Beyond Banality: Eichmann, Deceit, and Evil

null, Matthew Sharpe

Hannah Arent claimed Adolf Eichmann embodied a thoughtless banality of evil, whose crimes were not driven by "indoctrination of any kind".  Eichmann's Argentine interviews and political testament, "The Others Have Spoken, Now I Want to Speak!" show that he was a Nazi ultra, whose faith in genocidal Nazi ideology did not waver after the collapse of the Third Reich.  What then becomes of the idea of the "banality of evil", and what does Eichmann's case point towards, in terms of philosophical understandings of evil?