While living in Argentina in 1960, Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped
and smuggled to Israel where he was put on trial for crimes against humanity.
The New Yorker magazine sent Hannah Arendt to cover the trial. While covering
the technical aspects of the trial, Arendt also explored the wider themes
inherent in the trial, such as the nature of justice, the behavior of
the Jewish leadership during the Nazi Regime, and, most controversially,
the nature of Evil itself.

Far from being evil incarnate, as the prosecution painted Eichmann, Arendt
maintains that he was an average man, a petty bureaucrat interested only in
furthering his career, and the evil he did came from the seductive power of
the totalitarian state and an unthinking adherence to the Nazi cause. Indeed,
Eichmann's only defense during the trial was "I was just following orders."

Arendt's analysis of the seductive nature of evil is a disturbing one.
We would like to think that anyone who would perpetrate such horror on the
world is different from us, and that such atrocities are rarities in our
world. But the history of groups such as the Jews, Kurds, Bosnians, and
Native Americans, to name but a few, seems to suggest that such evil is all
too commonplace. In revealing Eichmann as the pedestrian little man that he
was, Arendt shows us that the veneer of civilization is a thin one indeed.

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