University of California Irvine Philosophy Adolf Eichmann Reading Analysis

University of California Irvine Philosophy Adolf Eichmann Reading Analysis

W9 Understanding assignment: underline and comment I uploaded readings. Please follow the guidelines very carefully and write correctly. If you have any questions please ask me. Thank you. Marxism and Critical Theory ANNA BONCOMPAGNI Marxism and Critical Theory Marxism Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) Society, class relations and conflict The mode of production Bourgeoisie and proletariat Marxism and Critical Theory The superstructure The economic “base” of a society determines a “superstructure” = political system, justice, laws, and religion, culture, and morality, justified by an ideology Examples: In a feudal society → religious ideology In a capitalist society → liberalist ideology Marxism and Critical Theory The superstructure Ideology as an instrument of social reproduction “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production” (Marx) False consciousness = the oppressed share the same values and objectives of the oppressors, without seeing that these values are against their own interest Task of intellectuals: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” Marxism and Critical Theory Antonio Gramsci: “Cultural hegemony” It includes institutions, practices, habits, beliefs, … “Hegemonic” = dominant, predominant Capitalism → ideology → common sense Common sense and the limits of perception Importance of the working-class culture Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) Marxism and Critical Theory Critical Theory The Frankfurt School (1930s) Traditional theory = understand and explain Critical Theory = critique and change Max Horkheimer (1895 – 1973) Theodor W. Adorno (1903 – 1969) Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) Jürgen Habermas (1929 – , 2nd generation) Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) Marxism and Critical Theory Critical Theory Aim of the Frankfurt School = to transform capitalism into a form of social life in which human beings are “emancipated” Ideology is not entirely explicable through reference to the underlying system of production Immanent criticism = from the inside Objectivity is a myth Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) Marxism and Critical Theory Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964) A critique of “the ideology of advanced industrial society” Consumerism and false needs Obliteration of the capacity for critical thinking “One dimension” Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) Marxism and Critical Theory Conclusion Relevance of the point of view of the marginalized Some forms of critical theory: Feminism Critical Race Theory Post-colonial studies Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) Hannah Arendt ANNA BONCOMPAGNI Arendt Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-Jewish family, American citizen (1951) Themes: power, authority, democracy, evil, freedom Main works The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) The Human Condition (1958) Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) – controversial Arendt Adolf Eichmann Joined the Nazi Party and SS in 1932 One of the main organizers of the Holocaust Managed the logistics of the deportation of Jews Captured by the Mossad in Argentina in 1960 Sentenced to death in Israel in 1962 Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem Eichmann – did not deny the Holocaust and his role in it – claimed that he was “not guilty in the sense of the indictment” – claimed that he followed Kantian moral principles (!) – claimed that he obeyed orders, but also that he obeyed the law Arendt Controversial aspects According to her critics, Arendt – ended up defending Eichmann – did not understand that Eichmann was indeed a fanatic and cruel anti-Semite She also blamed some leaders of the Jewish community for collaborating with the Nazis Arendt The banality of evil Normality and evil What does it tell us, ordinary people? “No one has the right to obey” Feminist philosophy ANNA BONCOMPAGNI Feminist philosophy Introduction Feminism as a social movement and world-view → a belief in and an advocacy of equal rights for women based on the acknowledgment of the equality of men and women → First International Women Conference, Paris, 1892 NB There were feminist thinkers before then too Feminist philosophy The three waves First wave: basic political rights (vote) – Mid Nineteenth century to suffrage United States: 1920 New Zeeland: 1893 France: 1944, Switzerland: 1971 Second wave: women liberation movement, 1960s-70s Social equality (“the personal is political”) Third wave: early 1990s: differences among women, black feminism (Fourth wave: social media) Feminist philosophy Feminist philosophy? It takes into account the issues raised by the feminist movement Feminist approaches in… Social and political philosophy Ethics Ontology and metaphysics Epistemology … Feminist philosophy Some key figures: “proto-feminists” Mary Astell (1666-1731) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 1694 educational retreat for women Some Reflections Upon Marriage, 1700 negative effects of marriage for women Feminist philosophy Some key figures: “proto-feminists” Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792 Women are not inferior to men by nature, but they appear to be only because of a lack of education Feminist philosophy Some key figures Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) ➢ Very important for the “second wave” ➢ The Second Sex, 1949 Otherness and oppression “One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman” Hannah Arendt – Extracts from Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (1964) Otto Adolf, son of Karl Adolf Eichmann and Maria née Schefferling, caught in a suburb of Buenos Aires on the evening of May 11, 1960, flown to Israel nine days later, brought to trial in the District Court in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961, stood accused on fifteen counts: “together with others” he had committed crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes during the whole period of the Nazi regime and especially during the period of the Second World War. The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950, under which he was tried, provides that “a person who has committed one of these . . . offenses . . . is liable to the death penalty.” To each count Eichmann pleaded: “Not guilty in the sense of the indictment.” In what sense then did he think he was guilty? In the long cross-examination of the accused, according to him “the longest ever known,” neither the defense nor the prosecution nor, finally, any of the three judges ever bothered to ask him this obvious question. His lawyer, Robert Servatius of Cologne, hired by Eichmann and paid by the Israeli government (following the precedent set at the Nuremberg Trials, where all attorneys for the defense were paid by the Tribunal of the victorious powers), answered the question in a press interview: “Eichmann feels guilty before God, not before the law,” but this answer remained without confirmation from the accused himself. The defense would apparently have preferred him to plead not guilty on the grounds that under the then existing Nazi legal system he had not done anything wrong, that what he was accused of were not crimes but “acts of state,” over which no other state has jurisdiction (…), that it had been his duty to obey and that, in Servatius’ words, he had committed acts “for which you are decorated if you win and go to the gallows if you lose.” (Thus Goebbels had declared in 1943: “We will go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all times or as their greatest criminals.”) (…) Eichmann’s own attitude was different. First of all, the indictment for murder was wrong: “With the killing of Jews I had nothing to do. I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, for that matter – I never killed any human being. I never gave an order to kill either a Jew or a non-Jew; I just did not do it,” or, as he was later to qualify this statement, “It so happened . . . that I had not once to do it” for he left no doubt that he would have killed his own father if he had received an order to that effect. (…) Eichmann, a Nazi criminal who escaped justice by hiding first in a small village in Germany and then in Argentina, was caught and brought to Israel by the Mossad. He declared himself “Not guilty in the sense of the indictment”. Arendt wants to understand what he meant by this. Would he then have pleaded guilty if he had been indicted as an accessory to murder? Perhaps, but he would have made important qualifications. What he had done was a crime only in retrospect, and he had always been a law-abiding citizen, because Hitler’s orders, which he had certainly executed to the best of his ability, had possessed “the force of law” in the Third Reich. (The defense could have quoted in support of Eichmann’s thesis the testimony of one of the bestknown experts on constitutional law in the Third Reich, Theodor Maunz, currently Minister of Education and Culture in Bavaria, who stated in 1943 [in Gestalt and Recht der Polizei]: “The command of the Führer . . . is the absolute center of the present legal order.”) Those who today told Eichmann that he could have acted differently simply did not know, or had forgotten, how things had been. He did not want to be one of those who now pretended that “they had always been against it,” whereas in fact they had been very eager to do what they were told to do. However, times change, and he, like Professor Maunz, had “arrived at different insights.” What he had done he had done, he did not want to deny it; rather, he proposed “to hang myself in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth.” By this he did not mean to say that he regretted anything: “Repentance is for little children.” (Sic!) Even under considerable pressure from his lawyer, he did not change this position. In a discussion of Himmler’s offer in 1944 to exchange a million Jews for ten thousand trucks, and his own role in this plan, Eichmann was asked: “Mr. Witness, in the negotiations with your superiors, did you express any pity for the Jews and did you say there was room to help them?” And he replied: “I am here under oath and must speak the truth. Not out of mercy did I launch this transaction” – which would have been fine, except that it was not Eichmann who “launched” it. But he then continued, quite truthfully: “My reasons I explained this morning,” and they were as follows: Himmler had sent his own man to Budapest to deal with matters of Jewish emigration. (Which, incidentally, had become a flourishing business: for enormous amounts of money, Jews could buy their way out. Eichmann, however, did not mention this.) It was the fact that “here matters of emigration were dealt with by a man who did not belong to the Police Force” that made him indignant, “because I had to help and to implement deportation, and matters of emigration, on which I considered myself an expert, were assigned to a man who was new to the unit … I was fed up… I decided that I had to do something to take matters of emigration into my own hands.” Himmler was a leading member of the Nazi party in Germany and the head of the Schutzstaffel (SS). Throughout the trial, Eichmann tried to clarify, mostly without success, this second point in his plea of “not guilty in the sense of the indictment.” The indictment implied not only that he had acted on purpose, which he did not deny, but out of base motives and in full knowledge of the criminal nature of his deeds. As for the base motives, he was perfectly sure that he was not what he called an innerer Schweinehund, a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart; and as for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do – to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care. This, admittedly, was hard to take. Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal” – “More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable” – and finally the minister who had paid regular visits to him in prison after the Supreme Court had finished hearing his appeal reassured everybody by declaring Eichmann to be “a man with very positive ideas.” Behind the comedy of the soul experts lay the hard fact that his was obviously no case of moral let alone legal insanity. (Mr. Hausner’s recent revelations in the Saturday Evening Post of things he “could not bring out at the trial” have contradicted the information given informally in Jerusalem. Eichmann, we are now told, had been alleged by the psychiatrists to be “a man obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill,” “a perverted, sadistic personality.” In which case he would have belonged in an insane asylum.) Worse, his was obviously also no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind. He “personally” never had anything whatever against Jews; on the contrary, he had plenty of “private reasons” for not being a Jew hater. To be sure, there were fanatic anti-Semites among his closest friends, for instance Lászlo Endre, State Secretary in Charge of Political (Jewish) Affairs in Hungary, who was hanged in Budapest in 1946; but this, according to Eichmann, was more or less in the spirit of “some of my best friends are anti-Semites.” Alas, nobody believed him. The prosecutor did not believe him, because that was not his job. Counsel for the defense paid no attention because he, unlike Eichmann, was, to all appearances, not interested in questions of conscience. And the judges did not believe him, because they were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that According to Arendt, failing to pay attention to Eichmann’s claim that he was “not guilty in the sense of the indictment” prevents from fully an average, “normal” person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. They preferred to conclude from occasional lies that he was a liar – and missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case. Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all “normal persons,” must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was “no exception within the Nazi regime.” However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only “exceptions” could be expected to react “normally.” This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape. (…) In his own presentation of the matter, the turning point came … in January, 1942, during the Conference of the Staatssekretäre, as the Nazis used to call it, or the Wannsee Conference, as it now is usually called, because Heydrich had invited the gentlemen to a house in that suburb of Berlin. As the formal name of the conference indicates, the meeting had become necessary because the Final Solution, if it was to be applied to the whole of Europe, clearly required more than tacit acceptance from the Reich’s State apparatus; it needed the active cooperation of all Ministries and of the whole Civil Service. The Ministers themselves, nine years after Hitler’s rise to power, were all Party members of long standing – those who in the initial stages of the regime had merely “coordinated” themselves, smoothly enough, had been replaced. Yet most of them were not completely trusted, since few among them owed their careers entirely to the Nazis, as did Heydrich or Himmler; and those who did, like Joachim von Ribbentrop, head of the Foreign Office, a former champagne salesman, were likely to be nonentities. The problem was much more acute, however, with respect to the higher career men in the Civil Service, directly under the Ministers, for these men, the backbone of every government administration, were not easily replaceable, and Hitler had tolerated them, just as Adenauer was to tolerate them, unless they were compromised beyond salvation. Hence the undersecretaries and the legal and other experts in the various Ministries were frequently not even Party members, and Heydrich’s apprehensions about whether he would be able to enlist the active help of these people in mass murder were quite comprehensible. As Eichmann put it, Heydrich “expected the greatest difficulties.” Well, he could not have been more wrong. The aim of the conference was to coordinate all efforts toward the implementation of the Final Solution. The discussion turned first on “complicated legal questions,” such as the treatment of understanding a very important moral lesson. The “Final Solution” was the extermination of Jews. half- and quarter-Jews – should they be killed or only sterilized? This was followed by a frank discussion of the “various types of possible solutions to the problem,” which meant the various methods of killing, and here, too, there was more than “happy agreement on the part of the participants”; the Final Solution was greeted with “extraordinary enthusiasm” by all present, and particularly by Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, Undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior, who was known to be rather reticent and hesitant in the face of “radical” Party measures, and was, according to Dr. Hans Globke’s testimony at Nuremberg, a staunch supporter of the Law. There were certain difficulties, however. Undersecretary Josef Bühler, second in command in the General Government in Poland, was dismayed at the prospect that Jews would be evacuated from the West to the East, because this meant more Jews in Poland, and he proposed that these evacuations be postponed and that “the Final Solution be started in the General Government, where no problems of transport existed.” The gentlemen from the Foreign Office appeared with their own carefully elaborated memorandum, expressing “the desires and ideas of the Foreign Office with respect to the total solution of the Jewish question in Europe,” to which nobody paid much attention. The main point, as Eichmann rightly noted, was that the members of the various branches of the Civil Service did not merely express opinions but made concrete propositions. The meeting lasted no more than an hour or an hour and a half, after which drinks were served and everybody had lunch – “a cozy little social gathering,” designed to strengthen the necessary personal contacts. It was a very important occasion for Eichmann, who had never before mingled socially with so many “high personages”; he was by far the lowest in rank and social position of those present. He had sent out the invitations and had prepared some statistical material (full of incredible errors) for Heydrich’s introductory speech – eleven million Jews had to be killed, an undertaking of some magnitude – and later he was to prepare the minutes. In short, he acted as secretary of the meeting. This was why he was permitted, after the dignitaries had left, to sit down near the fireplace with his chief Müller and Heydrich, “and that was the first time I saw Heydrich smoke and drink.” They did not “talk shop, but enjoyed some rest after long hours of work,” being greatly satisfied and, especially Heydrich, in very high spirits. There was another reason that made the day of this conference unforgettable for Eichmann. Although he had been doing his best right along to help with the Final Solution, he had still harbored some doubts about “such a bloody solution through violence,” and these doubts had now been dispelled. “Here now, during this conference, the most prominent ..