To Reimagine Mass-Murdering Racists
John Durham Peters’ Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition has a haunting passage about Otto Adolf Eichmann, a major architect of the Nazi’s “Final Solution” campaign against European Jews. Like Hannah Arendt before him, Peters acknowledges that discussing Eichmann is challenging. Eichmann embodied “the enigma of a mass murderer who never killed.” Moreover, his attitudes and comportment aren’t what many envision when they think of a mass-murdering racist. As Peters’ writes:
Eichmann abhorred cruelty on the personal level but was willing to countenance terrible things at a distance. He showed outrage not when he was accused of killing hundreds of thousands but when a witness accused him of having beaten a Jewish boy to death. Eichmann was not a cruel or malicious person, as Ardent documents at length, but rather something of a dullard. His was not the steely stance of medical passivity before morbidity. He had a tender stomach and was horrified on the rare occasions when he saw the disposal of corpses. He even rejected Nabokov’s Lolita when it was offered to him for his reading pleasure in jail: he found the book “unwholesome.” Having once slapped a Jew bothered his conscious more than having sent innumerable Jews to their deaths. He had never personally entertained any bad feelings toward Jews and even apparently had a Jewish mistress for a period. Eichmann presents the problem of straining a gnat and swallowing a camel, in the vivid biblical phrase. He was moral in some things but without a compass in the large. He remained a person to the end, one of us, dogged by petty preferences and guilts, too small to grasp the magnitude of his monstrousness; he was completely out of scale with the deeds he authored. Common morality—being decent in one’s choice of literature, not having unkind thoughts toward people—is blank before the enormity of mass murder.
Was Eichmann cruel? Not in close range. Was he malicious? No. He was a dullard who lamented having once slapped a Jew. Was he callous and indifferent to human death? No. He found the disposal of Jewish corpses horrifying. Did he read vile literature? No. He championed reading wholesome works. Did he harbor deep-seated, antisemitic race-hate? No. He didn’t hate Jews and even had a Jewish mistress.
Eichmann wasn’t a cartoonish super-villain. He was too humane and terrifying for that. He was a mass-murdering racist whose life and programs of systemic, genocidal racism require us all to reassess our conceptions of evil.
