Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered for The New Criterion’s sixth annual Circle Lecture on September 26, 2024.

Over the last six decades, a certain phrase has metastasized and become such a cliché that it has been used to describe all the following things and more: the coronavirus pandemic, Republican moderates, neoliberalism, January 6, the death of George Floyd, the war in Gaza, and of course Donald Trump. That phrase is “the banality of evil,” and it has tripped off more tongues than the book it comes from has had readers—which is quite something. The more subtle thinkers even occasionally boast that they know where the quote comes from.

For instance, in a 2020 piece about the coronavirus, a pair of Al Jazeera contributors proposed that “Going back to Hannah Arendt’s notion of the ‘banality of evil’ may help us make sense of what is going on.”

In 2021, an associate professor of anthropology and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame used the phrase to write about how resistance to lockdowns revealed people’s “participation in a banal project of evil authorized by neoliberalism.” The author did, however, go on to say, “I am in no way attempting to diminish the horror of the Holocaust by utilizing Arendt’s theory in this manner.” Indeed.

A peer-reviewed article from 2022 explained in its abstract that it “employs ‘banality of evil’ to explain the actions of insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

But it is not only our best and brightest who have employed the phrase. In 2023, while talking about the role he played in Killers of the Flower Moon, Robert De Niro said that his character, like Donald Trump, demonstrated “a feeling of entitlement,” which

you could say we became a lot more aware of after George Floyd, with systemic racism. And so that’s what it is.

It’s the banality of evil, it’s the thing we have to watch out for. We see it today, of course, we all know who I’m going to talk about. Because that guy [Trump] is stupid. Imagine if he was smart.

Chris Hayes of msnbc used the phrase to describe the former Trump doj official Jeffrey Clark, who was named a co-conspirator in the federal prosecution of Donald Trump. Hayes boasted to his several viewers:

I thought of Hannah Arendt’s infamous line about the banality of evil as I looked at this middle-aged lawyer in his boxers and his glasses, fantasizing about what those big, bad troops would do with their guns, how they would shove a dictatorship down the throats of the American people.

The Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison, who prosecuted Derek Chauvin, also reached for these philosophical heights. In an interview, he said:

There’s a, there’s a, there’s a woman who [sic] named Hannah Arendt, and she wrote about going through the Nazi experience in the 1930s in Germany. And she talked about the banality of evil. Now, what does banal mean? Banal means everyday, ordinary, routine, regular. . . . You, we want the devil to have, uh, a tail and pitchfork and horns, but they don’t, you know, and what is, they’re just, so what is the lesson? The lesson is ordinary people can do the wrong thing if they don’t step up to the moral imperative. Right? Ordinary people can be, can be wrong. The ordinary people can let the Holocaust happen. Ordinary people can let, can stand by and say, well, it’s none of my business, I’m just gonna let this wrong go on, ’cause I don’t want to be mixed up in it. But what is required of us as active citizens and as moral people, is that we do the right thing, even if it’s gonna cost us. And that’s the test that Derek Chauvin failed.

Finally, earlier this year the phrase was employed by a former State Department official who resigned over the war in Gaza. In an interview, Annelle Sheline, who served in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, criticized her former colleagues for not speaking out against Israel’s supposed human rights violations, saying,

For someone in that position . . . it perhaps gets to things like the banality of evil. You know, Hannah Arendt talked about how it was that the Nazis were able to function. That it’s people just doing their jobs.

The overuse of any phrase is not the phrase’s fault, of course. Decent concepts can become clichés without damage to the truth of the concept. The problem with the use of Arendt’s phrase is that it is not just a piece of lazy thinking, but also one built on a foundation that is fundamentally rotten.

Arendt’s first flaw is technical but not insignificant. Although she wrote her book on the Eichmann trial as though she had been a regular observer, multiple sources say that Hannah Arendt never attended more than a few days of the trial of Adolf Eichmann that took place in Jerusalem in 1961. It was enough that this German high philosopher surveyed the scene, wrote a somewhat journalistic description of aspects of it, and then drew a philosophical theme from her observations in order to raise her account above that of mere journalese.

It is worth reminding ourselves of some of the observations that Arendt made in her 1963 book, titled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. To begin, there are her criticisms of Eichmann, all of which betray the gullibility of the woman in the court and say next to nothing about the man in the dock. For instance, Arendt believes Eichmann when he shows “his rather bad memory.” But she criticizes him for using “the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés.” As she writes:

What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

You might say that this is as serious a charge as Arendt can level at anyone. An inability to think: is there anything worse?

