In Politics, Obedience and Support are the Same

This obituary of the young soldier who was dragooned into hanging Adolph Eichmann (the author of the obituary seems to have no sense of the fact that execution by long-drop hanging is a technical operation, that is supposed to break the neck of the person being killed, as opposed to strangling him to death, and that Eichmann’s reluctant executioner had no experience or training in this task, and therefore ended up doing the latter to his charge) reminds me inevitably of Hannah Arendt’s haunting book Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Subsequent scholarship has revealed that Arendt was too agnostic regarding Eichmann’s phony claims that he wasn’t a fanatical anti-Semite, but Arendt’s central thesis – that Eichmann was an intellectual nonentity who performed his monstrous bureaucratic tasks so well in large part because of an inability to think critically about anything – remains, I believe, both accurate as a matter of the historical record, and especially germane to our present circumstances.

Indeed the striking thing about almost all of the top Nazis is that they were mediocrities and failures, who took advantage of the special circumstances in which they found themselves to wreak revenge on a world that had judged them to be what they in fact were.

This combination of resentment against the world and an unwillingness or inability to think critically about anything represents the emotional and intellectual core of fascism, and remains, I suggest, very relevant to our current interests.

You yourself claimed not the actuality but only the potentiality of equal guilt on the part of all who lived in a state whose main political purpose had become the commission of unheard-of crimes. And no matter through what accidents of exterior or interior circumstances you were pushed onto the road of becoming a criminal, there is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done. We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potentialities of those around you. You told your story in terms of a hard-luck story, and, knowing the circumstances, we are, up to a point, willing to grant you that under more favorable circumstances it is highly unlikely that you would ever have come before us or before any other criminal court. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and Support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”

Eichmann in Jerusalem