I Don't Know How People Came To Think That "the Banality Of Evil" Means "evil People Are People Too".

I don't know how people came to think that "the banality of evil" means "evil people are people too".

That's also true but it's not what the banality of evil means.

The term was coined by Hannah Arendt in her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the "final solution" in the Holocaust.

It describes the way in which the Nazis at large and Eichmann in particular have turned the horrendous act of mass murder into just another job, disconnecting themselves morally and emotionally from their actions.

Before the death camps and gas chambers, Nazi soldiers simply shot Jews into mass graves by the hundreds of thousands. It was a lot cheaper and faster, but it caused great psychological distress for the murderers who pulled the trigger.

The leadership's solution was a massively upscaled version of the "gas vans" they used to mass murder hundreds of thousands of Germans with disabilities and mental health issues.

Shooting bound civilians in point blank range over and over is something you can't just pretend you're not doing or is no big deal. But if you're just the guy who sorts people into groups. Or just the guy that funnels them into a room. Or just the guy who opens a cannister on the roof. It's much easier to distance yourself from what you know is happening.

The same principle applies to much lesser evils, like soldiers operating drones from a distance, or insurance workers denying coverage for life-saving treatment.

More Posts from Ilytreasurelily and Others

3 months ago

companies make billions from you thinking you're ugly btw. only ugly thing is their bottom line. log out of tiktok right now.

2 months ago

haaate when i actually find advertisements funny. makes me feel dirty . makes me feel impure


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1 month ago

Let’s go on vacation to eat a ton of good food and have hot hotel sex

3 months ago

'he would not fucking say that' maybe he would if he knew he was starring in his very own porn fic for the sole purpose of delighting some freaks on archive of our own dot org. maybe he'd play it up for the cameras. ever consider that

4 months ago

cant even enjoy my somno kink. because of woke

1 month ago

Human Pet Guy is actually just a natural extreme in the evolution of a fetish porn author b/c it's a very well know fact that if you write a lot of fetish porn, you will inevitably end up writing a story that is basically "Fetish World: the World where everyone does my Fetish" and that's all fun and games but if you're a huge nerd (likely) you'll probably end up asking yourself how Fetish World could even be possible when obviously it would be impossible in the current sociopolitical order so now you're walking through all the political and economic changes that would be possible to enable Fetish World and before you know it you've spent way more time on worldbuilding than you have on writing the actual porn. Cybersmith simply takes this one step further. He thought through all the steps needed to make Fetish World possible and then decided those steps made enough sense that he would go out of his way to advocate for the creation of Fetish World in real life which is, and I really cannot emphasize this enough, completely fucking insane. It's such a funny concept honestly like imagine if someone read a bunch of Omegaverse fanfic and then went on Shark Tank to pitch them on bioengineering men who can get ass pregnant

4 months ago

there are two competing sects on this website - one that uses the word "spicy" to mean "neurodivergent" and one that uses the word "spicy" to mean "sexual content." i do not like either of them

1 month ago

Average British Fantasy Author of the 20th Century: Born in Hong Kong, raised in Singapore, Kingston and Oxford, he kissed his first girl at the tender age of 38. He spent 23 years obsessively writing notes for his epic masterwork, the Sword of Gormenlia series, with elements drawn from Indian mysticism, Arthurian mythos, Surrealist poetry, Victorian racism and Radical beliefs[?]. He died in Cyprus where he owned the world's most beautiful houseboat.

Average American Fantasy Author of the 20th Century: Born on the border between Ohio and Montana, Wizjeremiah VanderMcDercken, better known by his pseudonym John "Wizard" Whiteman, was raised in a ghost town and was the only citizen of his county who could read. At the age of 14, he stole a car and drove 30 hours straight to New York City to send his first story "The Alien was Really a Man" to Astounding Stories, for which he was paid a whopping 12$. A string of successes followed, including "The Man was Really a Robot" "The Alien was Really a Wizard" and "The Wizard is Really a Man When You Think About It". He harassed Samuel R. Delany for twelve years over a mild criticism of one of his now out-of-print novels. Died in Yonkers where he had a condo.

Average Canadian Fantasy Author of the 20th Century: Born just outside of Toronto

Average French Fantasy Author of the 20th Century: Despite publishing over 170 novels over a period of fifty years, no one outside of France, or indeed within France, knows who Jean Messac is. Left on the steps of a convent in the south of France, he soon learned to hate the nuns, the books in the local library, Parisians, Americans, specifically the citizens of Syria, the Dominican Republic and Bulgaria, the French literary establishment, Regionalist writers, Sartre, De Gaulle, Casimir, anyone who appeared on TV, Radio, Newspapers and Photographs. He lived in a shoebox gifted to him as a joke from André Breton. He was a high school teacher and wrote for a variety of magazines and publishers, was institutionalized three times and was a Majdanek survivor. His books have all been translated in Russia and Japan following a popular JRPG adapting his saga "Pox-Children of the Kamchadals". He died in the same city where he spent his entire life at the age of 64.

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ilytreasurelily - hey staples centre wtf is up
hey staples centre wtf is up

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