Reading Eichmann in 2020s America

Hannah Arendt and the Covid/Vax Disaster

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is an important work, but I hadn’t read it myself until last year, when I saw a fine film on its writing and reception, titled Hannah Arendt.

The book is on the Jerusalem trial of the Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann, who coordinated a good deal of the round-up and transport of Jews to the extermination camps. He eluded capture in ‘45, and hid with his family in Argentina, until discovered and kidnapped to Israel by the Mossad in 1960. The New Yorker hired Arendt, likely on the basis of her groundbreaking explorations of antisemitism and modern despotism in the Origins of Totalitarianism (1952), to report and reflect on his subsequent trial. Eichmann is a slight expansion of the several long essay-reports she published with them in early 1963.

The Initial Controversy

These were met with outrage from many. What was most objected to were 1.) Arendt’s tentative exploration of the idea of the banality of evil, as represented by Eichmann, and 2.) her mentioning the extent to which many Jewish leaders had cooperated with the gathering & transport operations, including their not telling deportees what they knew or strongly suspected, that the real destination was extermination. Here are a few passages which illustrate these features of her book. (As they are among thirteen passages we’ll be discussing, I’ve given each a letter, for the sake of easier reference.)

First, on Eichmann’s banality:

A.) The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and our moral standard of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied…that this new type of criminal…commits his crimes under circumstances which make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. (276)

On other pages Arendt indicated he was culpable, and at all times could have been aware that his crimes were crimes; however, one can see how a passage like this provokes difficult questions, and might be summarily rejected.

B.) …[He had a] horrible gift for consoling himself with clichés [which] did not leave him in the hour of his death. (55)

C.) He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. [His case illustrates]…the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil… (288, emphasis added)

Second, there are the passages on the failure of many Jewish leaders:

D.) I have dwelt on this chapter of the story [the basic cooperation of so many local Jewish leaders in the smooth execution of the process], which the Jerusalem trial failed to put before the eyes of the world in its true dimensions, because it offers the most striking insight into the totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society—not only in Germany but in almost all countries, not only among the persecutors but also among the victims. (125-126)

E.) As far as Eichmann could see, no one protested, no one refused to cooperate. “Immerzu fahren heir die Leute zu ihrem eigenen Bergräbnis” (Day in day out the people here leave for their own funeral), a Jewish observer put it in Berlin in 1943. (115)

That such passages would be met with some objection is natural, but the very high degree of outrage is in retrospect difficult to account for. Everyone should have known that Arendt was going to engage in philosophic reflection on the trial, and her reporting, both on the trial and on the aspects of the genocide it touched upon was quite accurate, with her critics only finding a few missteps, and these usually having more to do with phrasing than with the facts.

Clearly, the explosion of controversy—portrayed in the film by her receiving a two-inch-high stack of supportive letters, and a foot-high stack of condemnatory ones--had something to do with the larger Jewish struggle to come to terms with the Holocaust. Eichmann touched a nerve because it seems to have been the first highly-publicized work to display how strange, i.e., how not simply explainable by categories like “total evil” or “antisemitism,” the genocide’s operation in many instances had been. (Arendt had herself used and developed those terms in her Totalitarianism book.)

I have not engaged in a careful study of the range of responses, but from the film and my own reading of the book, it appears to me that it was a kind of collective freak-out on the part of a majority of Jewish intellectuals, eliciting hyperbolic critiques even from usually-wise luminaries like Norman Podhoretz and Saul Bellow. However, this emotional side of the response was to some degree stirred-by and at all points mixed-with, a coordinated campaign to misrepresent her articles, and in essence, to deliver a stern reprimand from the Jewish community—and perhaps especially from the more secular side of it--to a “wayward” member.¹ To a narrow mind, “all publicity is good,” but I agree with the evident view of the film’s screenwriters that the “controversy” was, and particularly for the intellectuals caught up in it, a shameful episode.

Reading Arendt in the 2020s

I’d certainly recommend Eichmann to anyone interested in the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, for it could serve as an entryway into a host of books and issues, being very well-informed about those aspects of the larger story which touch upon Eichmann’s role. Arendt appears to have mastered most of the relevant historical work available by 1962. And obviously, Arendt’s thought itself is a subject worthy studying: she is an important figure of Heidegger-influenced philosophy, a major theorist of totalitarianism, and a seminal inspirer of the ideal of participatory democracy. Finally, we should note that she did develop the snatches of her philosophizing on evil in Eichmann further—for that book is mainly one of reporting--in the 1966 book of essays titled Responsibility and Judgment.