Arendt acknowledges elsewhere that the case of Eichmann’s conscience is “admittedly complicated” but is also “by no means unique.” She notes that he was “much less intelligent” than General Alfred Jodl, for instance, who was hanged at Nuremberg. She writes that Eichmann was “without any education to speak of” and calls his realizations only “dimly realized.” Again, all of these things seem genuinely to mark Eichmann down in Arendt’s estimation.

She deplores those who seek to portray Eichmann as a monster. And she says that in any case, such a portrayal would not have worked for the prosecution. Had he been a monster, Arendt writes, then

Israel’s case against him would have collapsed or, at the very least, lost all interest. Surely, one can hardly call upon the whole world and gather correspondents from the four corners of the earth in order to display Bluebeard in the dock. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.

Finally, she writes that she

can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of [this] book; for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III “to prove a villain.” Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.

Whatever controversy Arendt expected came swiftly, not least in the superb takedown of her book published in Commentary, written by Norman Podhoretz. Despite being a friend of Arendt, Podhoretz recognized that there was a serious moral failing in his friend’s book. Worse, it contained a set of claims that he could already see were going to lead Arendt’s readers as well as a wider audience astray.

Podhoretz starts from the very nature of the way that Arendt approaches her subject:

The story as she tells it is complex, unsentimental, riddled with paradox and ambiguity. It has all the appearance of “ruthless honesty,” and all the marks of profundity—have we not been instructed that complexity, paradox, and ambiguity are the sign manifest of profundity?

He goes on to stress that while Arendt does not defend Eichmann, as some charged,

What she does do, however, is accept Eichmann’s account of himself and of his role in the Final Solution as largely true. In some sense, he was an “idealist”; in some sense, he was not an anti-Semite; and the degree of his responsibility for the murder of the six million, while sufficient to hang him, was relatively insignificant,
and certainly nowhere near what the prosecution claimed.

But his most important observation is what this obsession with proving Eichmann’s “banality” will do when spread around:

Around this theme of Eichmann’s “banality” other themes gather: the almost universal complicity of Christian Europe, and especially of the German people, in Nazism (for in diminishing Eichmann’s personal responsibility for the Final Solution, she enlarges the area of European responsibility in general).

The years since have proved Podhoretz’s critique staggeringly correct. If Eichmann cannot be held personally responsible, then the responsibility must be spread around. And since the time of the Eichmann trial, such responsibility has been spread not just across Germany, but also across Britain, Europe, and indeed the West as a whole. The Holocaust is now seen as the central crime of the civilized West—an attitude that educational materials and institutions meant to memorialize the Holocaust now often unwittingly slip into. The work of Dara Horn and others has shown beyond any doubt that the Holocaust is understood in America as something that is supposed to tell us about the twenty-first-century West, a subject mainly meant to provide us today with moral edification and improvement.

Yet scholarship since Arendt’s book has not just countered her interpretation but should in fact have buried it. In 2011, the historian and philosopher Bettina Stangneth brought out a book in Germany titled Eichmann vor Jerusalem (the English edition, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, came out in 2014). It is a devastating work, most of all for the reputation of Hannah Arendt. For it shows beyond any doubt how, for the few days she attended the trial, Arendt was actually fooled by Eichmann. He played her. For Eichmann—
contra Arendt’s claim—not only knew what he was doing, but was even deeply, sincerely proud of it.

Whereas Arendt famously portrayed the man in the glass booth as a mere bureaucrat, Stangneth shows that Arendt had fallen for Eichmann’s carefully crafted and prepared performance. Assembling a whole library of scattered documents from Eichmann’s exile in Argentina in the 1950s, Stangneth puts the actual, unrepentant Eichmann back center stage.

There are a number of startling discoveries in the book, not least among them the extent to which Eichmann had kept up with the books and scholarship on the Holocaust as they came out, so that by the time he was awaiting trial in Jerusalem, he was on top of all primary and secondary material that could be put to him in court.

Yet Stangneth’s principal scholarly triumph was her piecing together of the extant transcripts and recordings known as the “Sassen conversations.” Together with Eichmann’s contemporary attempts at memoir-writing—which were known about by the time of the trial—an Eichmann entirely different from Arendt’s emerges. Wonder of wonders, it is the Eichmann that the world knew existed until Hannah Arendt came along.

