Banality Of Evil
Swans, CA by Deck Deckert
(Swans - July 31, 2006)Â It’s long past time that we stopped referring to our wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and now Israel’s war against Lebanon, in dispassionate terms involving differing views of geopolitics, strategic interests, mistaken foreign policy, rights of self defense, etc.
We are talking about crimes against decency, crimes against humanity. We are talking about war crimes.
And we are talking about evil.
People are being slaughtered — civilians, children. They are not combatants, not soldiers. They are not, in that most obscene phrase so readily accepted by the corporate media, “collateral damage.” They are innocents being blown apart, blinded, burned, paralyzed, hideously deformed, living and dying in agony.
We are talking about evil.
It’s perhaps ironic that the phrase “the banality of evil,” entered the general lexicon following the publication of a 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, based on the trial of a Nazi monster, Adolph Eichmann. Author Hannah Arendt argued that people who carry out unspeakable crimes may not be crazy fanatics, but simply ordinary individuals just “doing their job.” It works because humans have a way of accepting whatever tasks they are given as normal, no matter how unspeakably ugly and murderous those tasks may be.
The citizens of the United States and Israel are now just doing our jobs, becoming part of the banality of evil.
Oh, that doesn’t mean dropping bombs on cities — directly. Or lobbing napalm and white phosphor shells on homes populated by women and children — directly. It doesn’t mean running torture camps — directly.
It just means closing our eyes to what is being done in our names.
I’ve long been an apologist for the public because of the truism that the corporate media has been a pipeline for government lies. Among other things, they cover up the horrors of war, almost never publishing any photos to show the grim reality of shattered bodies, never give us any stories about the victims of our warplanes, tanks and high-powered rifles. They don’t even tell us stories or give us pictures about our own troops. Without an honest media, we are severely handicapped in getting at the truth.
But enough is enough! We are all capable of reading between the lines. We know what it is going on.
Of course, our leaders are the most responsible. George Bush and the neocons started two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, and have encouraged Israel’s rape of Lebanon. Congress is no better, blindly supporting the wars — ours and Israel’s. Democrats, the loyal opposition, aren’t. The two-party system is a hoax. We have one party, a war party. And Congress has never met a war it didn’t like.
The House voted overwhelmingly, 410 - 8, to support Israel in its “confrontation with Hezbollah,” even though that “confrontation” is really an assault on the nation of Lebanon. And the Bush administration is rushing more bombs to Israel for use in Lebanon. More than 400 people have been killed so far, most of them civilians, very few of them Hezbollah fighters.
Israel, using a lot of US military hardware and billions of US dollars, has destroyed apartment houses, bridges, a milk factory, a food factory, two pharmaceutical plants, water treatment centers, power plants, grain silos, a Greek Orthodox Church, and hospitals. Israeli planes even attacked a convoy of new ambulances being brought into Lebanon from Syria. Nearly a million Lebanese have been made refugees. [more]