Arendt’s books will remain valuable in every age, but admittedly, I turned to Eichmann not merely because I saw that film, but because of its relevance to the mission of this substack. Arendt did strenuous intellectual work in the 40s and early 50s, and again in the early 60s, to come to terms with what had happened under the Nazis—and with what was still happening under the Soviets—and in doing so was pushed to develop new understandings of antisemitism, a theory of totalitarianism, and eventually, in the wake of Eichmann, new approaches to the question of moral responsibility. Similarly, I am working to try to understand what happened—and is still happening—during the Covid-Vax/Disaster, a set of operations, foul-ups, and cover-ups done at the direction of, or with the connivance of, our own elites. This set of crimes and sins, in addition to starkly reducing and threatening our freedoms,² have together taken at least two to five million lives and injured hundreds times as many more.

I profess, and with the authority my doctorate in political science, my close work on core American documents and thinkers, and a book on totalitarianism I co-edited, that this multi-faceted Disaster was an episode of apostasy-from-the-American-Political-Tradition and totalitarianism-flirtation. And I can only use the word “episode” by assuming that it will eventually be largely repudiated, as so far it has not.

Thus, as Arendt was confronted with the surprise of Eichmann’s character, with its not fitting what the categories of total evil, antisemitism, and crimes against humanity would lead us to expect, but still seeking to take its shape from a societal appearance-of-normality, I seek to face the way nearly all the leaders of our putatively liberal-democratic societies, whether of the left, the right, or the “non-partisan” center, permitted the sins and crimes of the Covid/Vax Disaster, and still block investigation or open discussion of many of them. Perhaps the hardest thing to face is that they have starkly truncated—either through outright censorship or the devious use of what I call suppression—the freedom of the citizenry to discuss the overall crime. And part of the reason Eichmann’s case appears relevant to our situation, is that it looks like a pathological clinging to the “normality-pattern” and status signals of the 1980s-2010s period enabled the corruptions that so many of our leaders have proven themselves entangled in.

So for the remainder of this piece, I will be highlighting certain quotations from Eichmann (and from the closely-related Responsibility and Judgment) on the topics of A.) Widespread Complicity, B.) Judgment with an eye to our situation.

Two Crimes against Humanity, Nazi and Covidian

Before proceeding, however, it is necessary to provide a sketched comparison of the Holocaust and the Covid/Vax Disaster. I take it as obvious that the latter was in several basic ways a lesser crime, but also that insofar as the category “crime against humanity” is one which may be used consistently, it must belong to it.

Again, I hold that both of these crimes had a close relation to totalitarianism. The Holocaust proved the end-goal of one of the two main types of 20^th-century totalitarianism, the Nazi kind, and the Covid/Vax Disaster was part of an exploration of a 21st-century kind of totalitarianism, and for a time became the primary method of it. This new system is, or would have been, characterized by managerial-ist rule, pseudo-democracy, internet manipulation, bio-security, Woke dogma, digital currency, and a potent combination of plausible deniability and self-deluding denial. The trial-balloon-like steps into it were taken by large segments of our progressivist and centrist elites, in coordination with elements of the West’s intelligence agencies, and perhaps—it cannot yet be ruled out—under the guidance of a thoroughly organized conspiracy.

For the differences, two stand out.

First, the Nazis’ organized exterminations were a clear crime, murder, and additionally, the lion’s share of the murders were done on racist genocidal lines. Even though Hitler kept up a façade of deniability as the murders were under way, such that they were not announced to the German people, such that victims who wanted to believe they were merely being forcibly relocated could do so, and such that policemen, soldiers, and citizens could similarly lie to themselves, we subsequently learned precisely when and how he ordered them. So unlike with the killings in the Covid/Vax Disaster, whether by the Frankenvirus itself, the lockdown side-effects, the hospital protocols, or the Covid-19 “vaxxes,” with the Nazi exterminations the intent to murder, the victims of it, and the agents of it are clear. Moreover, we pretty much know who prepared the way for a government which would accept Hitler’s genocide order, and we know who carried it out at the higher levels, including who arranged the gathering and transport (a group of top administrators which included Eichmann). And while there is an ongoing debate about whether ordinary Germans of the time who did not take risks to try to stop what they surely suspected was happening should share part of the culpability, i.e., be counted to some degree as “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” such a debate cannot alter the clarity of the main crime.

