On Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem
[The
following pages are the text of a lecture delivered, in part, in Liberal
Studies 402 in March 1997 by Ian Johnston, at Malaspina University-College.
This document is in the public domain, released October1999. the hit counter was installed in May 2000]
For
comments or questions, please contact Ian
Johnston
INTRODUCTION
When we read this book, we are confronted with some huge issues,
many of which are a central part of the living experiences of some of the people
in this room. For many of us, the horrors of World War II, and especially the
actions of the Nazi government with regard to the Jews and other groups deemed
inferior and unwanted, are so much a part of our own
lives that it is difficult not to want to talk about a great many things—the
nature of evil, the "guilt" question, the history of Anti-Semitism,
the growth of totalitarian government, and so on.
In dealing with Arendt's book, however, we must resist a great
many temptations to digress into many such complex areas, if we wish to focus
on her main point, because the book is centrally about none of these global
issues. And if we stray too far into various matters which arise out of the Eichmann
story and do not look clearly at what Arendt wishes us to consider, then we
will miss the main point—indeed, as I should like to argue in a moment, we may
become an integral part of the problem she wishes to deal with.
What I want to focus on here for a few minutes, then, is what I
see as the central concern of this text. I want to call it quickly and
cursorily to our attention, so that we do not lose sight of it in our
discussions about all the other matters. I don't have much time, so I shall be
as brief as I can be. Simply put, I want to insist that there are two major and
related lessons Arendt wishes to consider. The first is an old-fashioned
Kantian injunction that we are all members of a single group, the human
community, and that our responsibilities are above everything else to than community
of individuals. Secondly, the failure to base our judicial treatment of
genocide on this awareness leaves us dangerously incapable of recognizing and
therefore of dealing with the most pernicious new crime to appear before the
courts in this century. These are urgently practical questions which concern
all of us in our daily lives. Thus, Arendt's main concern is not to educate us
about the Holocaust or about Eichmann but about ourselves.
The Issue of Justice in the Community
If this book is not primarily intended as a history of the Holocaust,
an essay on the nature of evil, a study of anti-Semitism, an examination of the
"guilt" question, or even a complete biography of Adolph Eichmann,
then what it is about? Well, Arendt tells us many times: this is a book about
justice in the modern world. Arendt's purpose here is clear (and repeated many
times throughout): the details of the Eichmann trial matter because they
indicate to us the nature of our own responsibilities for justice in the human community
and of the ways in which we too often evade or ignore those responsibilities.
Some time ago, soon after we began this four-cycle curriculum in
Liberal Studies, we examined Aeschylus's play The Oresteia. That work, as we discussed then, is about the establishment
within the human community of a system of justice administered by the citizens
of the polis. The moment comes about as a divine gift, and there is an assurance
given by the gods that the community which establishes justice properly and
which carries it out with integrity and respect will flourish. Of all the works
we have read in Liberal Studies, The
Oresteia is the most optimistic and the most challenging: human beings can,
in the human community, rule each other in such a way that the community will
thrive. But the play also contains an ominous warning: the community that
forgets its full responsibilities or upsets the appropriate balance upon which
justice depends will perish.
The major point that Arendt wants us to derive from this book is
the same. For her the story of Eichmann and the story of his trial are
important primarily for what they
reveal to us about the nature of justice and about the attempts, deliberate and
otherwise to pervert it.
I do not have time here to rehearse her argument—and in any case
there's no need, since she makes it very clear herself. But I do want to call
attention to some points in it, once again in order to emphasize that this book
has a specific point which we should not miss.
The first point that is made repeatedly through the book is that
justice—criminal, moral, and political justice is a highly individual matter. That
is, it involves the particular actions of particular people, and the business
of rendering a judgment or making a decision is corrupted as soon as this key
point is forgotten. One of her main indictments of the proceedings in Jerusalem
is that the trial was deliberately engineered, in spite of the attempts of the
judges, to deal with group interests—both those during the events being judged
but, more importantly, group interests at the time of the trial (i.e., fifteen
years after the end of the war).
