May 17, 2004

Arendt: the banality of evil

Trevor,
an issue for you to bring your knowledge of Hannah Arendt to bear upon.

International Committee of the Red Cross Report makes two points.

It says that many innocent Iraqi's were arrested in dragnet type operations. Initial arrests were often rough and frightening to the people whose houses were broken into. And the military had no good system of notification for the families of detainees. This resulted, as the report terms it, "in the de facto 'disappearance' of the arrestee for weeks or even months until contact was finally made. The net effect was to have people's family members simply disappear with no idea of what had happened to them for weeks or even months.

It also says that "ill-treatment during interrogation was not systematic, except with regard to persons arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an 'intelligence' value." The kind of "ill-treatment" they're talking about is pretty much like the stuff we've been seeing in those pictures. The fact that this only seemed to happen while most prisoners were in the interrogation phase, and then generally to the ones who Military Intelligence thought might have really choice information, tells you that this wasn't simply a matter of a breakdown of authority or rogue sadists, but rather a matter of organized policy.

Standard operating procedure or routinized work.

Hence the banality of evil. The US privates who did the torturing were 'normal’ people, ordinary human beings. They were not devils or monsters psychologically speaking; for the most part they were not even abnormally sadistic or inherently brutal, or killers ’by nature’, and so forth. Just ordinary soldiers doing what was asked of them;cogs in the gigantic military machine who are perpetrators and human beings who never realized what they were doing.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 17, 2004 11:56 PM | TrackBack
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