Re: Abu Ghraib photos don't tell whole story, July 20.
In his book review of Standard Operating Procedure, Ted St. Godard writes: "(Hannah) Arendt's Eichmann was a low-level Nazi bureaucrat busily designing railway systems that could as easily have transported textbooks as human cargo."
Adolf Eichmann was hardly low-level. He strove very hard to become the "Jewish specialist" of the Third Reich and as head of the innocuous-sounding Referat IV B4 of the Gestapo's Reich Main Security Office, Eichmann oversaw the development of the deportations, the death camps and the gas chambers.
Arendt's famous quote about "the banality of evil" does mislead as to the horrible will and drive to exterminate European Jewry that Eichmann possessed and St. Godard seems to have taken that erroneous tack when he suggests that men like Eichmann were "not so much evil as banal, more mindless than malevolent."
Banality does not account for the deaths of six million Jews. Banality, in the case of Eichmann, is the public mask of a sociopath.
Michael Melanson
Winnipeg
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