Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Where is the banality of the Jews?

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1258705173945&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
Terra Incognita: Where is the banality of the Jews?
Nov. 23, 2009
SETH J. FRANTZMAN , THE JERUSALEM POST
The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall reminds us once 
again of the theory of the "banality of evil." It is important to 
explore the way in which contemporary thought views the actions of the 
East Germans and their Nazi forebears as "banal" and yet many of those 
who see their actions as dull, tend to judge the IDF harshly.
A discussion of the subject should begin with celebrated filmmaker and 
Israeli intellectual Eyal Sivan.
Sivan is primarily famous for The Specialist, a 1999 film about Adolph 
Eichmann. Sivan's main themes in his work have been that Israel has 
created a national Holocaust cult; that Israelis are capable of becoming 
more and more like Nazis in their dealing with the Palestinians and that 
Eichmann, one of the greatest Nazi organizers of mass murder, was 
"banal" or dull, therefore merely part of a system, and not particularly 
evil.
Sivan's work follows in the footsteps of philosopher Hannah Arendt, a 
German-born Jew who had an affair with the Nazi philosopher Martin 
Heidegger before fleeing to New York in 1941. She resumed the affair 
after the war, defended her philosopher-partner at his trial and then 
defended Eichmann's "banality" in her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem: 
A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).
Both Arendt and Sivan are well-known, respected intellectuals whose 
ideas influence contemporary views on the Holocaust.
Many have challenged Sivan and Arendt by trying to prove that Eichmann 
was far from banal; that he was a crusading individual, a unique person 
who excelled at his work and was thus evil, not merely part of a larger 
bureaucratic "machine" that was Nazism.
But perhaps the question shouldn't be whether Eichmann was banal, but 
whether the Jews are banal.
Arendt blamed the Jews for their deaths, claiming that the Judenrat and 
their part in Nazi bureaucracy was a driver of the Holocaust. For 
Arendt, the culprits were the far-from-banal Jewish collaborators, not 
the Nazis who ran the thing.
For Sivan, the Nazis are also colorless banal fools, the Jews are the 
culprits, in this case the Zionist regime for daring to memorialize the 
Holocaust and for supposedly erasing the Palestinian memory of the 
"nakba" of 1948 and continuing to suppress Palestine.
ALL OF this leads us back to the fall of the Berlin Wall. During 
anniversary celebrations to mark the event, groups of European 
activists, along with their Israeli and Palestinian friends, staged an 
especially violent and loud protest at the security barrier near Nil'in 
in the West Bank, the site of a weekly anti-fence protest. They wanted 
to connect Israel's wall with the Berlin Wall. The New York Times 
obliged them with a photo captioned "this wall still stands".
How is the Arendt-Sivan philosophy of banality connected to the fall of 
the Berlin Wall?
Many who write about the East German regime and its Stasi secret police 
tend to portray the soldiers who manned its wall as banal. When they 
obeyed the "shoot to kill" orders against those trying to flee the East, 
they are inevitably excused.
A program on the National Geographic channel claimed they had to 
'wrestle with demons' and it must have been "terrible" for them to shoot 
their own people. One feels the shooter was as much the victim as those 
he shot.
But for all the wrestling and inner struggle of the East German border 
guards, one might have forgotten that they carried out criminal orders. 
And yet with the fall of the Berlin Wall, none of the leaders of the 
Stasi were put on trial. Banality triumphed. The system in East Germany 
was bad; no individual had committed any crimes.
The reunification of Europe was replete with such amnesties for 
murderers. With the exception of a few cases, most of the Communist 
criminals were forgotten. The idea was, as in South Africa, Spain after 
Franco and Northern Ireland, that bygones should be bygones. No show 
trials. No revenge.
And yet the same European judicial system that forgets the Communist and 
Franco past is the one, in Belgium, Spain and the UK, that allows itself 
to investigate IDF "war crimes" in Gaza.
How did it come to be that a judicial system in the UK that can't 
investigate Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, when the British 
paratroops shot 14 people dead in 1972, can investigate far-away Israel? 
England waited 30 years to convene an inquiry into Bloody Sunday; Israel 
is expected to do so tomorrow morning.
The central theme that runs all the way through is that the Jews, as a 
people, are not perceived as banal. As such they are perceived as 
individually evil when they do things that are perceived as wrong.
A Jewish IDF soldier who commits a crime while on duty is not having 
some sort of internal moral wrestling match; he is especially inclined 
to do bad. His crime is part of a system that is portrayed as uniquely evil.
When statistics showed that the IDF has almost no instances of military 
rape, an MA student at Hebrew University, supported by influential 
faculty, penned a thesis arguing that Israeli soldiers aren't raping 
Arab women because of the IDF's "racist" nature. The thesis was feted 
because even in Israel people are convinced that Jewish actions are so 
uniquely evil, that even inaction (for example, not raping) comes from a 
pernicious instinct.
The problem is an absence of banality.
Philosophers, intellectuals and commoners alike have turned the most 
satanic regimes into banal bureaucracies, with soul-searching SS men and 
border guards. The least they could do is use the same standards when 
judging the IDF.
The writer is a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

 instinct.
Curioso. 

 Curioso. 
una delle vette raggiunte dalla sociologia
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124674

נחום ha scritto:

Una volta invidiavo molto la sinistra matura e ragionevole degli altri 
paesi, mentre qui mi sembrava tutto un troiaio di deliranti, con scarse 
eccezioni. Ultimamente, invece, conoscendo meglio, mi sta confortando 
molto vedere che la coglioneria suicida dell'estremista di sinistra non 
è un fenomeno esclusivamente italiano.
Ognuno ha i suoi deliratori e odiatori di sé, chi più chi meno. E 
Israele (questo mi conforta ancora di più) non fa assolutamente eccezione.
Tb (bieco illuminista)
-- 
"A vote is like a rifle, it's usefulness depends upon the character of
the user."
~ Theodore Roosevelt