Excellent! Apologies in advance, but this post won't read well unless you dive into the arguments. Anyways:
One thing that strikes me about the ongoing Eichmann debate is the underlying array of sensibilities that form the backdrop for the arguments themselves. For Arendt's critics, it is better if the Holocaust is understood as a sort of distinct, historical horror with clearly delineated villains and victims, almost like a well-developed theatrical play, which occupies a safe distance in time and space from one's own contemporary society. Eichmann was an evil, evil monstrous monster, and don't you dare suggest otherwise!
I don't wish to be misunderstood: the Holocaust was a historically distinct event with horrific dimensions, and there certainly was a perpetrator and a victim. Eichmann was definitely a monster, as the assorted facts seem to imply. However the driving impulse to reify in one's mind this historical set of relationships as a distant storm to be safely studied betrays a certain psychological disposition, to me anyways.
Arendt's critics wish to say: Eichmann and the Nazis were evil, and don't you dare criticize the victim Jews - even if they were collaborators - for if you doubt the cartoon Nazi evil just a smidge, and question the absolute innocence of the Jewish victim archetype, then perhaps you are abetting this very evil hmm? If you begin to muddy the actors in this particular delineated historical event, it begins to dissolve the illusion of historical isolation, unleashing those ghastly logical inquisitions to other events and social structures. What sorts of shadows begin to rise from our own social mechanisms and institutions when we look too closely?
Better that the Holocaust remains hermetically sealed and studied from afar. Perhaps we shouldn't be speaking so ill of these social climbers and careerists, these Eichmanns, or better, the very nature of the social ladder itself. After all, I have a ladder to climb of my own! From the top of which I can safely study history of course.
What Arendts' defenders seem to be getting at - and the greater scuffle over the concept of the "banality of evil" suggests this as well - is that this great monstrous evil was perpetrated through startlingly banal social mechanisms, banal social mechanisms that can be observed in...say...a polite society such as ours. There is an impulse that says: "woah woah, now there was something happening there that concerns us now, and maybe we should address it."
There is an energetic desire to dive into the historical account, to get the hands dirty and attempt to understand it in relation to one's own time; there is an awareness that this cycle could very well repeat itself in some shape or form, and that we need to be a bit more rigorous when it comes to evaluating the underpinnings and foundations of modern society.
I'm aware that all of this isn't entirely fair. I don't personally know any of these people and can't claim to understand all of the competing motivations. However, I can't help but scratch the old chin.
