In 1963, Hannah Arendt, watching the trial of leading Nazi, Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, described Eichmann’s actions as ‘the banality of evil’. Underlying her phrase was her belief that it was quite simple for normal people (and not just psychopaths) to commit evil acts as they convinced themselves that they were doing the legitimate bidding of the state.
I thought of this phrase as I read in my local newspaper ‘The Harlow Star’, that the former leader of the Labour Council in Harlow, Cllr Tony Durcan, compared the Conservative Leader of the Council Andrew Johnson, to Robert Mugabe, over a disagreement about the allocation of the six Labour Councillors on Committees. The Labour Councillor stated “It feels a bit like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe."
So, a minor disagreement over local representation turns into a comparison in which the newly elected Conservative Council is compared with a dictatorship, a genocidalist regime and one in which most inhabitants live in abject misery. From the ‘banality of evil’ to the ‘trivialisation of evil’. But this Councillor’s remark is not a one off. Many on the left have a history in trivialising evil. How often have Right-wing Tories or Republicans been called ‘Fascists’ by their opponents, as if their beliefs were comparable to Nazi death camps.
What goes through the minds of individuals who can trivialise real evil in this way? Can they really believe in what they are saying? Those who trivialise evil, either hope to shock and smear to dramatise their point, or they lack any sense of moral equilibrium and are moral relativists - or both. But, by trivialising evil in this way, not only are the real victims of dictatorship demeaned and insulted, but the very concept of real evil is somehow made more banal. If Robert Mugabe’s regime shows us anything, it must be that evil is treated with the seriousness it deserves. When we say never again, we should mean it.
