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Nov. 16th, 2014
Sunday Morning
Nov. 16th, 2014 09:54 amI was hoping to let the cats out this morning. They have been such angels, relatively speaking, as far as cats go. This has been a long cold snap. Since we first put the heater on, we have yet to shut it off. However, the sky remains drizzly, a little now and a little then. It is just enough to move me to keep them in, but I am hoping to let them go this afternoon. I will still need to get them in for the night however, as temperatures drop into the thirties, with this cold spell expected to continue until the middle of the week. I do believe this is unusual, being a little early in the winter. It seems to me that, in years past, we could go through a whole winter without a cold snap lasting this long.
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The drizzle has only gotten worse this afternoon. I am afraid that the cats will not be very courteous tonight. Man, it was not even supposed to rain this weekend.
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The drizzle has only gotten worse this afternoon. I am afraid that the cats will not be very courteous tonight. Man, it was not even supposed to rain this weekend.
There has been some recent controversy over the 'Evil vs. Banality' of Adolph Eichmann. Recall that Hannah Arendt famously marveled over the banality of the man, seeing him as merely a functionary carrying out insane orders. There has been some new research by Bettina Stangneth, a German philospher who has had more material to work with, including Eichmann's personal writing and taped musings, that make it clear that he was, by far, more murderous than banal.
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Eichmann was proudly prominent in preparations for the “final solution” even before the Wannsee Conference (Jan. 20, 1942) formalized it. “His name,” Stangneth notes, “appeared in David Ben-Gurion’s diary only three months after the start of the war” in September 1939. On Oct. 24, 1941, a newspaper published by German exiles in London identified Eichmann as leader of a “campaign” of “mass murder.”
“I was an idealist,” he told his fellow exiles, and he was. In obedience to the “morality of the Fatherland that dwells within,” a.k.a. the “voice of blood,” his anti-Semitism was radical because it was ideological. Denying that all individuals are created equal entailed affirming the irremediable incompatibility of groups, which necessitated a struggle to settle subordination and extermination.
“There are,” Eichmann wrote, “a number of moralities.” But because thinking is national, no morality is universal. Only war is universal as the arbiter of survival. So, Stangneth writes, “Only thinking based on ethnicity offers a chance of final victory in the battle of all living things.”
-- George F. Will at The Washington Post
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Eichmann was proudly prominent in preparations for the “final solution” even before the Wannsee Conference (Jan. 20, 1942) formalized it. “His name,” Stangneth notes, “appeared in David Ben-Gurion’s diary only three months after the start of the war” in September 1939. On Oct. 24, 1941, a newspaper published by German exiles in London identified Eichmann as leader of a “campaign” of “mass murder.”
“I was an idealist,” he told his fellow exiles, and he was. In obedience to the “morality of the Fatherland that dwells within,” a.k.a. the “voice of blood,” his anti-Semitism was radical because it was ideological. Denying that all individuals are created equal entailed affirming the irremediable incompatibility of groups, which necessitated a struggle to settle subordination and extermination.
“There are,” Eichmann wrote, “a number of moralities.” But because thinking is national, no morality is universal. Only war is universal as the arbiter of survival. So, Stangneth writes, “Only thinking based on ethnicity offers a chance of final victory in the battle of all living things.”
-- George F. Will at The Washington Post
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