Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil.
What I took away from this was the desperate necessity for free thought and the clash of open debate: Eichmann was a product of his time, of an elite who had utterly crushed dissent and had adopted a terrifying uniformity of vision. The political critics of the Nazis had lost the argument - the vacuum that left was ultimately filled by the Holocaust.
'It was not that Eichmann could not hear the call of conscience, but that his conscience spoke with the voice of respectable society; and this is the voice that seduces men to evil.' (emphasis mine)
Long live the voice of disrespectable society.
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