11/11/04 "New Statesman" -- "Edward S Herman's landmark essay, "The Banality of Evil", has never seemed more apposite. "Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way rests on 'normalisation'," wrote Herman. "There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals . . . others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public."
On Radio 4's Today (6 November), a BBC reporter in Baghdad referred to the coming attack on the city of Fallujah as "dangerous" and "very dangerous" for the Americans. When asked about civilians, he said, reassuringly, that the US marines were "going about with a Tannoy" telling people to get out. He omitted to say that tens of thousands of people would be left in the city. He mentioned in passing the "most intense bombing" of the city with no suggestion of what that meant for people beneath the bombs.
As for the defenders, those Iraqis who resist in a city that heroically defied Saddam Hussein; they were merely "insurgents holed up in the city", as if they were an alien body, a lesser form of life to be "flushed out" (the Guardian): a suitable quarry for "rat-catchers", which is the term another BBC reporter told us the Black Watch use. According to a senior British officer, the Americans view Iraqis as Untermenschen, a term that Hitler used in Mein Kampf to describe Jews, Romanies and Slavs as sub-humans. This is how the Nazi army laid siege to Russian cities, slaughtering combatants and non-combatants alike.
Normalising colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such racism, linking our imagination to "the other". The thrust of the reporting is that the "insurgents" are led by sinister foreigners of the kind that behead people: for example, by Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian said to be al-Qaeda's "top operative" in Iraq. This is what the Americans say; it is also Blair's latest lie to parliament. Count the times it is parroted at a camera, at us. No irony is noted that the foreigners in Iraq are overwhelmingly American and, by all indications, loathed. These indications come from apparently credible polling organisations, one of which estimates that of 2,700 attacks every month by the resistance, six can be credited to the infamous al-Zarqawi.
In a letter sent on 14 October to Kofi Annan, the Fallujah Shura Council, which administers the city, said: "In Fallujah, [the Americans] have created a new vague target: al-Zarqawi. Almost a year has elapsed since they created this new pretext and whenever they destroy houses, mosques, restaurants, and kill children and women, they said: 'We have launched a successful operation against al-Zarqawi.' The people of Fallujah assure you that this person, if he exists, is not in Fallujah . . . and we have no links to any groups supporting such inhuman behaviour. We appeal to you to urge the UN [to prevent] the new massacre which the Americans and the puppet government are planning to start soon in Fallujah, as well as many parts of the country."
Not a word of this was reported in the mainstream media in Britain and America.
"What does it take to shock them out of their baffling silence?" asked the playwright Ronan Bennett in April after the US marines, in an act of collective vengeance for the killing of four American mercenaries, killed more than 600 people in Fallujah, a figure that was never denied. Then, as now, they used the ferocious firepower of AC-130 gunships and F-16 fighter-bombers and 500lb bombs against slums. They incinerate children; their snipers boast of killing anyone, as snipers did in Sarajevo."
The rest of this article, which was first published in The New Statesman, may be read at the
The New Statesman.com
Note: New Statesman
"The Banality of Evil"
The New Statesman.com
Stumble It!
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Dave Ruston
I think we have to come to grips and stare face to face into this gaping hole: the American mind--THERE'S NOTHING THERE!! It's like it has been vacuumed clean. The brain has been sucked out and replaced with a giant marshmellow.
Found this on the Internet you might enjoy: The banality of evil, whose potentiality denys word and thought, did not seem to frame the usual standards of evil, such as pathology of evil, self-interest, ideological conviction of the doer, intentional evil, or even an obstinate set of ideas that had impelled him to evil and so one. Eichmann portrayed the factual example of a kind of evil manifestation that was not found in the traditional dimensions. In this sense, Arendt raises the question about whether such traditional dimentions of evil are a necessary condition of evil-doing. Has the phenomenon of evil necessarily a volitive root? Or, in other words, has the imperative condition to the evil-doing been the evil based on traditional foundations? It was undeniable that this new whole of questions about the phenomenon of evil, whose roots were not anchored in the philosophical, moral, religious traditional standards, at least will open a new perspective on the understanding of evil. Such notion was mentioned by Arendt in the first pages of The Life of the Mind's introduction: "Behind that phrase [banality of evil], I held no thesis or doctrine, although I was dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our tradition of thought — literary, theological, or philosophic — about the phenomenon of Evil." (16) Evil as a demoniac portion like Lucifer, the falling angel, mentioned by the religious tradition; the evil mobilized by weakness, envy, or even the hate that evil feels by Good, exemplifyed in the literary tradition in Shakespeare; for Arendt all of them cannot explain what had happened in Nazi Germany, brought into light by Eichmann. Arendt says: "... I felt was shocking because it contradicts our theories about evil,..." (17) The perplexity before a phenomenon that contradicted the known theories about evil, and the clear relationship between the problem of evil and the faculty of thinking, were what Arendt have pointed out by the expression the banality of evil.