The contrast is perhaps most evident in the fact that, assuming Covid-dissidents like myself are right that the Covid-vaxxes and the mandated hospital protocols killed several millions and perhaps even more, a majority of the survivors of the victims are unaware of (or in denial about) how they were killed, or are unsure. Moreover, even where we are sure that a killing occurred, we are unsure about the intention and culpability of the multiple agents. For example, what crime—or what legal sin--is a pharmacy worker who continued to administer thousands of the injections after she knew there were serious concerns about their safety, guilty of? Or, if she never knew because she refused to read any dissident accounts, what is she guilty of? It isn’t murder in the first or second degree, that is clear—but little else is.³ Or, what crime are those officials at the FDA who were silent about the safety signals, who thus let hundreds of million of persons walk into radically unacceptable risks, somewhat like letting them walk into a field of widely dispersed land-mines, guilty of? Is it “gross negligence mass manslaughter,” or “dangerous act mass manslaughter?” These are technical terms of legal culpability, but maybe a real reckoning with this new kind of Crime against Humanity, one of negligence, dispersed responsibility, ambiguous intention, and capability of being done under a putative liberal-democracy, will eventually necessitate new terms.

Second, while the Nazis committed many more crimes than the extermination operation, their set of crimes does not approach the sheer complexity of the Covid/Vax Disaster’s set. Note the number of different ones I have hinted at merely in these few paragraphs. Notice also my use of the term “Disaster,” which implies a situation in which impacts go beyond all control and specified-intention, even though the bloodiest disasters are usually human-caused or facilitated. While the spirit revolted against the idea that the Holocaust was even possible, so that many resisted accepting what the facts pointed to for some time, the mechanics of the act itself were not difficult to comprehend, whereas with the Covid/Vax Disaster, we are struggling just to get our minds around the thing itself. What is the act? Is there a main one? We must coin new terms, distinguish and then re-connect different crimes, and even lay out menus of different possibilities of what happened within several of the categories.

Take just one example. Above, I alluded to the fact—established by various studies—that the lockdowns killed masses of persons, via suicides, addictions, etc., and of course, the mental health and developmental harms which did not result in deaths were serious harms also. But this was a crime which most people thought, and still think, was “done with good intentions,” even though dissidents now know that there are strong reasons to think that deep-state actors slipped these “counter-measures” as part of general reset of our societies’ expectations, into government decisions.⁴ What did these actors really intend, and really seek to nudge and then shove our nations into? The debate about that will run for decades, perhaps never to be resolved. Hitler and his men, with their open criminality serving to demonstrate their “toughness” according to the Nazi ideal, never could permanently bury such secrets (and often didn’t want to), but our guilty elites, whose despotic intentions were well-cloaked, and much more tentative, might be able to. And yet, it could be that their sins/crimes respecting lockdowns were merely ones of group-think and agency-aggrandizement, with the CYA actions following close behind. If so, most of the main actors intended nothing more nefarious than, say, the kinds of crimes the bosses of the tobacco companies, as portrayed in the Michael Mann film The Insider, orchestrated.

Will we ever learn, this side of Judgment Day, the true account of their intentions?

And here we’re speaking just of the complexity of the lockdown aspect of the Disaster!

But enough. I’ve made plain the difficulty of comparing these two crimes against humanity. And in doing so I’ve shown that those dissidents who notice their similarities can also admit these difficulties and differences, and thus not be guilty of equating them.

Widespread Complicity

The father of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, was a leader all the world owes some debt of gratitude to, since his giving his people political hope was crucial to the defeat of Soviet communism. (See Bark & Gress, A History of West Germany, vol. 1) But alas, he once said that only “a small percentage” of the Germans had been Nazis, and that a “great majority [had been] happy to help their Jewish neighbors when they could.”

Arendt labels this “the exact opposite [of the truth],” and continues with this:

F.) …it [the Eichmann trial prosecution team] carefully avoided touching upon this highly explosive matter—upon the almost ubiquitous complicity, which had stretched far beyond the ranks of Party membership. (18)

Let’s not debate here the extent of ordinary citizens’ complicity in the Covid/Vax-Disaster’s sins and crimes, and simply note that nearly all of our larger corporations, state governments, and universities, fully cooperated in what the Covidians pushed in terms of the lockdowns, the mask-requirements, the propaganda dissemination, and usually, even in the censorings and vax-mandates. And again, to this day nearly all of our media leaders, even at “alternative” channels, forbid reporting on the claims of mass-deaths from Covid-vaxxes.

