When Lucy Steigerwald tweeted this item about ICE still trying to deport people in the middle of a pandemic, she commented that she didn’t understand how they could sleep at night; I said that “Just doing my job” is even more insidiously evil than “I was only following orders”. Mike Siegel then replied by calling attention to what Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski said about the interrogator character in the episode “Intersections in Real Time”, a man so harmless-looking he would’ve gone unnoticed in any ordinary office:
…You look at most of the guys who ran Treblinka, or Bergen-Belsen, and they’re largely ordinary looking guys, who could be accountants or repair men or car salesmen…most SF tends to…deal with the big bad guys, the…Darth Vaders and all the other major forces…but all too often the real damage is done not by the single Evil Leader, but by the ten million people who follow him, the bookkeepers who track the bodies and…make the trains run on time, who run the gulags, who build the new state empires that will be built with slave labor, any or all of whom could say, as many have, “I was just doing my job”…To the interrogator, he was simply doing his job, and…then he goes home to his wife and kids, and has dinner, and sits out on the porch trying to forget what he does because he thinks he has to do it…assuming he thinks about it at all…
Look around you, especially in an election season, and see the pure evil a lot of people spout, usually while imagining that the things they’re advocating – up to and including mob violence – are righteous. And they’re all ordinary folks. Some of the people I’ve crossed paths with as an activist don’t actually care about anyone’s rights; they’re just amoral Marxists who happened to fall into sex work at some point and have chosen to adopt it as an identity despite Marxist regimes’ long persecution of us. The majority of cops, bureaucrats and other petty evildoers don’t see themselves as evil; they see themselves as just people doing a job. And every one of them looks (and in public, acts) just like anyone else. They shop in the same stores, watch TV, love their dogs, eat next to us in restaurants.
All the cops.
All the screws.
All the functionaries.
All the other quiet sociopaths.
Straight on. Hannah Arendt described this perfectly with “The Banality Of Evil”, and her other works.
Precisely.
The 10 minute video below, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Nazi”, is rich with photographs discovered after Hannah Arendt left this world.
Many show various Nazi Personnel on their days off.
Others show the banal workaday activity of perpetrating horrors.
But, can today’s perpetrators of horrors see themselves in it, or just dismiss it as ancient history?
“But, can today’s perpetrators of horrors see themselves in it, or just dismiss it as ancient history?”
I assume that’s a rhetorical question since your reference to the Nazi photos shows you know the answer.
To do evil a person much first convince themselves that they are doing good. Not only mass murders. but their supporters as well depend on ideology to achieve violence against the innocent in the name of the good. To quote Solzhenitsyn again,
“Ideology – that is what gives devildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”
What’s true for the monster is true for his supporters.
I know quite a few of those (far and hard) left sex work activists, and the irony of them supporting such a discredited viewpoint is lost on them.
By the way, J Michael Straczynski was also the head writer and story editor on The Real Ghostbusters. (Before ABC and Q5 intervened and caused him to leave.)
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Very much so. Even a really evil leader is just a symptom. The problem is the supporters, the followers. They are that actual problem and the real source of all that evil. Without the followers, that leader would just be a person that says stupid things nobody listens to.
Hence I would add:
All the voters that support leaders that should never lead anything.
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