Thus, for example, the Israeli government wanted a trial that
would remind the world of the sufferings of the Jewish people, that would once
more raise the question of the collective guilt of the German people, that
would let everyone know about the horrors of anti-Semitism,
that would at last allow the Jewish survivors an official hearing, and so
on. Arendt points out again and again that there was a political agenda driving
much of this trial, and in her view that perverts justice, no matter how
sympathetic we might be to some of the motives for this use of the trial. The strength
of this political agenda was so strong that it led to the judge's original
verdict being rewritten in order to mesh with the government's (and the
prosecution's) perceptions.
And why does this matter, when she has no doubt about the guilt of
the defendant? Her book raises a number of important and challenging legal
points, but they are, in a sense, secondary. A trial, like Eichmann's, as she
points out many times, has a simple task: to render judgment on this man, for
these deeds, at this time, taking into account various factors which might have
significantly affected his ability to choose how to act (e.g., was he mentally
sound, was he in a position to know what he was doing, did he have any way of
acting any differently, and so on). Anything which shifts the business of the
trial away from this sharp particularity into wider cultural or historical
issues, no matter how important, is an erosion of justice, because it subsumes
questions of justice to political and social and cultural questions not
immediately relevant to the principal reason for the trial: justice in the
community.
Political and social questions are important, indeed essential,
parts of the background information, so that the individual under scrutiny can
be fully understood in terms of the various social and political pressures with
which he had to deal. But, according to Arendt, they serve as background only. Any
attempts to explain away individual actions (or refusals to act) by reference
to collective pressures is pernicious to justice, because they strike at the
very basis of the central hope on which our civilization rests: that human
beings are individually responsible for what they do.
Again and again in her text Arendt takes issue with those who wish
to do this, to explain away the horror by reference to cultural generalities. One
can understand people's reasons for wanting to do this. After all, faced with
the extraordinary horror of the events, many of us find it easier to blame something
like the German people or European Anti-Semitism or the pathological Nazis,
rather than to see the cause in the particular actions of ordinary people. Even
in our seminar comments, often the discussion is dominated by comments about
groups, as if the collective identity of certain people (Germans, Jews,
Italians, and so on) is the key element in understanding and judging them. Arendt
wishes to remind us that this sort of thinking perverts justice.
The strength of Arendt's case comes, not from her grasp of the
bewildering complexities of detail (impressive as that is) or from her moral
indignation at what was done, but rather from her uncompromising sense that in
the human community, we as individuals—no matter what group loyalties and
identities we may possess—have a personal moral responsibility for what we do
and that we can be held accountable—in fact, must be held accountable as
individuals—for crimes against the human community.
We have spent a good deal of time this semester dealing with various
forms of relativism—the pragmatic relativism of James, the cultural relativism
of Benedict, and the existential relativism of de Beauvoir. It comes across to me
as immensely refreshing to return to an old fashioned Kantian, a moral thinker
who maintains that we are responsible to the human community for our actions,
that there are certain universal principles by which we must conduct our
actions and in terms of which we will be judged and must judge others, that
subsuming such matters under cultural questions is a moral evasion of the first
order. This is immensely refreshing because it establishes a clear and
uncompromised sense that we are, first and foremost, human beings and that any
attempt to deal with our fellows on any other basis is suspicious.
The Moral Compromise of Classification
This issue of group thinking becomes particularly acute when Arendt
moves to the key question raised by the Holocaust: How could so many people
from such a culturally rich
place become willing agents in a diabolically evil program? She
has no doubt that the origin of the Final Solution was in Hitler's own
personality, something beyond our understanding. She's not interesting in
probing that origin. For her what really matters is how Hitler secured massive
compliance with his irrational hatred.
Her analysis brings out very clearly how such compliance is secured:
it comes through something really common to us all, the manipulation of our
thinking and our imagination through classification. Once we have accepted
certain labels, then we are well on the way to sanctioning different treatment.
Arendt spends a good deal of time discussing the complex issues of
citizenship in many European countries after the First World War. This was a
quagmire because, as a means of
accommodating the tense ethnic rivalries in often artificially created
countries, the peace makers after the war had come up with various schemes of
classifying citizens, which had been more or less accepted (not least of all by
the citizens themselves). These classification systems had, in effect,
recognized human beings as belonging to different groups and, beyond that, as
fundamentally unequal in their political rights. Hence, Arendt argues, it became
easy to think that different ethnic groups required different treatments and
had different values.
