Saddam: the ‘banality of evil’ revisited

The NYT‘s John F. Burns is a seasoned, very experienced foreign correspondent. I was just amazed, though, that in the piece he had in today’s “Week in review” section, in which he reflected on what he had witnessed directly during Saddam’s short judicial appearance Thursday, he never made a single explicit reference to the idea of the “banality of evil”.
It was the philosopher Karl Jaspers who first made the observation–this was at the time of the Nuremberg Trials–that a court procedure should indeed seek to banalize evil. In October 1946, he wrote in a letter to his former student Hannah Arendt:

It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what really characterizes them… I regard any hint of myth and legend with horror, and everything unspecific is just such a hint.

(Arendt later picked up on that observation and used “the banality of evil” as the subtitle to her 1963 classic, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”.)
Here was John Burns, in the lead to today’s piece:

It was only in the courtroom, at the American military base, that their physical insignificance, their sheer unremitting ordinariness, became so plain.
On television last Thursday, the images of the 12 former Iraqi leaders conveyed an altogether bigger impression, perhaps because the lens tightened until their faces filled the screen. But to a reporter sitting 25 feet away, for the five hours it took to complete preliminary hearings against Saddam Hussein and 11 others who terrorized Iraq, they seemed to have shrunk, pressing home the question: How could these utterly unremarkable men, forgettable in any other context, have so tyrannized their 25 million countrymen that they remained unchallenged for 35 years?

Interesting question…

Actually, the whole 1946 exchange of thoughts between Jaspers and Arendt of which the above quote was a part is really interesting, and raises some very important questions about how we can even start to think and talk about horrifying acts like those undertaken by Adolph Hitler or Saddam Hussein, or about the perpetrators of such acts.
Since I seem to be in a self-plagiarizing mood this days, let me just give you a bit more of the description of that exchange that I gave in this spring 2002 essay in Boston Review. The essay was primarily an exploration of “jusyice” issues in the Rwandan post-genocide context, but a re-reading of the following part of it actually reveals many issues of key importance in Saddam’s “case”, as well.
Actually, I’d advise you read the whole essay there–it ain’t short!–but I’ve tried to access BR’s website a couple of times this weekend without success. I suppose they’re putting the contents of their latest issue up there.
So anyway, what follows is an excerpt from that essay. If it tempts you to go read the whole thing, maybe you’ll find that link there will be back in working order soon.
—-
… In August 1946, at the close of the Nuremberg trial of two dozen ringleaders of the Nazi atrocities, Arendt wrote to Jaspers that,

Your definition of Nazi policy as a crime… strikes me as questionable. The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough…. [T]his guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal systems…. We are simply not equipped to deal, on a human, political level, with a guilt that is beyond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue…. I don’t know how we will ever get out of it, for the Germans are burdened now with thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who cannot be adequately punished within the legal system; and we Jews are burdened with millions of innocents, by reason of which every Jew alive today can see himself as innocence personified.

In October–just three days after the executioners at Nuremberg hanged the eleven men condemned by the Allied judges–Jaspers wrote back that,

I’m not altogether comfortable with your view, because a guilt that goes beyond all criminal guilt inevitably takes on a streak of ‘greatness’–of satanic greatness–which is, for me, as inappropriate for the Nazis as all the talk about the ‘demonic’ element in Hitler and so forth. It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what really characterizes them…. I regard any hint of myth and legend with horror, and everything unspecific is just such a hint.

Karl Jaspers was a fair-minded, conscientious man who had stuck by his humanistic principles (and his German-Jewish wife) throughout the twelve years of Nazi rule, and had suffered considerably for this exercise of love and conscience. It is understandable that in 1946, he should still be particularly sensitive to any kind of reasoning that might revive any notion of the Third Reich’s ‘satanic greatness’–an idea that had often been promulgated by pro-Nazi intellectuals during the war. In December 1946, Arendt wrote that she found Jasper’s criticism on this point, “half convincing; that is, I realize completely that in the way I’ve expressed this up to now I come dangerously close to that ‘satanic greatness’ that I, like you, totally reject.” But she suggested that, even without subscribing to such a myth, there was still, “a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all…built factories to produce corpses.” She suggested another possible way of characterizing this difference: “Perhaps what is behind it all is only that individual human beings did not kill other individual human beings for human reasons, but that an organized attempt was made to eradicate the concept of the human being.”
In 1960, Israel captured Adolph Eichmann and announced that it would put him on trial for “crimes against the Jewish people” and “crimes against humanity.” Arendt and Jaspers re-opened their discussion of whether a criminal proceeding was the best way to deal with the phenomenon of the Holocaust. “I have this foolishly simplistic idea,” Jaspers wrote to her. “It would be wonderful to do without the trial altogether and make it instead into a process of examination and clarification. The goal would be the best possible objectification of the historical facts. The end result would not be the judges’ sentence, but certainty about the facts, to the extent that such certainty can be attained.”
This might seem like an early proposal for something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or at least a Truth Commission. (Jaspers did, however, go on to suggest that after having established “the facts,” the Israeli body should pass Eichmann on to an international court to undergo a formal trial for “crimes against humanity.”) At this point, Jaspers seems to have been generally convinced by Arendt’s arguments that what happened during the Holocaust could not be dealt with solely through criminal prosecutions. He also stressed that political factors would inevitably underlie the decision to hold trials: “Judgments passed by the victors on the vanquished have, in the past, been regarded as political actions and distinct from legal ones…. The political realm is of an importance that cannot be captured in legal terms (the attempt to do so is Anglo-Saxon and a self-deception that masks a basic fact in the functionings of political existence).”
In her response, Arendt admitted that, “as far as the role of the law is concerned, I have been infected by the Anglo-Saxon influence. But quite apart from that, it seems to me to be in the nature of this case that we have no tools to hand except legal ones with which we have to judge and pass sentence on something that cannot even be adequately represented either in legal terms or in political terms.”
Soon enough, she was on her way to Jerusalem, where she reported on the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker in a series of pieces that subsequently became her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Despite her use of Jasper’s ‘banality of evil’ Arendt seems to argue in the book that what happened during the Holocaust was not merely the commission of ‘banal’ (that is, justiciable) evil, but went beyond that. In the Postscript, she wrote that “I held and hold the opinion that this trial had to take place in the interests of justice and nothing else.” But despite that, she concluded that many aspects of the trial itself demonstrated, “the inadequacy of the prevailing legal system and of current juridical concepts to deal with the facts of administrative massacres organized by the state apparatus.”
In Jerusalem, as in Nuremberg, Arendt (and Jaspers) judged that criminal prosecutions might be a necessary element in a response to state-sponsored atrocities–but they could not be sufficient. In Rwanda, in our current era, the distinctive features of the Rwandan genocide made an exclusive reliance on legal methods even less appropriate than in the case of the Holocaust.