Banality of Evil - Literature Review

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- Literature Review (3,720) ‘To what extent was Hannah Arendt correct in saying that human beings are conditioned to be evil by authority?’ Exploring the dispute between dispositional evil and conditioned/situational evil Eichmann and the Banality of Evil Stephen Whitfield addresses Hannah Arendt’s thesis on evil. Whitfield argues that perpetrators of evil during the Holocaust did so through three factors; thoughtlessness, distance and the nature of bureaucracy. Whitfield notes that an aspect of bureaucracy causes the wrongdoers to become engrossed with the logistical side of genocide, presenting a barrier between action and consequence. Alluding to Arendt’s illustration of Eichmann, Whitfield reinforces the idea of Eichmann lacking the staple traits of evil such as hatred, aggressiveness and virulent anti-Semitism apparent in the higher echelons of Nazism. In other words, both authors emphasize Eichmann’s normality, epitomising a diligent, acquiescent worker who perhaps absolved his heinous crimes through a duty to the state, the conditioning factor here being compliance to those giving orders and fulfilling one’s task to the utmost of one’s ability. However, Whitfield begins to explore a counter-argument to the question, stating that Eichmann instead had an evil disposition that correlates with the evil he conducted. The prosecutor Gideon Hausner during the trial attacks Eichmann with words like ‘cunning’, ‘flint-hearted plotter’ and ‘demonic personality’, adding that Eichmann ‘revelled in the exercise of power’. This notion is supported further through the findings of the Szondi test conducted on Eichmann. The findings of the ten tests on Eichmann led Léopold Szondi himself to conclude ‘You have on your hands a most dangerous person.”. Whitfield accentuates Eichmann’s unusual profile by showing how even among six thousand tested criminals over a span
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