Hannah Arendt was a German Jewish political theorist who fled the Nazis, ended up in New York, and spent the rest of her life trying to understand how the Holocaust happened. Her conclusion was terrifying and nobody wanted to fucking hear it.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) traces the roots of Nazi and Soviet terror back to 19th century colonialism and anti-Semitism. Her argument: totalitarianism is not just violent dictatorship. It is a completely new form of government that aims to destroy the very idea of being a person. It isolates you, destroys your relationships, and tells you the only meaning in life is the movement itself.
Then she went to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the Eichmann trial and came back with an even worse conclusion: Eichmann was not a monster. He was a boring bureaucrat who did paperwork. He was terrifyingly normal. She called it the banality of evil. Evil does not need a villain. It just needs a man filing forms who never stops to ask what the forms mean. ( on some shi Kafka ain’t seen)
America hated her for this. She lost friends. They called her a Nazi sympathizer (she was not). She was telling the truth, which is always less comforting than the story we tell ourselves.
Starter book: Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)
