Lieber Herr Böttcher,
anbei ein Text für die Berliner Blätter.Liebe Grüsse nach Berlin,
Henry Zvi Lothane
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Henry Lothane, MD, DLFAPA
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Office address: 1435 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10128
Phone: (212)534-5555
www.lothane.com
Gesendet von: "Lothane, Henry" <henry.lothane@mssm.edu>
Published in Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychology, 36:1-20, 2014
HOW TO THINK ABOUT EVIL: A RESPONSE TO RICHARD J. BERNSTEIN Ph.D. ON ARENDT’S BANALITY OF EVIL
Henry Zvi Lothane, M.D.Abstract
As an adjective applied to evil, ‘banal’ is the wrong word: it means commonplace, ordinary, trivial. Its synonyms are: ‘trite,’ ‘hackneyed,’ ‘platitudinous,’ ‘vapid,’ ‘wishy-washy,’ and ‘silly.’ The eminent political philosopher,
Hannah Arendt, committed an egregious mistake when she plagiarized Karl Jaspers’ words (“total banality;” “prosaic triviality”) in the subtitle of her book on the Eichmann trial: “A Report on the Banality of Evil.” While the phrase died Hard and is still a popular cliché, it is an injustice that offends the memory of the martyrs of the Holocaust.
Even though Arendt met with vigorous protest from many quarters, she never admitted her mistake. Arendt’s fatal flaw is vindicated in the article by Professor R.J. Bernstein, ‘How Not to Think About Evil,’ published previously in this Journal. Arendt claimed that calling Eichmann ‘banal’ was factual; but it was not. She merely expressed her emotional reaction to the appearance of Eichmann in court: a poor ‘nebbish’ who did not know what he was doing. The historical facts presented here (below), however, will demonstrate irrefutable evidence that the criminal, Eichmann, knew all too well what he was doing, and that there was nothing either ‘banal’ or ‘trivial’ about it.