Sure, none of this descended to the level of 30s-era German complicity in the continuance of an openly totalitarian and racist regime, or to the darker level yet of 40s-era German complicity in genocide.

But nonetheless, is our difference from those Germans quite so clear? Read on:

G.) Is this [Arendt had just described Eichmann’s account of his ‘normal/friendly relations’ with the Jewish leader Storfer] a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity? Or is it simply the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal (Dostoevksi once mentions in his diaries that in Siberia, among scores of murderers, rapists, and burglars, he never met a single man who would admit that he had done wrong) who cannot afford to face reality because his crime has become part and parcel of it? Yet, Eichmann’s case is different from that of the ordinary criminal…[he] needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. And that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other… But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime…it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character. (51-52, emphasis added)

With that last sentence, let’s change merely four words, and one phrase:

But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for career, that even now, five years after the commencement of the Covid/Vax Disaster…it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the American national character.

Young American, are you the sort who wishes to be a part of academia, media, government, law, medicine, or big business? Tell me, how is your own situation all that different from the one described by Arendt?

H.) The youth of Germany is surrounded, on all sides and in all walks of life, by men in positions of authority and in public office who are very guilty indeed but who feel nothing of the sort. The normal reaction to this state of affairs should be indignation, but indignation would be quite risky—not a danger to life and limb but definitely a handicap in a career. (251)

Do you think it will all that different in institutions controlled by “conservatives?” Do read my stack.

Or do you assume it must be different with the churches and synagogues? Their personnel didn’t impose the Disaster, nor should we charge them as we must the media types with the duty of reporting on it, at least to the same degree of duty, but nonetheless, I must regrettably report that I have not seen signs of a fundamental difference so far.

The Necessity of Judgment

How might Arendt speak of these duty-abdicators?

I.) In brief, what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it. Without taking into account the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to understand what actually happened. (24, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship” in Responsibility and Judgment)

I do not accuse my main set of “fellows,” the “conservatives,” of sins quite as serious as those Arendt is accusing her fellow intellectuals of in this passage. For that group saw the Nazi Regime of ’33 to ’37 for what it was, but refused to clearly stand against it before the public. Our situation is and was different—it did not involve a thuggish and racist party in charge of the government, but a much more dispersed and denial-afflicted collection of villains. Also, the conservatives’ failure to provide straight-speaking to the public cannot be traced to their belief in some version of Historicism.

But what they’ll tell you, dear reader, if you have the bad taste to ask, is that my accusing the likes Fox News, The Federalist, The Claremont Institute, and many others of suppression, shows that I’m judgmental and fringe, when in fact, it is they who have done the truly bizarre thing, that of pretending—and for years!--that a huge story two-thirds of the nation talks about in private cannot be talked about in public.

Listen rather to Arendt, who said that the only real defender of civilization is the man or woman who won’t refrain from making a judgment:

J.) There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging that has nothing whatever to do with the biblical “Judge not, that ye be not judged”… For behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done. (19, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship” in Responsibility and Judgment)

One need not be a Historicist, of course, to fall into that kind of fatalism. One just has to succumb to a general loss of faith, perhaps in God and His caring, but definitely in human choices which can by reason be judged as just or unjust.

K.) [Eichmann held that] …What he had done was a crime only in retrospect, and he had always been a law-abiding citizen, because Hitler’s orders, which he had certainly executed to the best of his ability, had possessed the “force of law” in the Third Reich. …Those who today told Eichmann that he could have acted differently simply did not know, or had forgotten, how things had been. He did not want to be one of those who now pretended that “they had always been against it,” whereas in fact they had been very eager to do what they were told to do. However, times change, and he…had “arrived at different insights.” What he had done he had done, he did not want to deny it; rather, he proposed “to hang myself in public as a warning for all anti-Semites on this earth.” By this he did not mean to say that he regretted anything: “Repentance is for little children.” (Sic!) (24)

Is that what our conservative and progressivist/centrist leaders guilty of facilitating the Suppression, or what our medical experts and administrators guilty of much worse, intend to whisper to themselves for the remainder of their lives?

