Just like in Baathist Assad's Prisons: The Banality of Jewish Zionist Evil

Hannah Arendt made a big deal about the uniqueness of Nazi evil as it pertains to the Holocaust. It is natural for a Jewish person, whose religion makes him/her believe he/she is superior to other humans, to not only elevate their suffering above the suffering of other people, but to also elevate the evil of their enemies above any other evil. That is what Zionists have been doing with the Holocaust: There is nothing like it in human history, they contend, and therefore there has never been, and will never be, anything as evil as the Nazis.

Yet, as they have been prosecuting their genocide against the indigenous Palestinian people for the past 100 years, the Zionist Jews of Israel see no problem with perpetrating against the Palestinians the same level of banal evil that Arendt says was perpetrated against German and European Jews during WWII.

One does not need to be an academic philosopher to see and understand evil when one sees it in motion. Arendt's main observation as she witnessed the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann in 1962 is that he was a distrubingly ordinary person who wouldn't hurt a fly, but who was a "cog in the machine" (of the Nazis) who pushed papers and kept records. Arendt was conflicted about his responsibilities in the Holocaust, since he himself did not kill anyone, did not hate Jews (so he said) and did not know that the papers he was pushing through the Nazi administration aimed ultimately at killing interned Jews in the camps. Her conflicting feelings nevertheless could not compel her to relieve him of moral responsibility.

In this commentary, I will excerpt some passages from the article entitled "Hannah Arendt’s World: Bureaucracy, Documentation, and Banal Evil" by Michelle Caswell, appearing in Archivaria 70 (Fall 2010): 1–25, and ask you to abstract for a moment the references to the Nazis and their Jewish victims and think about whether they might apply to the Zionists and their Palestinian victims. Subjectivity is often the sister of blindness. 

I will also show pictures of Israeli torture methods that resemble in many ways the torture methods of the Syrian Assad regime long documented by Amnesty International and others, as they were applied to

1- Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners seized by the Syrians during their occupation of Lebanon (1975-2005) many of whom have never reappeared (an estimate of 17,000 were taken from Lebanon to Syria, some believed to be still alive), and 

2- Syrian prisoners taken by the Assad regime forces since the 2011 revolution. [See a video and transcript of how Syrian soldiers treat their prisoners: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/04/barbarity-of-syrian-regime.html]

------------------- Excerpts from the aforecited article: ---------------- 

Again, please read these comments and think about the banality of Zionist Israel's optional reliance on 19th century Ottoman laws or early 20th century British mandate laws to dehumanize the Palestinian people and steal their lands and homes. Later you will see a copy of the Israeli Police form with which it interrogates suspected Palestinian "terrorists"; the fact that they have forms for everything, with names, dates, locations etc. tells much about how Zionist bureaucracy replicates Nazi bureaucracy in its "administration" of its Palestinian victims.

Excerpts:

1- Arendt’s analysis of the nature of evil continues to provide insight into the minds of seemingly ordinary individuals who commit extraordinary evil...

2- As long as ordinary people can be transformed overnight into mass murderers, we are still living in Hannah Arendt’s world.

3- Arendt’s theory of evil explains how obsessive documentation in a totalitarian bureaucracy can help facilitate mass murder by alienating decision-makers from the violence of their decisions.  

4- Arendt had difficulty coming to terms with the ordinariness of Eichmann, who did not fit commonplace notions of how a monstrous mass murderer should behave.

5- Arendt, deeply troubled with reconciling the Eichmann on trial with the Eichmann who organized the Holocaust, shifted her own prior conceptions of radical evil ... to explain how a new category of thoughtless bureaucrats can become capable of committing mass murder.

6- The thinking individual, according to Arendt, maintains moral judgment and an ethical basis for action even when society’s values [e.g. Zionist society] are skewed enough to endorse mass murder. 

7- ... otherwise ordinary humans are so dehumanized by the mechanizations of modern bureaucracy that they are made capable of committing mass murder if sanctioned by the system.

8- The more perfectly the bureaucracy is “dehumanized,” the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation.

9- Seemingly more complicated, but in reality far simpler than examining the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil, is the question of what kind of crime is actually involved here – a crime, moreover, which all agree is unprecedented. For the concept of genocide, introduced explicitly to cover a crime unknown before, although applicable up to a point is not fully adequate, for the simple reason that massacres of whole peoples are not unprecedented. They were the order of the day in antiquity, and the centuries of colonization and imperialism provide plenty of examples of more or less successful attempts of that sort… [simply put, the Zionist blackmail mantra: yes there have been massacres and genocides, but the Holocaust is unique. Nothing can ever supersede Jewish suffering. Therefore, because tormenting, massacring and genociding the Palestinians is nothing compared to the Holocaust, it is acceptable].

10- ... thoughtlessness “emerges under conditions of inverted human order,” in which laws enforce evil rather than good, and the machines of bureaucracy churn out destruction rather than creation. Thus the insidious nature of evil in modernity is such that bureaucratic functions (like documentation) alienate human beings from thinking about the consequences of their actions, even when they still possess faint traces of moral knowledge.

11- Records are the media through which procedures are routinized; records enable repetition, which leads to “the nearly universal ability to make any activity into a routine that deadens the awareness of what is being done.” It is for this precise reason that both the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge were such meticulous recordkeepers. [So are the Zionists in their meticulous "administration" of their prisoners and of the occupied parts of Palestine!].

12- [In this excerpt, replace 'Jew' with 'Palestinian' and see what you get]: This is like an automatic factory, like a flour mill connected with some bakery. At one end you put in a Jew who still has some property … and he goes through the building from counter to counter, from office to office, and comes out at the other end without any money, without any rights, with only a passport on which it says: ‘You must leave the country within a fortnight. Otherwise....

The banality of evil in Israeli interrogation forms

 

(From Haaretz)