationally, ethical tenets and moral activities.

What I have wished to do (since no one came forward to direct the thread in any particular direction---and I waited politely 48 hours) is to forcibly move it into the area that seems most relevant. I would sure like to hear more of what you see as needed. Would the more demanding ethic simple be more attention paid to Pauline ethics? As you might guess I think everything needs to be reconsidered, perhaps especially Pauline ethics. And this of course moves in the discomfiting direction of the examination of Jewish ethics. I did say, above, and no one commented:

'Man schlägt den Juden und erschlägt den Menschen'.

To all appearances, and in no sense, has Gentile issue with Jews and Judaism and this ethic been gotten round. Is it just me or is it only all the more present?

I think the problem goes deeper than that. Human nature, whatever glories can be attributed to it, is also clearly capable of rank foulness and dark evils. We need some answer to that, I think.

That certainly accords with Christian philosophy: the basic impurity of the heart, and the distrust of the heart. But the heart (in Medieval metaphysics) is the very motor that drives ... everything.

[Immanuel Can]

The problem with any "ethics" it seems to me, is that it assumes -- at least potentially -- sound judgment and good character on the part of the one putting the ethic into action. Ethics are no better than their enactors.

Yet in light of Auschwitz, do we have any reason to suppose human beings in the natural state possess such fortitude? 148 million died in the last century, the most modern and enlightened century so far. Auschwitz was part of that. In fact, it was an expression of modern man's moral capabilities. Can we really afford to be wrong again in this century, with our vastly extended powers?

Is feminization any answer? I don't think so. I see no reason to suppose that women are better souls than men, though some people think they are. I think their expressions of viciousness tend to take more subtle forms, but I don't find them less vicious. Less powerful, maybe and differently inclined, maybe...but not better people. So I agree with your distaste for the naive idea that simply feminizing society will make us better; but back to the masculine won't help either.

We need to become different people than we are -- better people: more humble, more self-aware, less unselfish, less ruled by our egos. We need new values and a new orientation toward the world and others... That's the real direction in which hope lies.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Face it. Most people are 'evil'. You only have to look at social media. There was nothing particularly unique or unusual about the Nazis.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

But even if 'people are evil' the greatest source of deaths has been absolutist and totalitarian regimes, notably Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Those countries that had democratic-style governments, and maintained them, were responsible for far less murders.



Based on this, it would seem it is less an 'evil' individual, or an 'unethical' individual, and much more that a few dangerous persons come into a position of power. It would appear, then, that even if the ethics of the greater multitude were generally decent, and perhaps even if they weren't, these massive deaths, at least the most notorious cases, have little to do with general ethics and more to do with a sort of psychosis of leadership (uncertain how to phrase this).

I think that what occurs to me here is that it is quite possible to imagine that a generally unethical and even somewhat immoral general culture if managed through a democratic system will be the form of government least likely to engage in psychotic mass killings, or in any case they are not likely to result from those governments. This in numerous senses contradicts what I sense is your assumption, or your belief or understanding, that men of exalted ethics or high morals will avoid killing huge numbers of men for no apparent good reason.

If this is so, and if avoiding mass death is the object (you set it out as a primary and a telling evil), it may be best to allow for and even to create---and in any case to allow, to tolerate---generally corrupted populations if they are constrained by democratic-style governmental systems. And if that is so the vision of a Christian culture that is Pauline and strictly so, is somewhat irrelevant.

While one must, I think, admire the focussed and ethical European religionists and those examples of men who really do succeed in elevating themselves and holding some high ground, it seems a fact that most men don't do that nor do they wish to. I am aware that immediately after WW2 many people underwent deep self-analysis and self-searching to try to understand what happened, and why, and some Christian theologians (Helmut Thielicke comes to mind and his book 'Nihilism, It's Origin and Nature---With a Christian Answer'), but as it turns out it appears that the post-war era delineates a rapid retreat away from Christian forms, or Christian restraints, and Christian idealism, except in those forms that have escaped from ecclesiastical organisation (which become sentimentalised in 'liberalism'). Christianity, according to most who offer opinions on the subject, is over-all rather dead. The form is there but few really believes in the content. Some say that even those who wish to uphold it and deeply regret its general influence over people has diminished so (Peter Hitchens for example).

This though is somewhat contradicted by the rapid and continuing rise of some Christian forms such as Pentecostalism. And certainly religionsim on a world-scale is up, except in Europe. Islam continues to rapidly expand. Yet it seems to me that Pentecostalism is such a strange bastard-version of what I would choose as 'Christianity' (the Anglicans seem to have arrived at a very decent form, in my view: it is highly intelligent in any case! You can always talk with an Anglican!) Pentecostalism is strangely an emotionalised and a 'feminized' forms. It is expanding quickly in Latin America and Africa too: sub-intellectual cultures.

The best bet therefor, if one's desired end is a culture that manages to refrain from mass killing, may well be a generally 'sinning' culture of fornicators, queers, scoffers, the ignorant, and non-spiritual and even atheistic people who have no time for hate and rage because they are fully engaged in pleasure and entertainment. And then a 'democratic' governmental structure and a sophisticated and (best if 'sustainable') governmental and economic system that manages them.

It really does seem to me that there are examples---very exalted examples---of sincere, developed, rich, and extremely intelligent Christian (and post-Christian) men whose discourse is superlative and who are highly admirable for their attainment. And no one cares about them nor thinks about them. What they say, and what they might recommend, fade into irrelevance. What they think and what they value ... simply does not appear on the radar of anyone.
_____________

*The graph is only direct battle deaths.

[Melchior]

Why don't we hear much about how evil the Japanese were?

[Immanuel Can]

The Japanese were an interesting case. Their treatment of prisoners was, by our ethics, beyond brutal. But according to their view of things, especially in light of the Bushido Code -- which was their code of ethics -- what they did was reasonable and ethical.

So which way was it? Were they evil (as per Western views) or noble (as per traditional Japanese warrior values)?

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

It appears that you answered your own question ...

[Immanuel Can]

Is your assumption, then, that they were both good and evil? That what they did to the captured servicemen was both good and bad? That they are both heroes and villains?

I know that's politically correct as a view: but the more important question is this -- is it true?

Was Eichmann excusable by his cultural location, or was he still evil, though his society may have thought he was not?

I know which side I'm taking.