Photograph Source: AgnosticPreachersKid at English Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 3.0

Systemic Complicity

The German American philosopher Hannah Arendt was a deeply problematic anti-communist intellectual who traded in her initial attraction to Marxism for Western Cold War ideology. She celebrated the American slave-owners’ republic, demeaned the people of Asia, smeared Karl Marx, and demonized revolution. She falsely and nefariously conflated the Soviet Union and socialist China with the Nazi Third Reich.[1]

Despite all that and more to her discredit, Arendt coined a useful phrase — “the banality of evil,” a philosophical concept developed in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. “The banality of evil” refers to how horrific atrocities are committed by ordinary, unremarkable people who blandly conform to institutional rules and dominant social norms, obeying authority without moral reflection.

Arendt came up with the phrase while observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the high-level Nazi bureaucrat who organized the mass deportation of millions of Jews to death camps during the Third Reich’s Holocaust. Arendt had expected to see a sadistic fiend but instead beheld a dull, conventional man who had merely been “doing his job” as he coordinated mass slaughter. She was looking for supreme malice and instead found routine thoughtlessness, an inability to question the system one serves or to imagine the suffering of others under that system.

“The banality of evil” has come to mean “systemic complicity” – the normalization of destructive principles and practices within bureaucratic, state, and corporate structures. “Ordinary individuals become cogs in a machine, allowing them to distance themselves from the fatal consequences of their daily work.”

Normalization Radio

Lately, I’ve been flashing back to Arendt’s phrase while listening to National “Public” Radio (N“P”R) as I make breakfast. This supposedly liberal network’s upbeat anchors report on horrors inflicted at home and abroad in neutral tones, their coverage interspersed with soothing music.

The problem isn’t just that the full extent of the horror is vastly unreported or that the underlying systemic (capitalist-imperialist) basis for the horror is deleted. It’s also that the suffering and horror that is reported – much of which can be gleaned from the coverage – is normalized within the confines of the way things are, as in “that’s the way it is” (Walter Cronkite’s nightly sign off). Rather than dig in on origins and culpability, not to mention correction, the network moves on to something different and more pleasant – a feel-good story about how a fisherman rescued a dog stuck on an ice-flow, an actor of color who overcame his shyness, a married couple that renewed its vows in their 90s, or a report on the NBA playoffs.

Last Tuesday, I heard a matter-of-fact N“P”R story about displaced Lebanese people who have purchased satellite images showing that the houses into which they poured their life savings have been levelled to the ground by fascist Israel. N“P”R gave decent time to the story, including interviews with the victims, one of whom expressed anger over how the United States gives Israel the bombs and bulldozers it uses to ethnically cleanse southern Lebanon. And then the network moved on to a happy human- interest story. Days before I heard “public” radio do the same exact thing with a story on Palestinians being brutally displaced from their West Bank homes by Uncle Sam’s client Israel.

While the full extent of the horror imposed by the US and its clients is not reported, the other problem is the normalization and banalization of the horror that does make it into the news: criminal slaughter made trite and commonplace, routine, and nothing to get outraged about or active against.

I had no trouble learning from “mainstream” media about how Trump’s criminal war on Iran started with the murder of hundreds of schoolgirls. The atrocity was reported between happier and far less significant news items and without any serious moral judgement or call to stop the horror. The report included the standard statements from officials who flatly denied the egregious US crime.

You can find stories in US media about the ongoing and accelerating capitalist destruction of livable ecology, reported in passing, as in “oh well,” often with quotes from those who deny the Ecocide.

Last Wednesday, N“P”R blandly reported the unpleasantness of Europe’s extreme heat [100 degrees already in Paris during Spring!] due to human-/capital-caused climate change before shifting to soothing music, local traffic, and sports.

Look at how the reigning media reports on the deranged, depraved, and supremely dangerous fascist Trump administration and regime, headed by a malignant ogre who Noam Chomsky once rightly described as “the most dangerous criminal in human history.”  To be sure, you can find informed and outraged reflections on Trump, the Trump regime, and the Trump party and movement in the Op Ed sections of the New York Times, on MSNOW, in occasional P“B”S and N“P”R segments that bring on safe Trump critics, and in other outposts of elite liberal and moderate opinion (like The Atlantic and The New Yorker). But these are outlets frequented by an educated minority. The lion’s share of coverage and commentary describes Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump’s actions and statements as if he were a normal bourgeois-democratic US chief executive and not a distinctively grave and illegitimate, fascist menace to humanity.

“He’s Not a Fascist”

I’ve recently and twice heard N“P”R obsequiously interview Trump’s good friend Dana White, helping this malevolent parasite of blood and gore sell the savage outdoor Ultimate Fighting cage matches soon to be held on White House grounds to honor the Trump’s birthday. The first suck-up was conducted by New Yorker editor David Remnick. “He’s not a racist,” White told Remnick on N“P”R. “He’s not a fascist. He loves this country. And if you’re an American—race, religion, whatever it is—President Trump is on your team, that I guarantee you,” White said. (The second N “P” R promotion of White took place last Wednesday.). Remnick, a connoisseur of boxing and an elite liberal and Obama pal who knows very well that White’s statement was absurd, stayed pleasantly focused mainly on the history and distinctive athletic peculiarities of “ultimate fighting.”

“You Must Always Show Respect By Calling the Lethal and Illegitimate Monster ‘President Trump’”

Even much of the critical or half-critical coverage of and commentary on the lethal madman in the White House – a psychotic hate machine who threatens to bomb an entire civilization (Iran) “back to the Stone Ages where it belongs” and who has put up a post depicting himself nuking planet Earth from a space station – respectfully and ritually refers to the nation’s thoroughly illegitimate chief executive and wannabe fascist strongman for life as “President Trump.” It’s very telling, the clear bureaucratic directive to always put “president” before Trump’s name, so that the reporters and pundits and their bosses can avoid charges of disrespecting the nation’s Dear Leader. Never mind the leader’s evil and the extreme peril he and his regime pose to life on Earth.

Over the last two days, American media has blithely reported that the deranged, demented, debased, and depraved lunatic they insist on dutifully calling “President Trump” has threatened to “blow up” the country of Oman and is ordering the US Department of Justice to vengefully prosecute E. Jean Carroll, the woman who successfully sued him for sexual assault and defamation. Every day brings new evidence that there is no moral bottom for this fascist maniac and his sick regime.

The media’s normalization of Mein Trumpf is an epitome of “the banality of evil.” It is no small contributor to the fact that his “most dangerous [presidency] in human history” has yet to face a sustained popular rebellion remotely commensurate to the threat it poses to a decent future for human beings and other living things. National Prozac Radio (as a student of mine once aptly described N“P”R) and the rest of the corporate media seems largely in the business of manufacturing “good Americans”[2] – an obedient mass of subdued “citizens” conditioned to bow down to their masters, no matter how insane, corrupt, exterminist, and fascist those masters may be.

“And so it goes,” to quote Kurt Vonnegut, whose novels Mother Night and Slaughterhouse Five have long been seen as congruent with Arendt’s phrase.

NOTES

1. Dominico Losordo, Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, and How it can be Reborn (NY: Monthly Review, 2024), pp. 144-163.

2. A play on “Good Germans,” which Wikipedia describes as “an ironic term — usually placed between single quotes such as ‘Good Germans’ — referring to German citizens during and after World War II who claimed not to have supported the Nazi regime, but remained silent and did not resist in a meaningful way. The term is further used to describe those who claimed ignorance of the Holocaust and German war crimes.”