I think we have to come to grips with reality: America has evil leaders doing very evil things, supported by a mindless, thoughtless public, who would rather shop at Wall Mart, kill a few Arabs, go to work, go to school, go to church, and make the world safe for democracy.
Let us raise the question that comes naturally from the two former topic: How, then, does the faculty of thinking work in order to avoid evil? First of all, according to Arendt, the moral and ethic standards based on habits and customs have shown that they can just be changed by a new set of rules of behavior dictated by the current society.In Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship, Arendt emphasizes: "It was as though morality, at the very moment of its collapse within an old, highly civilized nation, stood revealed in its original meaning, as a set of mores, of customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with no more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of a whole people." (28) Thenceforth, Arendt claims the bridge between morality and the faculty of thinking. In this same article quoted above she asks how is was possible that few persons resisted the moral collapse and had not adhered to the regime, despite any coercion. Arendt herself answers: "The answer to the ...question is relatively simple. The nonparticipants, called irresponsible by the majority, were the only ones who dared judge by themselves, and they were capable of doing so not because they disposed of a better system of values or because the old standards of right and wrong were still firmly planted in their mind and conscience but, ... because their conscience did not function in this, as were, automatic way, ... they asked themselves to what an extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be charged for the better, but because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves." (29) (emphasis added)
That's what Bush's NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND is all about. Not only does he vacuum clean the brains of the young, but the teachers and administrators who must tap dance to his tune or else. There's only a few of us left who can think critically. And they are gunning for us.
Look what happened to me. It wasn't about the house/land thing. It was about my writing because I told the truth in a way that was meaningful and memorable. So my web site was shut down, and I was evicted, arrested, jailed, and banned from my house, the one I built.
I think that is what has happened to Americans. The evil could spread out as fungus under the surface, by a mass of citizens that did not reflect on events, did not ask for significance, nor made a dialogue with themselves about their own deeds. Arendt says: The greatest evildoers are those who don't remember because they never given the matter a thought; nothing can keep them back because without remembrance they are without roots. (36)
In other words, ignorance is bliss and we can now commit murder with total abandonment and remember nothing because we were just following orders.
Saddam's sons would torture their football team if they didn't win, or have their security teams pick up women for them to rape.
Saddam would poison the Kurds and on, and on...
Iraqis are lucky that they will soon be able to hold elections, it will be the only other country in the region with a representative gov't after Israel, that's why Arabs don't want it to happen.
This a NON has really just demonstrated the point of this article. a NON believes the unthinkable to be normal. And in this "normal" you have to be a NON-thinker.
This is what makes me feel so crazy. This kind of "normal" is so offensive to my heart, my brain, my sensitivities that I'm starting to ask crazy people if they think I'm crazy? Jesus, Mary, Joseph. Jesus, Mary, Joseph. Jesus, Mary, Joseph.(One of my mother's crisis prayers, accompanied with frantic signs of the cross).
It's about OIL !!!
It's about OIL !!!!
What is it that aNON doesn't get about it ?
It's not about Saddam, there are others around the world that do the same thing. Of course that doesn't make it right.
It's not about democracy, for CRYING OUT LOUD !
Get with the program.
It's about OIL !
The American public has been lied to by experts, and they still don't get it after 1 1/2 years of trying to control those that you bombed the hell out of.
Wake up.
It's about OIL !
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"Arrogance is unacceptable. Do it to my face, and I will react" - Jim Callaghan