Published in Spanish in the blog Polis—Política y cultura
Translated by Oded Balaban balaban@research.haifa.ac.il
One of Hannah Arendt's most misunderstood themes is also one of the best known. We are referring to the "banality of evil." There are even those who imagine that the great political philosopher thought evil was banal. Those of us who have followed the development of Arendt's thought know, however, that the concept of banality is a derivative of Kant's concept of the radical nature of evil.
THE EICHMANN CASE
As is well known, the proposition concerning the banality of evil was elaborated by Arendt by observing the personality and listening to the opinions expressed by Adolf Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem. Regarding banality, some believed that Arendt was trying to minimize the crimes committed by Eichmann. This is false: Arendt agreed with the death penalty sentence applied to the accused. In the last paragraph of the epilogue, Arendt wrote her personal sentence: hanging. Nothing less. It is worth quoting the paragraph in full, for therein lies the essence of Arendt's argument about the banality of evil. As if addressing Eichmann directly, she wrote:
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. Politics is not like the nursery; obedience and Support are the same in politics. 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 many 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.[1]
Arendt probably did not know that Eichmann was an actor. His strategy was to present himself at the trial as a victim of circumstances, and not as one of those responsible for the Holocaust. A simple cog in a death machine, a man who was only carrying orders and could in no way be held responsible for the genocide.
Arendt did not know much about Eichmann's life. After her book, historians like Hans Mommsen, studying the biography of the accused, were able to conclude that Eichmann was an anti-Semite and, therefore, one of those responsible for the collective murder that had taken place in the gas chambers.
However, beyond the person of Eichmann, Arendt tried to show that there were indeed people who only limited themselves, as if they were automatons, to carrying out orders and who, under other circumstances, would not have been the murderers they became. Arendt was not benevolent towards such people. What mattered was what an individual had done and not what he might not have done if things had gone differently.
Each being is responsible for himself, and his actions was Arendt's verdict. There are, to be sure, extenuating circumstances, but according to Arendt, in Eichmann's case, there were none. That he would have acted like an automaton? That does not matter. Everyone is responsible whether he chooses to be an automaton or a human being. For that, and nothing else, he had to die. Where, then, does the banality of evil lie? Although it may seem tautology, the banality of evil resides in its banalization. That is to say: evil will never be banal, but it can be banalized.
For example, a soldier of an invading army who kills enemy soldiers in battle cannot be accused of murder. But if that soldier kills defenseless people, soldiers already surrendered, rapes women, sets fire to houses—that soldier is a murderer. And if he has received orders to commit these crimes? Likewise, he is guilty of not having rebelled against war crimes that any professional soldier should know about. Obeying an illegal order does not absolve anyone.
War is in itself a crime, an anti-political pacifist would tell us. But there are war crimes, and those who give and who receive orders are responsible for those crimes. To say then, "I killed because I was ordered to do so," is to convert a murder into the simple fulfillment of an order—into a banal act. And as most murderers will always resort to arguments to justify their murders, almost every murder could be banalized because the banality of evil comes from the inability to feel guilty. Let us repeat: There is no banality without trivialization.
Eichmann tried to trivialize, like most murderers, his murders. Through his alibi, he tried to appear innocent. In many cases, and this was Eichmann's case, such an attempt might even increase his guilt. First, the perpetrator committed a crime. Second, he tried to banalize it to himself and others.
THE FILBINGER CASE
Sometime after the Eichmann case, in the Germany of the economic miracle and democratic consolidation, a discussion similar to the one Arendt tried to stimulate in Israel and the USA took place. I refer to the now forgotten, but at the time much publicized, Filbinger case
Hans Karl Filbinger (1913-2007) was a judge during the Nazi era. After being rehabilitated, he became a CDU (Christian Democratic Union) politician and Minister-President of the state of Baden-Württemberg (1966-1978).
In the eyes of his many supporters, Filbinger represented conservative values (Christian, patriarchal, authoritarian, religious, patriotic) and won elections with an overwhelming majority. But in 1978, the actor Rolf Hochhuth denounced him for having been one of the most implacable jurists of the Nazi regime, calling him a "terrible jurist" (a term applied in post-war Germany to jurists in Hitler's service). This accusation would have gone unnoticed if Filbinger himself had not filed a complaint against the actor. It was then that the press discovered the politician's tortuous past.