This issue of classification is one of the most important in the
book. Arendt discusses in great detail how the success of the Nazi
extermination apparatus depended initially upon classification schemes which designated
citizens as having different status: Jews and non-Jews, assimilationist
Jews and Zionists, native Jews and refugee Jews, Jews in the Council and
ordinary Jews. The first step in the eradication process was to insist upon the
official implementation of a publicly acknowledged classification system. Once
that was in place, then getting acquiescence for different treatment became
relatively easy.
The Green Berets supposedly had a saying: "If you get them by
the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." This pungent saying
suggests that moral attitudes are primarily a
matter of physical security and fear. As Arendt points out, the physical
dangers are important, and we should never underestimate just how horribly the
Nazis could make active resisters suffer. But it's an important part of her
case that our moral responsibilities do not begin and end with active
resistance. In many cases, what we do have at our disposal is passive
resistance or the refusal to carry out actions we perceive as immoral. And one
thing we have to attend to in any such system of passive resistance is the way
in which oppressors wish to sell us a classification system.
Anyone seeking, like the Nazis, to persuade us to carry out such
actions, will generally place a high priority on persuading us that compliance
with certain actions is no big deal because those concerned are not like us—the
classification systems we have accepted tell us that.
So Arendt's text offers a different lesson: "If you get them by
the mind, their hearts and balls will follow." And the classification
system served to do just that. It is a very old principle, which goes commonly
by the name "Divide and conquer."
Once you can get people to abandon the really essential category of
"human beings," and get them thinking in terms of ethnic categories,
most of the work is done.
[That point, to compare great things with small, is an important
point in an article this weekend on Canadian multiculturalism arguing that
dividing Canadians into official minority categories is serving to promote
hostility rather than to foster tolerance for diversity].
I would like momentarily to digress on this business of classification.
What makes this so effective is that we are all used to it; in fact, we cannot
function without it. Quite apart from the point that we probably cannot
perceive, understand, or remember things without having some system of classification,
there is also the fact that the modern state cannot exist without a huge
classification system which establishes the categories, hierarchies, group
identities, and so on essential to all aspects of the modern state.
Part of the Enlightenment project was to make these classification
systems rational and fair, rather than based upon ancient family lines,
religion, tradition, or personal allegiance. This, it was thought, could be
done if, following the liberal tradition, our state operated as a bureaucracy,
in which functions were classified, endorsed by the sovereign power, and
subject to the rule of merit or periodic election and, as much as possible, an
equal playing field.
That is very much how we operate today. At the risk of a very
simple generalization, let me suggest that we have a three class society. Most
of the people are at the bottom; they are the classified ones. They are the
workers, and what they have is jobs or school or welfare or jails. At the next
level are those in charge of implementing classification systems (of pasting
the labels on people). They are the professionals, and what they have are
positions (professors, lawyers, doctors, probation officers, social workers). At
the very top is the small group of those who make up and emend the
classification system. They are the rulers, and what they have are names.
As a teacher I am a professional classifier, like a lumber grader;
I spend most of my time putting labels on people. The state pays me to do that,
and students seek the services of me and my colleagues in order to get stamped.
And most of the students I teach have one important career ambition: to move
from the ranks of the classified into the ranks of
the implementers of classification systems (to move from a job to a position). That's
exactly what Eichmann wanted.
Arendt wants us to see in the Eichmann story how classification
can produce evil, how it corrupts one's sense of something much more important
than any label—the human
being on whom you are pasting the label. What, after all, was the start of
Eichmann's professional career and his crime? It was a classification process. He
early on made his career by distinguishing between assimilationist
Jews and Zionists and, on the basis of this difference, establishing for
himself moral differences between two groups of human beings. Having made the
initial distinction, he now has at his disposal moral categories "good
Jews" and "bad Jews."
That is why he can express a certain bewilderment at the way people see
him an such an enormous monster: had he not admired
and been friendly with many Jews? It is
perhaps a small step, perhaps even in the context easy enough to understand. But
it reveals a method of thinking (or of refusing to think) which leads to the most
horrible consequences.