Most important are the conversations themselves, recorded by the journalist and Nazi Willem Sassen in the 1950s. In Jerusalem, Eichmann threw doubt on their authenticity, and for this reason—as well as the complex dissemination and distribution of the transcripts, plus disputes over ownership and attempts to disown them—the complete picture of these interviews and writings took some time to come to light. But Arendt knew of these materials. She simply glossed over them because they seemed to go against her theory.

Stangneth’s work on these materials is extraordinary by comparison, and the results more than reward her efforts. She startlingly shows the extent to which these discussions, far from being one-on-one interviews, were in fact semi-public events. Everybody present knew who the interviewee, “Ricardo Klement,” really was.

The nature of these events, and their content, is of considerable contemporary as well as historical relevance for two reasons in particular. The first relates to the ongoing European discussion of free speech and Holocaust denial laws. Stangneth shows that as an increasing amount of information on the Holocaust came to light in the 1950s, the immediate reaction of the remaining Nazis and neo-Nazis in South America was denial. Some of the Argentina Nazis sincerely believed that the Federal German Republic would not last and that their belief system might yet return to save the German people. But even these remote fantasists realized that the news of the Holocaust presented problems for their rehabilitation. And so they hoped to expose the Holocaust as fraudulent.

Their first attempts were not only crude but were in fact swiftly overtaken by an unstoppable flood of information and scholarship. By the mid-1950s, even the most committed remaining Nazis clearly found ignoring the weight of evidence to be an uphill struggle. And so this group of Nazis in South America, brought together by Sassen, thought that Eichmann might provide the solution to their quandary. They believed that Eichmann would be able to help them, not just as the person most closely involved in the Nazi programs against the Jews, but especially as the man cited at Nuremberg as having first used the six-million figure. The Buenos Aires Nazis assumed that if they got Eichmann on record, then they could show the world that the six-million figure was a lie, or at least a great exaggeration.

By this point Eichmann was also thinking of breaking his cover in some way. In 1956, he again attempted to write a book, this time provisionally titled Die anderen sprachen, jetzt will ich sprechen! (The Others Spoke, Now I Want to Speak!). But the conversations with the Sassen circle—which came from the same instinct of his to break his silence—turned out to constitute an attempt to square an impossible circle. The Sassen crowd hoped that Eichmann would show them that the Holocaust did not happen. To Eichmann, these efforts to minimize the Holocaust were offensive—something like spitting on his life’s work. Eichmann knew that the six-million figure was accurate, and he seems to have only realized gradually that his audience was hoping for something quite different from him. The final tape includes Eichmann’s boast about the success of his life’s work, after which the room goes silent for a very long time. It is one of the most supreme, though not pitiable, examples of someone misreading the room. The discussions broke down under this unresolvable issue.

In the glass box in Jerusalem, Eichmann sought to portray himself as a cog in a machine. But in the tapes and manuscripts he made and wrote in Argentina in the 1950s, a completely different person emerges. It is somebody who is proud of his work and in fact boastful about it. Only in Jerusalem does he decide to make himself mundane. It is a performance for the court, which only turned out to convince the famous philosopher who made the occasional appearance.

But this merely shows that Arendt’s phrase was based on a false understanding, that Arendt was misled. What is more devastating is that the malignant results of her pseudo-theory continue to multiply. Let me give a pertinent example from recent years.

In 2013, a young British soldier home on leave was run over, hacked at with knives, and then partially decapitated on the streets of London. Fusilier Lee Rigby was slaughtered by two Islamic fundamentalists, who after carrying out their act of depravity stood on the South London streets, their hands dripping with blood, and, as is often the case after such attacks, boasted of their crime. They were not just proud of it. They were glorying in it.

Here is what a writer in The Telegraph said about the attack in Woolwich that day. It was, he said, a “case study in”—guess what—“the banality of evil.” As the headline writer added, “We shouldn’t bother looking for any logic in attacks like these. There is none to be found.”

A writer in The Guardian that same week responded in a similar way. Sir Simon Jenkins, a former editor of The Times and an architectural historian of distinction, wrote of the decapitation of a soldier that it was no different than the other “mundane acts of violence” seen on the streets of London and was only becoming such a big deal because of the “echo chamber of mass hysteria” whipped up by the insensible press and social media. This is what the “banality of evil” concept looks like when it is spread around both thinly and widely.

It seems to me that Arendt is one of the reasons why sensible people are now in the position of downplaying atrocity or at least being incapable of facing up to it. As Pod­horetz said back then, everything has to be seen to be complicated. And yet once everything is complicated, that complexity itself is reduced to utterly inadequate simplicity. Our own time seems to have no trouble describing what we would once have called evil as merely “banal” or “mundane.”

