"... an evil child's fumbling toys ..."

Philosopher and Holocaust-survivor Hannah Arendt wasn't very popular when she was writing on the Eichmann Trial in the early 1960s. But those who knew better, who lived by reason, saw value in her argument. Yes, Nazi war criminals needed to be brought to justice, but was Jerusalem's Eichmann Trial an example of that? Not really, she writes in her book of the same name -- or no, in the way logic can only be true or false.

The book is both an account and a critique of the Trial, not only its court and its proceedings but in its procurement of its accused, Nazi transportation co-ordinator Adolf Eichmann, who was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina and flown to Israel to face the proverbial music.

It was Arendt's belief that how we arrive at a conclusion is as important as the conclusion we want and need. There was no question Eichmann would hang for his crimes, but if it was to mean anything other than retribution, it would have to proceed correctly, leave behind a record that was beyond a ruling, an unequivocal tale that would serve as a buffer against future attempts at crimes against humanity (genocide).

Arendt's book, as a whole, has some valuable lessons for us today, coming at a time when courts are everywhere and judgements are handed down quickly and punitively. Speaking of technology and our emergent technocracy, Arendt (an expert on totalitarianism) has this to say in her "Epilogue":

"It is the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. No punishment has ever possessed enough power to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been. The particular reasons that speak for the possibility of a repetition of the crimes committed by the Nazis are even more plausible. The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technological devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population "superfluous" even in terms of labour, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble." (273)

Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) 2

 

A few months ago, while on a break between events held at the North Shore's Cap 5 Reserve, I stopped into Edgemont Village's 32 Books & Gallery to poke around, see what's new. Rachel Cusk's Second Place was newish, and I bought it, though not before flipping through the Globe & Mail Western Arts Correspondent Marsha Lederman's brand new Kiss the Red Stairs: the Holocaust, Once Removed, a memoir that tells of her parents' stories of the Holocaust and the intergenerational trauma that resulted from it.

When the name Fred Herzog (1930-2019) flashed by, I stopped and flipped back to where it might begin and read forward from there, to the turn of phrase that set off Lederman ten years before when, during her 2011 Globe & Mail interview with the photographer who chronicled Vancouver street life over the last half of the 20th century (in colour, no less), Herzog spoke the words "so-called Holocaust," a comment that "stayed with" Lederman ("I struggled with its meaning for many months"), the implication being that Herzog was an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier. (For the full story on Lederman's reflection on this interview, click here.) 

Is it fair to say that the use of "so-called" before any noun is to cast doubt on the truth of that noun? Maybe today it is, given that the truth is often more an impediment than an asset to those in pain (from the SJWs to DJT and his supporters). Hard to remember there was a time when "so-called" acknowledged a noun that was understood by those other than oneself. One of the greatest chroniclers of the Holocaust -- an event that took the lives of upwards of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis -- was the Jewish scholar Hannah Arendt, whose Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) is essential reading to anyone attempting to anything write on the subject. Had Lederman read Arendt's book she would have seen this, on Page 39 of the Penguin edition:

"Nothing's as hot when you eat it as when its being cooked" -- a proverb that was then on the lips of many Jews as well. They lived in a fool's paradise, in which, for a few years, even Streicher spoke of a "legal solution" of the Jewish Problem. It took the organized pogroms of November, 1938, the so-called Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass, when seventy-five hundred Jewish shop windows were broken, all synagogues went up in flames, and twenty thousand Jewish men were taken off to concentration camps, to expel them from it."