That point underlines the importance Arendt gives to stressing
Eichmann's normality. It was of considerable importance to the Jewish people to
portray Eichmann as a monster. And we all have a stake in that form of thinking
because it's so reassuring: only monsters are capable of such horrific crimes. But
Arendt wants us to see clearly that Eichmann was just like almost everyone
else—like many people in our own communities. He became an active agent of horror
because, in the last analysis, he didn't think clearly or feel intelligently. He
forgot his human moral responsibility. The classification system and, just as important
as that, everyone else's acceptance of it, made the omission easy.
The power of the classification system as a basis for the entire
operation is no more terribly ironic than in all those details about how the
Jewish communities themselves accepted the classification systems the Nazis
imposed. Once again, one can appeal to the traditions of the country or to the
power of the Nazi machine in order to explain away the complicity of the Jews
in their own extermination. But the point Arendt wants us to see is that those
factors are not enough: the first step is the acceptance of the system which separates
neighbour from neighbour, which establishes that some human beings are more
valuable than others and that, therefore, there should
be different treatment, different laws, different railway destinations.
That is the reason, among others, that Arendt can point out that
the usual system of dealing with murder—arraigning the person who actually
carried out the deed—is in this case of state crime inoperable in the usual
way, because: "in general the degree of responsibility increases as we
draw further from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hand"
(Arendt 247). Those people far away from the actual crime, by their individual
decisions, set in motion the classification system and therefore the very thought
process which, if it doesn't actually carry about the murder, makes it
possible, perhaps even inevitable.
Arendt pays tribute to those countries which successfully resisted
the implementation of the Nazi extermination program: Denmark, Bulgaria, and
Italy. She makes it clear how such successful resistance worked: the countries
either flatly refused to accept the classification system (like Denmark) or
they simply sabotaged it, making the differentiation unworkable. And once they
did that, the Nazi officials were, in effect, powerless. More than that, they
began to question their uncritical allegiance to that system of thinking. What's
important about these examples is that the process of evil was stopped at its
first appearance—in the moral differentiation of people according to certain
defined groups.
We have talked a good deal in LBST 401 about classification systems
and the way they affect understanding. Arendt sees in the Eichmann story (both
in his life and in his trial) an object lesson of the dangers of classification
systems in politics. As a Kantian she will admit no compromise with the term
"human community" or "human being" and she quite rightly
sees that attempts to subdivide can lead to the most horrible crimes committed
without a pause to reflect.
So one point she wants to stress is that we must beware of such
classification systems. We must as individuals recognize our responsibility to
the human community. When she talks about the banality of evil at the end of
her book, and refers to the lack of imagination and the thoughtlessness at the
heart of Eichmann's "evil," what she means, above all, is the
inability to perceive this responsibility or the ease with which people get
seduced from this awareness in pursuit of social goals like promotion or
approval.
One important corollary which she does not explicitly make in her
book, although many of her examples bring the point out, is the banality of
goodness. That is, she provides examples from many areas of a common refusal to
accept the classification system, of the refusal to treat human beings as
somehow less than oneself. Here again, the key first step,
from which all the others flow, is the refusal to let one's perceptions of
others become perception of the Other, the Different, the Person Officially
Defined as Undesirable. Not all such efforts were successful in large heroic
terms, but, and this is a key point for her, each one made an important
difference. So in her narrative people like Anton Schmidt and Georgi Dimitrov, otherwise
unremarkable people, emerge quite rightly as heroes. And that is precisely the reason
why the high officials of the Vatican and many others emerge as such contemptible
villains.
Collective Guilt
And how do people get seduced by these classification systems and
their consequences? Arendt makes clear
that one important feature which contributes to the seduction of the individual's
moral awareness is the compliance of everyone else. After the Wannasee Conference, where the Final Solution was openly
proposed, debated, and agreed to by the cream of German civil service (a
meeting which took only an hour and a half), Eichmann correctly concluded that
no one opposed the idea. Who was he to stand up to all these superior
types? This is not a matter of obeying
orders. It's a matter of the moral climate of a professional culture.
Arendt wants us to understand as clearly as possible the consequences
of a refusal to speak out or to walk away. Qui
s'excuse, s'accuse. The
most damning sentence in the entire book for me is one that probably most
people pass over without remarking anything special. It is this (in a discussion
of the deportations of the Jews): "but the population at large obviously
could not have cared less." Many of the Nazis themselves were
understandably worried about how their own population, which had actively
protested the mistreatment of the mentally deficient, would react to the
treatment of the Jews. One of the most confident about how the clergy, the
universities, the medical profession, and the educated middle class would
endorse Nazi policy (or at least not oppose it) was Adolf Hitler. He was right.