Are they going to deny that it was in their power to have chosen differently? They should recall Eichmann’s “judgmental” opposites, such as the isolated dissidents of Germany, and especially, the not-at-all isolated ones of Denmark:

L.) There were individuals in Germany who from the very beginning of the regime and without ever wavering were opposed to Hitler; no one knows how many there were of them —perhaps a hundred thousand, perhaps many more, perhaps many fewer—for their voices were never heard. (103)

M.) Politically and psychologically, the most interesting aspect of this incident is perhaps the role played by the German authorities in Denmark, their obvious sabotage of orders from Berlin. It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They met resistance based on principle, and their “toughness” had melted like butter in the sun… (175)

The other day, I read this from nurse Kimberly Overton in What the Nurses Saw: An Investigation into Systematic Medical Murders That Took Place in Hospitals During the COVID Panic and the Nurses Who Fought Back to Save Their Patients:

In my opinion, the nurses could have stopped so much of this early on if we just all collectively stood up and said, “No.” The moment they told us our patient couldn’t have an advocate at their side, we should have stood up and said, “Absolutely not.” We really could have stopped this. (126)

(BTW, I don’t agree that “medical murders” is the best term for most of the unnecessary in-hospital Covid deaths, usually caused by mandated protocols, but there is evidence that these kinds of deaths constitute 75-95% of the Covid-death total!)

The core lesson I’d derive from quote M.) is that real conservatism, democracy-defense, and Biblical religion, will ever aim to make our societies more like the Danish one of the 40s than the German, and more like the American one Nurse Overton had expected to assert itself in 2020.

Our Moral Collapse?

Though many more early deaths, particularly from new cancer patterns, are on the way, the deepest harms to us from the Covid/Vax Disaster will be the spiritual ones. While America in 2025 is dominated by Trump’s good populist-conservative fight against a corrupt and denial-besotted establishment, Eichmann’s application to our time reveals serious sickness of the soul festering on both sides of the political divide.

Our leaders are shunning repentance.

We still cannot rule out a most-horrid possibility for 2025, of the “conservative” media and political class deciding to continue their part in the Suppression, forever, and perhaps even regardless of what Kennedy and Trump decide to do.

Nor can we yet say what those two will do.

There have been so many disappointments that top Covid-dissidents like Steve Kirsch in fact now despair of the toxic mRNA meds ever being removed from the market.

And traitors remain in charge, everywhere. Consider the fact that Jim Cramer still has a job, still is presented by his network as an aspect of our televised “normality.”

Thus, the square truth about our society is right there in Arendt’s commentary on post-war Germany: “mendacity” and a “practice of lying self-deception,” have become “integral to” the character cultivated by those who hold power in America, including on the right and even including in religious institutions. Arendt would of course call us to judge that case by case, but still, we must admit that this pattern is now typical.

Our Dissidence

At Dissident Conservative, I will continue to explore how the works of various thinkers on the totalitarianism of the 20^th century apply to our situation. And because our 2020s flirting with a novel form of totalitarianism partook of patterns usually closer to those of the communist regimes than to the Nazi one, I expect it will be writers like Havel and Solzhenitsyn who will ultimately help us more than the likes of Arendt can.

Nonetheless, we have much to learn from Arendt. I find myself moved by her honest witness to 1.) the facts of the Holocaust itself, to 2.) the aspects of Eichmann’s character which suggest that we cannot neatly locate genocide-capable evil over-there (with the Nazis) and separate it out from many typical patterns of modern life, and finally, to 3.), the tendency of our sophisticates to flinch from judgment of individuals and their specific injustices and abdications, and often, to substitute for it declarations of “collective” guilt which appear penetrating and serious, but which in fact let the key sins slide:

N.) When all are guilty, nobody is. (Responsibility and Judgment, 147)

As Arendt’s witness and thought disturbed many of the appointed guardians of moral seriousness of her day, I highly recommend, and in open judgment against our own caste of cowards who write the “serious commentary,” reading Eichmann in Jerusalem in 2020s America.

1. “Four separate Jewish organizations hired scholars to go through her text, line by line, in order to discredit it and find mistakes though most of them turned out to be minor: incorrect dates and misspelled names.” (from the introduction by Amos Elon, xx.)

2. See Aaron Kheriaty, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Bio-Security State, and my Alex-Bereson-influenced “We Know What You Did Last Summer.”

3. I accept that there may have been handfuls of scientists who inserted depopulation-ist features into the novel mRNA meds, but such conspiracies must have been small; that is why I resist using the slogan some dissidents have adopted, that “Mistakes Were Not Made,” a slogan that implies clear intention to murder on the part of most of the agents.

4. Start with Michael Senger, then peek into the more detailed work of Debbie Lerman and Sasha Latypova. Lerman has a new book out.