the expression “Banality of Evil” is alive and well, still being used

The expression “banality of evil” was used in a recent news article.

The following quote is from the news article:

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The banality of evil has a new face. The West is so far advanced down the path of cultural relativism that its political leaders do not respond when Islamic leaders suggest killing homosexual people is acceptable if decreed by a committee. We have seen this all before. It was called Nazism.

The banality of evil was a phrase coined by political theorist Hannah Arendt to describe the methodical, bureaucratic nature of the Nazi killing machine.

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This quote is also from the news article:

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The Nazi genocide began, as do all genocidal wars, with the deliberate manipulation of language.

The first gas chambers were built in 1939 and grew out of Hitler’s euthanasia program that targeted the mentally ill deemed undesirable by the regime. Arendt records that between 1939 and 1941, about 50,000 Germans were gassed in what Nazis described as a humane program of “granting people a mercy death”. Hitler ­replaced the word “murder” with “mercy”, thereby expurgating guilt in advance and perverting the meaning of virtue so that the killing of citizens deemed undesirable by the regime was transformed into an act of compassion.

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There used to be a website which showed photos of the deformed children who were put to death at Hartheim. Those photos are long gone. They were removed so that people could be led to believe that the children who were killed at Hartheim were perfectly normal, and capable of living at home like normal children.

I have a whole section about Hartheim Castle on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Hartheim/index.html

This page on my website is about the gas chamber at Hartheim: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Hartheim/gaschamber01a.html

The gas chamber at Hartheim Castle

Hartheim Castle is now a memorial site which teaches young students that the children, who were gassed there, were perfectly normal, although slightly retarded. This is not true; the children who were gassed at Hartheim, were seriously deformed and incapable of normal thought and behavior. They did not walk into the gas chamber; they were carried in because they were so deformed that they could not walk.

Close-up of the pipe that put gas into the chamber at Hartheim

The following quote is from the news article:

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There is the banality of evil.

As a child, I had an unusual preoccupation with trying to ­decipher the animus of the Holocaust. I pored through books to uncover a single trigger, to capture a solitary truth ­— a concrete precedent to wield like a weapon against the darkness should it ever return. But I didn’t believe it would in our lifetime.

The banality of evil is a creeping nightmare; the gradual ­dilation of totalitarian thought in high places; the supersession of moral virtue by the orderly ­administration of misanthropy. It is Jews marched onto trains destined for camps where they will be forced to dig each other’s graves. It is the tiny body of a Christian toddler held aloft by her wailing ­father after being ­decapitated by Islamic State. It is the pink triangle sewn stitch-by-stitch onto the shirt of a man who is marked for murder simply ­because he loved ­— and was loved in return.

There was no single cause of the Holocaust, no pivotal ­moment in which the fate of millions was surrendered to the darkest forces of humanity. The truth is much worse. There were years of political deals between governments, scores of ominous warnings and innumerable propa­ganda methods designed by the Nazi regime to stir the hatred of the masses and solicit their acquiescence to the murder of fellow citizens the regime deemed undesirable. There is no final solution to the Final Solution.

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