For Arendt anything which tends to weaken this awareness of our
immediately moral and political responsibilities is potentially a perversion of
justice. Let me cite one particular example. In the years of the Eichmann
trial, there was much talk of the collective guilt of the German people. I was
a student at Heidelberg during the early 1960's immediately after the Eichmann
trial, and I can remember going to lectures in which die Schuldfrage was endlessly debated. Our
professors, all of whom had been educated and started their professional
careers during the Nazi years, had much to tell us about their difficulties. And
one could sympathize with the very real difficulties they faced as their
classes filled up with students wearing swastikas.
Still, one wondered why they had not just turned their backs and
walked out the door the moment their Jewish colleagues were sent packing or the
day the state demanded a loyalty oath. Some would deflect the questions aimed
at them personally to talk of the collective guilt of the German people.
Arendt has nothing but contempt for those who would seek to explain
this phenomenon by some notion of collective German guilt. It may be all very
well, she indicates, for young Germans to stand up and talk about the
collective guilt they have inherited from their ancestors and so on. To her
this is simply a cheap moral evasion, designed to relieve particular feelings
without challenging the moral sensibility in a significant way. There is no
meaning to collective guilt in that sense.
What Arendt means is that guilt is an individual matter. There may
indeed be many people in the community, including our community, who deserve to
feel very guilty about actions from their own past. But the concept that I
share a guilt for other people's actions, that is, for
events in which I was in no way involved, is false. What I do have is not guilt
but a moral responsibility for justice. That means that I have a responsibility
to the community to fight wrongdoing or, at the least, not to perpetuate it,
not to beat my own breast for some notion of collective guilt.
This is a matter of the highest importance. Arendt is speaking,
most pointedly, of Germany, where, amid all the cries of collective guilt in
the 1960's, there were many very guilty individuals who were untouched by the
judicial process and, more importantly, who were allowed to go free because
there was no strong demand from the community for their arraignment. What point
is there in agonized expression of collective guilt combined with an abdication
of political responsibility for prosecuting those who are publicly known to be
guilty of terrible crimes?
Those young German men and women who every once in a while—on the
occasion of all the Diary of Anne Frank hubbub and of the Eichmann trial-treat
us to hysterical outbreaks of guilt feelings are not staggering under the
burden of the past, their fathers' guilt; rather, they are trying to escape
from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality.
(251)
This is, incidentally, a lesson of particular importance to us. Today
it is fashionable for those defending the environment or the native people to
invoke concepts of the collective guilt of some group—the capitalists, our ancestors,
General Custer, and so on. From Arendt's text we should, I think, draw the
important lesson, that such talk is simply rhetorical posturing (except for
those who really do carry a moral guilt, and they should be voluntarily delivering
themselves up for judgement), especially when it helps
to conceal from us or enable us to evade our present responsibility to deal
with present injustice.
In one respect, Arendt's treatment of Denmark, Italy, and
Bulgaria—the countries which resisted the Nazi extermination program—is in some
ways misleading (or at the very least incomplete). Because the real story there
(following Arendt's own priorities) is not that the Danes, the Bulgarians, or
the Italians were, as a group, better than anyone else. Arendt goes to great
lengths to show that that sort of thinking is very dangerous. And I personally doubt
if collectively qualitative statements like that have much meaning. What
happened in Denmark, Italy, and Bulgaria is that particular individuals—particular
Danes, Italians, and Bulgarians-confronted with the usual requests from the Nazi
bureaucrats, decided that they would not go along. It is not a matter of
cultural natures (although such traditions may play an important part in
individual decisions); the key idea throughout Arendt is that the best defence
against totalitarian bureaucratic horror is individual courage, example of
moral responsibility which inspire and which, as Arendt points out, can spread.
The bureaucracy requires compliance; a rational bureaucracy bent on state evil
gets compliance only if most of the individuals it needs to carry out the work
resign their moral responsibility. There may be all sorts of reason why people
resign their responsibility and such acts of resignation may indeed be common. That
does not make them right; that does not make them just.
