In politics, obedience and support are the same

For the last few years, I’ve had the students in my seminar on criminal punishment read Eichmann in Jerusalem. The final passage of that book has been much on my mind lately, especially when I consider the people among us now to whom it could be addressed with at least considerable justice:

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.”