Arendt LOL
I read the transcript of his [Eichmann] police investigation, thirty-six hundred pages, read it, and read it very carefully, and I do not know how many times I laughed—laughed out loud!
One Comment
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LOL, I still think Arendt is right about Eichmann. He was a mild anti-semite second and a careerist first. He probably would have embraced the German Jewry in a different situation. His anti-semitism was certainly taken to a fever pitch by his time spent as a ranking member of the Nazi party, but I agree with Arendt that the reasons he was an anti-semite (and *seriously* against them I’d like to add) and a member of the nazi party was not due to a well worked out ideology, a well reasoned system of beliefs and principles. That he took those beliefs seriously doesn’t, in my opinion, change the fact that the main reasons he chose those beliefs in the first place were of strategic and vogue origins.
Hegel pretty much nailed it about Eichmann in a letter he wrote to Arendt: “Since things have gone badly for him in philosophy, he has thrown himself into astronomy for ladies, after that into a makeshift physics, and now finally into teutonism and hatred of the Jews, all of this just to earn his keep.”
Well ok, Hegel wasn’t really talking about Eichmann but Heidegger. Really though, this pretty much fits any Nazi intellectual ever to a tee.