Perhaps our age does not like the idea of evil or does not know what to make of it. And yet if there is one thing that we ought to be able to do, it is to identify true evil—the profundity of evil—when we see it. In our own day, it is put on display for all to see by death-cults like Hamas.

How are we to describe terrorists like those who broke into Israel on October 7 if we do not have the use of “evil” in our moral or philosophical lexicon? What are we to say, for instance, of the people who actually recorded themselves raping, torturing, and killing—people who, like Eichmann, wanted the world to know what they had achieved?

Allow me just two of the less lurid examples of evil from that day. One of the terrorists from Gaza who broke into Israel last October 7 was recorded after arriving into the village of Mefalsim, a community of just over a thousand people in the south of Israel. In the midst of the attack, the terrorist made a phone call back to his family in Gaza. The excitement in his voice is obvious. “Hi Dad,” the three-minute call begins. “Open my WhatsApp now and you will see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” The father replies, “May God protect you.” The son is exultant: “Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands.” He goes on and on repeating himself, boasting, “Dad, I killed ten! Ten! Ten with my own hands! Their blood is on my hands. Put Mom on.”

“Oh my son. God bless you,” say the parents. Their son keeps making the same boasts to his mother. “I wish I was with you,” she replies. “Mom, your son is a hero,” he boasts. “Kill, kill, kill.” Next the man’s brother comes on the line, and the young man brags to him too: “I killed ten. I swear!” “Hold your head up, father. Hold your head up.” One of the men on the other end says, “Come back, come back.” “What do you mean, come back?” replies the son:

There is no going back. It is either death or victory. My mother gave birth to me for the religion. . . . How will I return? Open the Whats­App. See the dead. Open it. . . . Open WhatsApp on your phone and see the dead. How I killed them with my own hands.

I hope you will still permit me one further example. Earlier this year, I was allowed to enter a maximum-security prison in Israel where many of the Hamas terrorists captured alive on October 7 were being held. They included people I recognized from the massacre videos. Here was the youthful ginger-haired man who had killed as many as fifty young people at the Nova party. In another cell was the terrorist who had become notorious because of a video in which he can be seen killing a father with a grenade. In that video, the father and his sons have run into their safe room, into which the terrorist tosses the grenade. The father, we learn, threw himself on the grenade to save his sons. The young boys then stagger around their house in agony. One of them has lost his sight and the other his hearing from the blast that killed their father in front of them. As they are in the house, one of the terrorists comes into the family’s main room and calmly helps himself to food from the family fridge. Dazed, one of the young boys says, “What are you doing? That’s my mother’s food.” At which point the terrorist turns to him and says, “Where’s your mother? I want her too.”

Hearing recordings like that, or seeing the atrocity videos from the day—largely recorded by Hamas themselves—what other word is available to us other than “evil”? Pure evil. Terrible evil. Unfathomable evil—all of these things for sure. But “banal”? No—nothing could be further from the truth. And yet today, the idea of pure evil seems unavailable to many cultured minds. Perhaps it is too theological. Or perhaps we think such terms come from a metaphysics that we have abandoned as insufficiently subtle for our more enlightened times. Today, it is as though everything must be understood in some psychological or sociological terms—and may well be understandable if we can only study it enough.

This is, of course, a view popularly held among those members of the print and broadcast media who to this very morning cannot call members of Hamas or Hezbollah “terrorists” and prefer to fall back on weaselly terms like “fighters.” As though the terrorists are like anyone else who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps and tried to make his way in the world.

Yet when studying groups like Hamas and seeing them up close, I am reminded of a far less famous historian and philosopher than Hannah Arendt: Gitta Sereny (1921–2012). Sereny, who was born in Austria, spent her life studying the nature of real evil. As well as writing the definitive work on the child-killing preteen Mary Bell, she also published books on Albert Speer and Franz Stangl (the camp commandant at Treblinka), both of whom she interviewed at great length.

Her work on Stangl, Into That Darkness, is one of the best books on the Holocaust that I know, coming as it does from an account of Stangl’s trial and Sereny’s own in-depth conversations with him in his prison cell. Stangl was a far more ordinary man than Eichmann, and yet Sereny does not treat him as such. She recognizes in him among other things a “morality”—if you can call it that—but one that is so badly warped that on several occasions, Sereny feels she cannot go on with their conversations. And Sereny had a strong stomach for horror.

