this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war – and today to those brave few who do their best to ease that suffering
we love and support our troops, just as we love and support the Iraqi people – without exception, or precondition, or judgement.
image and poem below the fold
Army Spc. Mark Wilkerson, waits outside a tent at Camp Casey III Thursday Aug. 31, 2006, near Crawford, Texas. Wilkerson plans to surrender to Fort Hood, Texas, authorities later today, a year and a half after going AWOL from the Army post before his unit’s second deployment to Iraq.
(AP Photo/Rod Aydelotte)
(Arendt) controversially uses the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to characterize Eichmann’s actions as a member of the Nazi regime, in particular his role as chief architect and executioner of Hitler’s genocidal ‘final solution’ (Endlosung) for the ‘Jewish problem’.
Her characterization of these actions, so obscene in their nature and consequences, as ‘banal’ is not meant to position them as workaday. Rather it is meant to contest the prevalent depictions of the Nazi’s inexplicable atrocities as having emanated from a malevolent will to do evil, a delight in murder.
As far as Arendt could discern, Eichmann came to his willing involvement with the program of genocide through a failure or absence of the faculties of sound thinking and judgement. From Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem (where he had been brought after Israeli agents found him in hiding in Argentina), Arendt concluded that far from exhibiting a malevolent hatred of Jews which could have accounted psychologically for his participation in the Holocaust, Eichmann was an utterly innocuous individual. He operated unthinkingly, following orders, efficiently carrying them out, with no consideration of their effects upon those he targeted.
The human dimension of these activities were not entertained, so the extermination of the Jews became indistinguishable from any other bureaucratically assigned and discharged responsibility for Eichmann and his cohorts.
from “6. Eichmann and the ‘Banality of Evil'”
contained in the extensive entry about Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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I am Like a Desert Owl, an Owl Among the Ruins
by Noelle Kocot
The alpha You. The omega You.
My grandmother’s ghost, its girlish snafu
Basking in the waters of urgency.
But I want the coolness of snow.
I want pairs of hands that speak to me cleanly,
Sutras to resuscitate what reigns
Over warped celluloid and heirlooms I can’t touch.
There are no family photographs.
Once I was ordinary.
I rattled around with arms, with legs,
With a damp remembering that served me well.
Then, a little sleep, a little slumber,
A little folding of the hands to rest.
I asked myself, don’t you just love it?
And then, why don’t you just love it?
And then, from what grace have I fallen?
Am I Sisyphus with his mute rock
Unsettling the topsoil, dissolved now
Into brandied battle shouts and pages that breathe like people?
There are hazards here, more so than before
The Furies struck and scarved the white night sifting
The bright waterlights blinking
And grieving over a mash of ice.
Like them, I wanted only to die, moon-dark, blessed,
Poised beneath the driest arrows of my suffering,
Far from the flocks of burning, singing gulls,
Face to face with the God of my childhood.
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