As a navy judge, Filbinger had sentenced deserting sailors to death. The court proceedings, initiated by Filbinger himself, proved that the term "terrible jurist" was perfectly applicable to him. The CDU had no alternative but to dismiss the patriarch. Incidentally, he was not sentenced to prison or anything else. He was lucky. During the Eichmann trial, he would have been sentenced to death.
What was most striking was Filbinger's utter inability to come to terms with his past. Although his children distanced themselves from him, he continued, up to the time of his death, to maintain that he had been a victim of a plot hatched in the GDR (East Germany-Deutsche Demokratische Republik-). With this denial, Filbinger joined a long line of post-Nazis incapable of coming to terms with the reality of his life. He had erased it from his mind and thus from his biography.
Why do I recall here the now almost forgotten Filbinger case? For one reason only. Filbinger, like Eichmann, tried to banalize evil. But Filbinger did not use Eichmann's argument ("I was only carrying out orders") but a more refined one: "I was only enforcing the laws". As Filbinger said in an interview to Der Spiegel: "I am not responsible for the bad laws. My job was only to enforce them." With these words, the banalization of evil became the legalization of evil.
Indeed, from a purely legal point of view, Filbinger had committed no crime. His fault was moral: blindly obeying the laws of a dictatorship without considering that a dictatorship, because it is a dictatorship, is unconstitutional and, therefore, illegal. Laws dictated by a dictatorship can only be legal for the supporters of a dictatorship. And here, we come up against one of the most controversial issues in public and private law: the relationship between legality and legitimacy.
LEGALITY AND LEGITIMACY
The subject was dealt with in depth by the jurist Carl Schmitt for whom legality does not cover the whole space of legitimacy so something can be legitimate and not be legal simultaneously. There, without mentioning it, Schmitt resorted to notions coined philosophically by Immanuel Kant. The difference is that while for Schmitt, legitimacy and legality were opposing terms, for Kant, they were inter-determined concepts.
Although a passionate advocate of constitutional law, Kant was not a legalist. Laws, according to Kant, must be respected because they come from practical reason, that is, from life experiences. From this arises morality, and from morality, religion and law. Thus, according to Kant, laws are affiliated with reason, and morality makes law. When there is discordance between law and morality, it means that something is wrong with the laws. From this observation, Kant deduced one of his most famous maxims: "Do all that the laws prescribe, but do not do all that the laws permit". That is to say, beyond legality, there is a space where we are allowed to be governed by a morality that cannot be totally covered with the mantle of legality.
Not everything legal is just and not everything just is legal, Kant might have said. Therefore, his legal philosophy has an overdetermination of morality in public and private law. A German word, almost untranslatable into other languages, expresses this overdetermination precisely: Sitte.
Sitte is the morality that comes from tradition and custom. Thus, one could contravene Sittlichkeit without contravening legality. Let us take an example: not responding to a neighbor's greeting is not illegal, but it is not sittlich. Not keeping a promise given to someone is not illegal, but it is not sittlich. Being elected president in the name of peace and taking the country to war is not illegal, but it is not sittlich. We could go on with similar examples.
Ideally, morality, sittlichkeit, and legality should correspond to each other. That is why Kant recommended that, not having in certain situations a law to be governed by, we should act as if there were one, following maxims that condense the forms of conduct in fields not considered by legality. For the same reason, there are extreme situations in which the discordance between morality and legality is so discrepant, that there is no alternative but to make a decision either in favor of the law without moral substratum, or in favor of the morality from which the laws come.
Eichmann said that he only received orders. He did not say that he received them from a clique of miserable murderers. In the case of Filbinger, he said that he ruled according to laws that might well be bad. Still, he did not say that those laws (decrees) came from the will of a criminal warlord who had put his word above the Constitution, laws, and morals.
By renouncing both legality and established morality, Hitler was, if we follow Kant, an ultimate expression of evil. Of an evil that cannot be banalized. Of an evil that is not subject to anything or anyone. Of that evil that Vladimir Putin represents today. Radical evil, as Kant called it
THE PUTIN CASE
Radical evil is pure evil, radically unbanalized, and impossible to be justified by anything. It is the return to a supposedly natural condition when there were no morals, ethics, rules, gods, laws, or words. Hitler himself knew this. He always hid the Holocaust, even from his people. He knew for the same reason that he had crossed the line that separates the human condition from another that we do not know what to call it.
