The Little Dog Laughed

I've started reading Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. It's been sitting on the bookshelf looking at me, night after night, along with The Victorian Internet.

Truth be told, I don't know enough about the Final Solution to get the most out of this book; I didn't even know what the Judenräte were, and had to look them up on the internet. So I'm very much coming to it from a state of ignorance. Primarily, my interest in it comes from a mention in Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority.

So far, the book is interesting, especially as an eye-witness account of Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem following his kidnap from Buenos Aires. Arendt reported on the trial for the New Yorker, and her (controversial) book is an edited version of the articles published in that magazine. She writes clearly and incisively but certainly has her own agenda.

Particularly interesting in the light of Milgram's work is this paraphrase of some of Eichmann's remarks:

"As for the base motives, he was perfectly sure that he was not an innerer Schweinehund, that is a dirty bastard in the depth of his heart; and as for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to to (sic) -- to ship millions of men, women and children to their deaths...." (italics mine)

and this direct quote:

"I sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me...."

Easy to conclude that if nobody had ever ordered Eichmann to arrange mass slaughter, he would have lived an entirely blameless life. This is probably Arendt's thesis, and the reason why her book was so controversial when it first came out: we'd like to see a monster sitting in the dock, but there's only a bureaucrat who wanted to belong.