eventful

It's been a busy little while since my last post. I finished 2666 on the way to Chile and started reading Eichmann in Jerusalem. I liked 2666 a lot in the end. It's pretty crazy and all over the place and I completely forgot about the third part by the time I'd finished the fifth (and final) part. The fourth part is extremely, almost soporifically repetitive but I somehow never got bogged down in it past the occasional, "Damn it, not this shit again." And the last part was pretty wonderful. In the end the book made a lot of sense, was full of some very beautiful writing (good job, translator whose name I forget). I will not forget the first and final parts, which are books unto themselves (actually, all the parts are), and the middle was good, too. How's that for repetitive?

Anyhow, a book I will most certainly NOT be forgetting any part of is Eichmann in Jerusalem. I would give just about anything for a few minutes of thinking as clear as Hannah Arendt's while she was writing this book. Who knows, maybe she could barely put her shoes on in the morning but when it came to thinking about ethics, justice and law she was operating on a whole different level from the rest of us. One of the most amazing insights she had was that there is a gigantic gap between ordinary murder and genocide not just in scale but also in kind. Eichmann was NOT a murderer. What he did, which was to participate actively and willingly in the attempted eradication of whole groups of people, was far worse than murder.

Murder is a crime against a person or small (relatively) set of people. There are laws on the books just about everywhere that say you can't just go out and kill someone. But genocide is a crime that takes place as a norm. That is, what Eichmann did was follow not only the law in the Reich, he followed the prevailing mores of his time and place. The fact of the killing is incomprehensibly horrible. But what's really, really scary about it is not that the Nazis killed so many people, it's that they managed to create an environment in which killing millions was all in a day's work for ordinary bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann. A similar rule applies to the more recent genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans. Things weren't as clinically efficient in those places as in Nazi Germany, but there's no doubt that huge groups of people came to believe that killing off another group or groups wholesale was the thing to do. That conversion of murder into an acceptable act doesn't excuse the participants in the least, of course. It just makes their evilness that much more terrifying.

What a chilling and fascinating story and what a writer!