Hitler did not allow himself to be governed by anything other than his own will. But Hitler was not an irrational being; that would be to defend him. His visions were irrational, but he tried to realize them by applying systematic instrumental rationality. The rationality of radical evil, we could call it. Precisely that rationality was what the US president was referring to a few days ago when he said that Putin was too rational to carry out an irrational work. If so, Putin cannot be compared to Stalin, but he can be compared to Hitler.
Stalin was certainly as murderous, if not more so than Hitler. But even his evil could be trivialized by the existence of a party, of a Leninist tradition, by the belief in a science of history according to which it was necessary to give birth to communism from the bloody womb of capitalism. Stalin assassinated beings who stood in the way of his crazed vision of the world. But he always pursued a goal, according to him, necessary. Not so Hitler, who had members of a people murdered not for what they did or did not do but for what they were: Jews. That is why Putin's murderous logic is much closer to Hitler's than his Russian predecessor's. Putin is the Hitler of our time.
Putin's evil has been radical from the beginning. Both in the massacres committed in Syria, Georgia, and especially in Chechnya, Putin broke with all the rules and laws of war. The European rulers knew it. But for them, Putin's wars belonged to barbarism. They thought they were far from until Putin's war came to European Ukraine. To the world of civilization, of constitutions, of human rights.
According to Putin, as he wrote in his 2021 essay, Ukraine belongs to Russia according to language and blood ties. Based on that premise, he baptized all Ukrainians who did not want to be part of the Russian state as Nazis. The invasion of Ukraine, which started in 2014 with the occupation of Crimea and the territories of Donbas, was carried out in the name of a biologist and naturalist reason. Its goal was the Russification of Ukraine, not to fight NATO enlargement, as some irresponsible Western academics tried to justify it. On that, there is hardly any discussion anymore.
Russia's military actions have been directed from the very beginning against the Ukrainian population. As if there was any doubt, Putin has just confessed it. When he learned that that symbolic and real bridge intended to link Crimea with Russia had partially exploded, he said, "today we have a healthy desire for revenge." What he did not say is what he did. He did not retaliate against Ukrainian bridges but against the people of Kiev.
Bridges are war targets; that is an elementary truth of all military manuals. To bomb bridges is to prevent the transport of enemy weapons and soldiers. But theaters, squares, markets, stations, and streets are not war targets. By the way, for as long as there have been wars, the civilian population has been the primary victim. But it has never been the main target. Well, Putin has murdered Ukrainians simply because they are Ukrainians.
We know that the Holocaust of the Jewish people is incomparable. But the logic that leads to killing human beings for what they are, that is, for their guilt of being, is also that of Putin.
Mom, why are bombs falling on the kindergarten? -asked a nine-year-old boy to his mother, journalist Nonna Stefanova. After hesitating, she decided to answer truthfully: "because we are Ukrainians".
I read Hannah Arent's opinion on Eichmann again. In one of her sentences, she says Eichmann must die because he took a right to decide which people should or should not populate the earth. Putin also took that right. Ukrainians, for him, should only exist as Russians. That is why I think and say: if today there were a supranational power, Putin, according to Hannah Arendt's dictum about Eichmann, should be executed. Because of the radical nature of the evil committed, Putin belongs to the world of the dead.
That possibility, Putin's biological death, is far beyond our will. Like so many dictators, he may die peacefully in his bed. He may even be sanctified by that degenerate monk named Kirill, who has said (verbatim) that God sent Putin to Russia. In any case, the West is not in a position to get rid of the radical evil represented by the Russian dictator. But it is in a position to defend Ukraine and thereby inflict a defeat on Putin. Such a defeat would be a victory for reason, morality, and international law.
Putin, at least, must die politically. And for that to happen, he must be defeated militarily. Hopefully, for good.
References
Kant, Immanuel 1797, Metaphysik der Sitten, Werke 5, Köln 1995
Kant, Immanuel 1787, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Werke 2, Köln 1995
Mommsen, Hans, Hannah Arendt und der Prozeß gegen Adolf Eichmann, preface to Arendt, op. cit.
Schmitt, Carl, Legality and Legitimacy, Durham, Duke University, 2004.
[1] Arendt, Hannah. 1977. Eichman in Jeruslaem—A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Penguin, p. 279.