The NEW banality of evil is tourism, capable of turning the Nazi concentration camp, where 200,000 people were imprisoned from 1936 to 1945, into an object of consumption. In Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, more than 30,000 died from disease, starvation, medical experiments, and torture. or gas chamber.
It was the center conceived its leader Heinrich Himmler as a “model” camp for his policy of extermination, which began with the incarceration of opponents of the fascist regime, but later included anyone deemed racially or biologically inferior by the Nazis. Since 1939, it has included citizens of countries occupied by Germany. Among all were communists, socialists, anarchists, blacks, gypsies, homosexuals, Jews, Catholics, evangelicals and soldiers from different armies.
From the very beginning, the Nazi regime was inextricably linked with the hardening of politics, with the need to “cleanse” through violence a decadent society like the Germany of the Third Reich. He also did this by building a perfect machine of pain and death, like this concentration camp, which, when viewed from afar, appears to be made up of perfect and ordered blocks, like a Lego game, in which the most innocent parts can be perverted and turned into elements of destruction.
As you walk, the electronic guide you hold to your ear tells you in an impersonal tone what the function of each unit is and doesn’t miss the opportunity to repeat that the Soviets committed so many abuses when they released the prisoners in April 1945. like Nazis He forgets many details, such as that after the war only six percent of the German soldiers in Sachsenhausen were put on trial. If you happen to walk into Bertolt Brecht’s house in East Berlin, which has been turned into a museum, the person in charge will try to convince you that the author Opera “Three Cents” And Caucasian chalk circle He was not such a Marxist as he himself insists on emphasizing in all his work.
I’m in Berlin, invited to The Rosa Luxembourg Conference, which every year commemorates the brilliant Marxist intellectual, executed by a shot in the back of the head on the same day that on January 15, 1919, his colleague Karl Liebknecht was shot in the back. Those who committed these crimes later helped Hitler to come to power. For the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the assassination of Rosa and Liebknecht marked a turning point in history, which she defined as “the line that divided Germany before and after the First World War.”
The mood currently prevailing among the German Left is of the utmost concern, because the line has been crossed again. Federal government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit confirmed the delivery of Leopard tanks to Ukraine on the grounds that for Germany “it is a matter of life and death concerning the defense of the country itself.” The students of the Prussian General Clausewitz insist that a good war is better than a bad peace, and the drums are beaten in the hope that World War III might end.
If the “logic of weapons” is trying to lead a rearmed Germany to a devastating world conflagration, then the “weapon of logic” has long legitimized and ruled subjectivity, to such an extent that some tourists from Sachsenhausen, without the slightest shame, take selfies balancing on the ruins of the gas chamber. Gross economic determinism, elimination of referents
the historical and future perspective, the trivialization of life and the manipulation of it should not even go beyond common sense. They are here, with the literal and unspoken violence that is normal in the media and social platforms.
The banality of evil is the negation of thought. Hannah Arendt came up with the concept after witnessing the trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, who she claimed was a “terribly and frighteningly normal” man, a bureaucrat, part of a murderous machine. He just did his part. Evil did not smell of sulfur and had no horns. He was trite, he was a good neighbor, people liked him. People are consuming and creating virtual fast food out of nothing and without much thought while Berlin sends 14 Leopards to the war. (Taken from Cubaperiodistas)
Source: Juventud Rebelde