On the last day that she interviewed Stangl, Sereny actually gained a confession from him—or at least as much of a confession as he was capable of. The next day Stangl died in prison of a heart attack. The admission of his guilt seems in some sense to have done him in. When she summed up her time with Stangl, Sereny had no problem saying that she felt she “was in the presence of evil.”

I mention Sereny not just to praise her work, but also to point out a very simple observation that she made towards the end of her life. Despite not being in any clear sense religious, she said in a late interview that it was her belief that evil exists in the world—that it was the only explanation for the things that certain people do; that it is a force that seems almost to descend upon humanity at times. Sereny’s work on evil is work of real depth, recognizing the limits of our understanding of the phenomenon while being humble enough to admit that it is also something likely forever to defy our comprehension.

Before I conclude, I should like to point to one other aspect of the damage that Arendt has wrought. And to underscore it, I should like to return once again to the work of Bettina Stangneth.

One of the things Stangneth’s work gives the reader is the opportunity to understand one particular aspect of what Eichmann wrote in the 1950s. It is one that deserves far wider attention. In Die anderen sprachen, jetzt will ich sprechen! Eichmann turns his attention to the recent Suez Crisis. (How extraordinary it is to think of Eichmann commenting on the Suez Crisis!) Here is one passage from that work:

And while we are considering all this—we, who are still searching for clarity on whether (and if yes, how far) we assisted in what were in fact damnable events during the war—current events knock us down and take our breath away. For Israeli bayonets are now overrunning the Egyptian people, who have been startled from their peaceful sleep. Israeli tanks and armored cars are tearing through Sinai, firing and burning, and Israeli air squadrons are bombing peaceful Egyptian villages and towns. For the second time since 1945, they are invading. . . . Who are the aggressors here? Who are the war criminals? The victims are Egyptians, Arabs, Mohammedans. Amon and Allah, I fear that, following what was exercised on the Germans in 1945, Your Egyptian people will have to do penance, to all the people of Israel, to the main aggressor and perpetrator against humanity in the Middle East, to those responsible for the murdered Muslims, as I said, Your Egyptian people will have to do penance for having the temerity to want to live on their ancestral soil. . . . We all know the reasons why, beginning in the Middle Ages and from then on in an unbroken sequence, a lasting discord arose between the Jews and their host nation, Germany.

There then follows an extraordinary and important passage. For Eichmann goes on to say—only a few years before being taken to face trial in Jerusalem, mind you—that if he himself were ever found guilty of any crime, it would only be “for political reasons.” He even tries to argue that a guilty verdict against him would be “an impossibility in international law,” though he admits that in any case he could never obtain justice “in the so-called Western culture.” The reason for this is obvious enough: in the Christian Bible, “to which a large part of Western thought clings, it is expressly established that everything sacred came from the Jews.” Western culture has, for Eichmann, been irrevocably Judaized. And so Eichmann looks to a different group, to the “large circle of friends, many millions of people” to whom his manuscript is aimed. This is part of what he writes:

But you, you 360 million Mohammedans, to whom I have had a strong inner connection since the days of my association with your Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, you, who have a greater truth in the surahs of your Koran, I call upon you to pass judgment on me. You children of Allah have known the Jews longer and better than the West has. Your noble Muftis and scholars of law may sit in judgment upon me and, at least in a symbolic way, give me your verdict.

Eichmann in exile was, perhaps unsurprisingly, an enormous admirer of Israel’s neighbors—something that, perhaps unsurprisingly, turned out to run in the family. After Eichmann’s abduction, his relatives apparently became concerned about his second son. According to a police report, “As Horst was easily excitable the Eichmann family was afraid that when he heard about his father’s fate, he might volunteer to fight for the Arab countries in campaigns against Israel.” As Stangneth notes, “Eichmann had obviously told his children where his new troops were to be found.”

And as Stangneth concludes,

Eichmann refused to do penance and longed for applause. But first and foremost, of course, he hoped his “Arab friends” would continue his battle against the Jews who were always the “principal war criminals” and “principal aggressors.” He hadn’t managed to complete his task of “total annihilation,” but the Muslims could still complete it for him.

How strange it is that as we try—and largely fail—to recognize and stand up to the enemies of civilization in our time, one of the people who seems to have stripped us of our ability to do so should have been a German Jewish philosopher, who sat for a few days in a room with evil in its most concentrated form and decided to define it by everything it was not.

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