Monday, March 11, 2024

The Evil of Banality

There were no terrorists hiding in tunnels beneath the city of Hiroshima, nor indeed underneath Mariupol's drama theatre, yet once again last night it was the IDF response to 7/10 that drew facile comparisons from people in fancy formal wear with one very specific part of the murderous, ethically complex inferno that was WWII.

Yet the thing about the Holocaust is that it stands apart from everything else that happened between the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the dropping of the second of Oppenheimer's atrocious new weapons on the citizens of Nagasaki, and deservedly so. And it in no way preserves this status as a result of some sort of process of 'selective empathy'.

Those who would have us lose sight of this are, in my recent experience, morally moronic, morally degenerate or both. Not so much the banality of evil as banality and/or evil. 

 

 

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