THE BANALITY OF EVIL

-----Original Message-----
> Spectors:
> years ended is what completely discredits his argument. Usually doomsday
> folks don't come back 25 years after they were proven wrong and say: "That
> proves I'm right!"

Spectors line of reasoning is quite common:  "So and so was wrong about
 fill in the blanks ] so how could anyone else be right?"  According to
Spectors' line of reasoning then, since at least one person has been wrong
about every subject, it is not possible for anyone to know anything.

Obviously, Spectors reasoning is utterly meaningless, but quite interesting
nonetheless. He provides a perfect example of the animal that
sociobiologists have found.  Spectors is ready to say (or perhaps do)
anything to ride his political ideology to social power.  In other words,
Spectors would make an ideal Presidential Candidate.

But it's not just Spectors.  Except for a few anomalies, all of us seek to
dominate others in one way or another:

 In fact, telling primates (human or
 otherwise) that their reasoning
 architectures evolved in large part
 to solve problems of dominance is a
 little like telling fish that their
 gills evolved in large part to solve
 the problem of oxygen intake from water.
          -- Denise Dellarosa Cummins

Prior to sociobiology, the brilliant social observer Reinhold Neibuhr said
of men like Spectors:

 Wherever men hold unequal power in
 society, they will strive to maintain
 it.  They will use whatever means are
 convenient to that end and will seek
 to justify them by the most plausible
 arguments they are able to devise.
              -- Reinhold Neibuhr

Nowadays, we know that genes drive behavior, and beliefs (or ideologies) are
selected to facilitate and enable these genetic drives in whatever society
the animal finds itself.  In other words, if Spectors saw a faster path to
dominance, he would switch his in beliefs in an instant (most of us would).

A well-documented example of exchanging beliefs for dominance is provided by
Adolf Eichmann.

--------------------
THE BANALITY OF EVIL

Adolf Eichmann was the Nazi official responsible for the murder of millions
of Jews.  During World War II, he was in charge of "the final solution of
the Jewish problem" which sent Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to
their deaths.  After the war, Eichmann was tried and convicted of "crimes
against humanity", and then hanged.  His crime is an extremely serious
category of criminal human rights abuse.  International law defines crimes
against humanity by virtue of their "mass nature" (a large number of
victims), and it must also be shown that a group was targeted for mass
murder because of its status as a group.

One of the most striking aspects of the Nazi Holocaust is the totally
unremarkable nature of the killers themselves. Eichmann's experience
demonstrated how established values can be distorted and twisted  to make
people do unspeakable things to other people.  His accomplices included
"doctors, lawyers, scholars, bankers, and economists" that planned the
necessary steps to exterminate the Jews.

What could have transformed these totally unremarkable people into mass
murderers?  What could have happened to so many "good" people?

Hannah Arendt discovered that Eichmann did not originally subscribe to mass
murder, indeed such a violent solution was alien to him.  During discussions
at the Wannsee Conference, Eichmann saw, to his great astonishment, that all
these respectable people (he had the greatest respect for bourgeois society)
not only agreed with his proposals, but followed his remarks on killing Jews
eagerly and enthusiastically.  He was convinced he must be doing the right
thing because no one contradicted him, neither priest nor politician nor one
of the bureaucrats -- no one.

Eichmann: "At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I
felt free of all guilt."  Eichmann provides an extreme example exchanging
one's beliefs for power. [ p. 114, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A Report on the
Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt; Penguin, 1963; ISBN 0-14-018765-0 ]

This coming century -- as we run out of oil and global societies are FORCED
into lower-and-lower standards-of-living -- we will find ourselves living
next door to Eichmann.

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-From Kirkus Reviews , February 1, 1992:

Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
by Christopher R. Browning

Chilling analysis of how a typical unit of German police actually operated
during the Holocaust, by Browning (History/Pacific Lutheran Univ.). In March
1942, some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still
alive. Eleven months later, 75 to 80 percent were dead--the result, Browning
says, of "a short, intense wave of mass murder," centered in Poland. During
16 months, Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of just over 450 men from
Hamburg, was responsible in Poland for the shooting of 39,000 Jews and the
deportation to Treblinka of 44,000 more. The horror began on July 13, 1942,
when the unit's commander, one Major Trapp, ordered his men to round up
1,800 Jews from the village of Jozefow, to select several hundred as "work
Jews,'' and to shoot the rest--men, women, and children. Trapp apparently
gave the order with tears in his eyes and gave permission to older soldiers
not to participate. Altogether, 10 to 20 percent of the battalion availed
themselves of this permission. The remaining men carried out the assignment:
"the shooters were gruesomely besmirched with blood, brains, and bone
splinters. It hung on their clothing." What sort of men were they? Browning
bases his answers on the judicial interrogation in the 1960's of 210 men
from the battalion. They were ordinary men, he finds, on the elderly side,
drawn from the lower orders of German society, and few had an education
above junior-high-school level. And after examining studies dealing with
this phenomenon and evidence of such conduct in other wars, Browning
determines that it's not just Nazism or Germans that produces such men:
There were American units in the Pacific that boasted of never taking
captives. "If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers
under such circumstances," he writes, "what group of men cannot?" It is the
care with which Browning examines the evidence, as well as the soberness of
his conclusions, that gives this work such power and impact.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060995068

Jay -- www.dieoff.org