Let me add, by way of a conclusion to this first point, that I am fully in agreement with Arendt. And that is
why I have strong reservations about "official" multiculturalism and the
idea of an officially sanctioned mosaic. Cultural diversity and "official"
multiculturalism may make an attractive tree in the cultural garden
of Eden, but the snake in the garden is busy categorizing and classifying differences,
so that Adam and Eve may more quickly forget that above and beyond diversity is
a higher priority, the universal demands of a common humanity.
And I would suggest that, in our discussions of this book, we must
be careful not to ourselves fall into this same difficulty, by explaining away
difficult questions by reference to particular groups and their behaviour—the Jews,
Germans, Poles, Catholics, and so on. Such classification, in Arendt's
argument, deflects attention from the essential guardian of or threat to
justice in the community: the particular actions of human individuals.
The Importance of Precedent
Arendt's second important point, which arises directly from her
preoccupation with individual responsibilities to the human community, is that
the Eichmann trial failed properly to recognize the complexity of the legal
issues it was dealing with. The final chapters of the book may seem to some
readers like something of an anti-climax, for there Arendt seems to be (from a
cursory look) engaging in legal nit-picking. After all, if Eichmann was guilty and
if the court reached that decision and sentenced him accordingly, then why
quibble about the particular laws, jurisdictions, precedents, and so on which
made the process possible? That view is
understandable enough, but it represents a failure to appreciate why Arendt
wants to explore the Eichmann trial in the first place.
First, Arendt wants us to recognize that what happened in Germany
was not a crime against the Jews. It was crime against the human community. The
function of justice, she points out, is not to avenge the victims; it is to
protect the human community. To forget this (for whatever political motive) is
to make sure that we will be less able to deal with such things again. For if
Eichmann's crime was only against the Jews, then what
stake do I have in it? By an extension of this logic, what legal stake or
obligation do I have concerning any repetition of the crime, if it does not touch
my community?
This, too, is a question of classification. If Eichmann's crime,
however immense, is a crime against the Jews only (one justification for
setting the trial in Israel), then I, as a non-Jew, have no particular stake in
it. After all, by definition, he did not hurt me. This form of thinking, Arendt
argues, is particularly injurious, especially in the sorts of crimes
exemplified by Eichmann.
Arendt goes to great lengths to argue that "genocide" is
a fundamentally new crime (new in the sense that for the first time we are
called upon to judge it in a court of law, not new in the sense that it has
never happened before). What makes it new is that it is a crime against the
human community in total, not against a particular smaller compartment (like
the Jews). Israel's refusal to recognize this point creates for Arendt an
unfortunate example and represents the loss of a precious opportunity.
It's unfortunate because it will happen again. And we will lack
the measures for dealing with it. For Arendt, the great failure of the Eichmann
trial (like the Nuremberg
Trials) is that they failed to strengthen International Law. Why
should this matter? Arendt explains as
follows:
It is essentially for this reason: that the unprecedented, once it
has appeared, may become a precedent for the future, that all trials touching
upon "crimes against humanity" must be judged according to a standard
that is today still an "ideal."
If genocide is an actual possibility of the future, then no people on
earth--least of all, of course, the Jewish people, in Israel or elsewhere--can
feel reasonably sure of its continued existence without the help and the
protection of international law. Success or failure in dealing with the
hitherto unprecedented can lie only in the extent to which this dealing may
serve as a valid precedent on the road to international penal law. (273)
If, that is, we want justice in the full human community, we must
not, as happened in Jerusalem, serve the interests of particular sections of
that community, no matter how sympathetic we might feel towards that section of
the community. To the extent that the Nazi crimes were committed against Jews,
it was appropriate that the trial be held in Jerusalem. To the extent that the
Nazi crimes were committed against the human community, the refusal of the Israeli
authorities to move the trial out of Jerusalem or to admit an International
Tribunal into Jerusalem was a serious mistake. It may have served the political
interests of the Ben Gurion government, the deep need
of the Jewish survivors for a public hearing, for a formal justification, the interests
of many other countries (including Germany, France, Argentina, Canada, and many
others) which had shown great reluctance to bring Nazi war criminals to
account. But it did not serve justice.
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