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vader did not fully believe in the empire, he was loyal to people, not principles, he was high on the dark side at mustafar and wanted to kill palpatine to make padme empress and be her guard dog, he strangled padme not because she 'threatened his political ambitions', but because he thought she had brought obi-wan to kill him, thus betraying him and lying about still loving him
c'mon on now
basic media literacy is dying
The Banality of Evil and the Ordinariness of Good
It took me eight months to finish Eichmann in Jerusalem, and one concept stayed with me:
“The Banality of Evil.”
A phrase popularized through the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment, it is often (mis)interpreted as “everyone is capable of evil” and has often been misused to excuse “morally grey characters” or romanticize “villains.”
What Arendt actually means by “banality” is that Eichmann, the man who orchestrated the murder of six million Jews, was NOT a radical, monstrous, “Dark Lord”-like figure. On the contrary, he was banal: small, pompous, full of clichés, and completely unable to think for himself. Eichmann couldn’t grasp a world of plurality, so he sought to eliminate what was too different.
This thoughtless evil — one that can only view the world through borrowed eyes, provocative slogans, and extremist propaganda — has spread like a fungus, now accelerated by social media, and threatens to lay waste to the world.
Arendt never meant “the Banality of Evil” as an excuse for Eichmann. In fact, she made this abundantly clear in the book’s final chapter: Eichmann’s participation in the “final solution” maybe circumstantial, and in theory, many would have done the same in his place, but that doesn’t lessen his guilt. The law judges the actuality of a crime, not the potentiality of guilt.
On the other hand, good can be ordinary, but never banal.
One thing I love about Schindler’s List is how it spends two-thirds of the film showing just how ordinary Oskar Schindler is. It is not grand ideology that drives him to save 1,200 Jews at the cost of his entire fortune. He is, above all, a businessman who hopes to profit from the war and retire in comfort and fame. He succumbs easily to luxury and lust, unable to stay loyal to one “Mrs. Schindler.” He even objects to Itzhak Stern’s secret plan to save Jewish intellectuals.
Yet, Schindler has not forgotten how to think and how to feel. He is learning. He is making up his own mind, slowly but surely. That contrast is what makes the image of the little girl in red and his final decision to make the list so powerful.
While Eichmann warns of the danger of thoughtlessness, Schindler demonstrates the power of an original thought, a self-determining act - even from a feeble mind, even from weak hands. Good is not some out-of-reach ideology. It might not even be consistent. But it is a concrete, humanizing act and it is life-saving.
“We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on... that’s who we really are.” — J.K. Rowling “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “I am part of that force which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.” — Goethe
The duality of good and evil has been written about countless times in Western literature, yet it still surprises modern readers as “radical” whenever it reappears.
To me, the true difference between the Banality of Evil and the Ordinariness of Good lies in originality: the ability to think for oneself, despite how difficult it has become.
Instead of asking, “What would Hannah Arendt do?”, Arendt challenges us to describe the reality we find ourselves in, so we can resist it.
Because Thinking IS Good.
I feel like all of my alastor peeps need to spend some time with Dean Winchester. I think that would be fun. Equally tortured minus the banality of evil.
Today's surrender to evil comes in the guise of a human rights lawyer
by Melanie Phillips
This is his threat that unless Israel surrenders and gives Hamas a victory, which will enable it once again to slaughter Jews and take them hostage, he will recognise “Palestine” — whose entire purpose as a fictional construct is as a strategy to exterminate Israel, slaughter Jews and steal their identity in their own ancestral homeland. He’s telling Israel in effect: “Agree to die or we’ll make sure you do”.
He then has the gall to declare “our message to the terrorists of Hamas is unchanged and unequivocal. They must immediately release all the hostages, sign up to a ceasefire, disarm and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza.”
But since he has said that if Israel doesn’t stop the war he’ll recognise a “state of Palestine,” Hamas now has every incentive to refuse to cease its attacks until that happy development occurs. Starmer has strengthened Hamas and all but sealed the hostages’ fate.
Is he really so deluded?
He went on:
And we are mounting a major effort to get humanitarian supplies back in. By air, and UK aid has been air dropped into Gaza today.
This reinforces the lie that Israel was withholding aid whereas Israel was allowing it in and the UN was refusing to distribute it unless this was handled by the UN and Hamas — which has been stealing it for itself intending the Gazans to starve. No mention of that by Starmer. Does he actually know what’s been happening?
By demonising Israel in this way, Starmer is further fuelling the rampaging Jew-hatred which is consuming the country he leads.
Whether he is kow-towing to Britain’s increasingly powerful Muslim bloc or to his own hard-left is irrelevant. Just as he campaigned for the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn to become prime minister at the last general election while ostensibly holding his nose, he really believes he is being principled and decent while plumbing the depths of moral bankruptcy.
This is not just hypocrisy. Not just moral blindness. He and his wretched Labour party are now a lethal threat to civilised values.
Today’s accomplices to barbarism aren’t dressed in jackboots or the shades and braid of a junta generalissimo. They wear the suit and earnest spectacles of a human rights lawyer. It is today’s banality of evil, and it is frying the western brain.
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality of Evil - Hannah Arendt
The day after Thanksgiving, the New York Times published an article called “In America’s Heartland, the Nazi Sympathizer Next Door,” by Rich
"In fact, “normies” like Hovater are just as dangerous, if not more so, than the neo-Nazi skinheads and criminals who have up until now been the face of the far-right extremist movement. Thugs carrying guns and beating people up in alleys may evoke more fear, but historically they are outliers. Incidents of mass violence like the Holocaust, Rwandan Tutsi Genocide and the Cambodian Genocide begin when average citizens buy into racist ideology and do the work of turning a society against a group of people. And those average citizens do have regular jobs and careers. They may even have friends of different racial backgrounds, and they may be loving parents.
Testimonies of genocide survivors tell us, time and time again, of the once friendly neighbors who turned in their Jewish acquaintances to the Gestapo. The classmates and teachers who taunted students with racist chants. The manifestos shouted on the radio and printed in newspapers. All the people responsible for these acts were “normies.” Genocide prevention depends on recognizing that future perpetrators are not a special breed of evil: they are normal people who, without proper intervention, can be easily persuaded to become more and more open about their hate until eventually they resort to violence."
the only defense to becoming a monster, even if you don't look or recognize you are becoming one, is to learn about the world and the people in it. seeing in black and white, perfect good and perfect evil, misses the complexity of life.
stop trying to moralize acting shitty to strangers and friends by covering it in coded language and excuses.
