You are an insult to yourself and your family, off with you.
“Some things are stronger than a single human being.”
Right, I guess God Himself came down and forced Heidegger to become a nazi.
It’s not that he finally found people unserious enough to take his clownery seriously.
Of course, still much beloved by socialists today. They secretly respect him for subsuming his individuality to the socialist cause.
“The greatest crimes are committed by people without convictions.”
It is true that a socialist will deny any responsibility or self responsibility, and without contradiction. The essence of socialism is the abandonment of the self, an affirmation only of a collective, of an imagined spirit. A socialist can say they were only following orders, and be correct, be hiding nothing. A socialist can say “I am just a guy, what do I have to do with it?” because for a socialist, guys don’t do things, guys don’t exist, they are cogs in the machine of the collective and the spirit. Coherence is not required, that is the attribute of an individual. Reason, in the sense of logic and in the sense of cause, is not required of a socialist, without contradiction. For his emotions, for his actions, for his thoughts and ideas, he is not responsible. Without contradiction.
But to say that socialists are people without convictions is a terrifying divorce from reality. Adolph Eichman, an SS officer, went to the speeches, went to the gatherings, went to SS school, watched the movies, had the cafe conversations, read the newspaper. His position was determined not by intentions or will, which he renounced, which socialism is defined as the renouncement of, but entirely by his convictions.
Communism is, if nothing else, conviction. The replacement of anything with conviction. Replacement of soul, replacement of heart, replacement of mind, even of flesh.
Communism is, first and foremost, even possibly only, a story.
It is the story that commands. And it is conviction which attaches the rality of the individual, with all his responsibility, to the story.
Conviction. Because the life of an individual is too much for a socialist, insupportable. Conviction is their release, their salvation, and their one and only choice.
There is no banality of evil. It is only a banality of obedience.
If you require evil, it is rather the romanticism of evil.
“Trying to understand is not the same as forgivness.”
In this, Arendt is correct, and why she herself is absolved of all guilt.
Arendt proposed that evil is generated from a dialectic of totalitarianism. Phenomenology. When will we stop paying for Husserl, that naive innocent Catholic.
If one lacks the disease of phenomenology, one can clearly see that the ends of Nazism were declared explicitly from the beginning. Ther was no “phenomenological dialectic” behind the genocide, it was an explicitly stated goal from the beginning. The “dialectic of totalitarisnism” is nothing more but the removal of traditional institutions and their replacement with socialist ones that will permit the attainment of the already declared goal.
It didn’t just occur to them one day. It didn’t arise dialectically from a phenomenological progression of a spirit of totalitarianism. It was written in several books at the outset of the project. It was a banal topic of conversation. The rest was just acquiring the means.
The distinction between totalitarianism and socialism is a pointless one.