The recent controversial post written by Matt Cockerill reminds me of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil."
From Wikipedia:
The banality of evil (as coined by Arendt) describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.
Who is responsible for the death of innocents caught in the frenzy of battle? Is it the legislative and executive leaders, marching their country to war? Is it the commanding officers, giving the orders? Or what about individual soldiers, carrying out orders like they were told? We could even ask if the question that perhaps the arms manufacturers also have a responsibility for innocent deaths. Are they not all complicit in the death?
To be honest, I'm not sure. But there is a great lesson to be learned: atrocities are not usually committed by blood-crazed sociopaths. But rather individuals that give their quiet, obedient consent to the real sociopaths.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book) Always look at the influences. Propaganda by Edward Bernays influenced Goebbels and other popular politicians. It's all in how you present things to the public. If you can control the public's mind and opinion you can do anything.
In a word:
YES
For whom the bell tolls...
IT TOLLS FOR YOU.
The tools of coercion for an inattentive mind are the idle hands of TERROR, pretending to be kind.
I'm starting to believe that democracy was a clever creation of elites who liked the idea of hiding their faces behind a multitude of people. Anonymous rulers are hard to do away with.
This subject is also explored in Dostoevsky's The Brother's Karamzov. I recommend it for all.
Hannah Arendt's familiar phrase "the banality of evil" doesn't get the scrutiny it deserves. Evil is not banal. Auschwitz is not banal.
'Banal' means: ordinary, boring, tired, routine, dull, everyday, stereotypical, pedestrian, commonplace, mundane, tedious.
Arendt found Adolf Eichmann banal — a commonplace, routine, dull Everyman. Eichmann did not look like a monster incarnate — he looked like a petty bureaucrat. But, if she expected to see Lucifer or the Antichrist then she had been misled by the Bible. To call Eichmann “banal” represents a failure of perspective —
Dullness of intellect, dullness of human sensibility, acceptance of prejudice, and conformity get along quite well with viciousness. “Eichmann” is synonymous with the death of 6 million Jews in fewer than seven years — what human being measured against that incommensurable could ever appear “equal” to it?
In near eastern myth only the old gods of Sumeria/Babylonia and the new, one God of tribal monotheisms could find all of humanity so despicable as to arrange the death by drowning of every man, woman, and child. Who but the remorseless King of Kings could be conjured up as powerful enough to directly exercise evil on so vast a scale?
But the ancient myth makers had no idea of agro-industrialism. They had no idea of railways. They no idea of how to make trains run on time. Turning the concept of modern meat production into wholesale mechanized slaughter of human beings required not a single original thought. Why killing people — who weren’t after all going to be eaten — meant no need to fatten them before slaughter or to refrigerate their flesh afterward.
the anti_supernaturalist