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https://theconversation.com/the-book-that-changed-me-hannah-arendts-eichmann-in-jerusalem-and-the-problem-of-terrifying-moral-complacency-187600>
"Hannah Arendt published
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of
Evil in 1963. Over the next two decades alone, it would be republished some 30
times, first in the United States and then Britain, as debate swirled around
both its arguments and its author.
A Jewish refugee displaced from Nazi Germany, first to France and then the US,
Arendt was among the 20th century’s greatest political philosophers.
She had travelled to Israel in 1962 to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for
The New Yorker, which first serialised her reports. Eichmann, kidnapped two
years earlier from Argentina by Mossad agents, was a substantial contributor to
the Holocaust. In Jerusalem, he would be found guilty and executed for his key
role.
His trial was also a marker of national self-definition for Israel, which had
been founded in 1948, three years after the war. The kidnapping and the trial’s
location were justified, it was argued, because Eichmann had committed crimes
against the Jewish people, which the Jewish state had therefore a preeminent
right to judge.
Arendt was keenly interested not only in Eichmann as an individual, but also
the underlying and larger questions about how – and where – one judges someone
like him."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
