Tag: Jerusalem

What did Hannah Arendt really mean by the banality of evil? | Aeon Ideas

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil

he banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy. To Arendt’s critics, it seemed absolutely inexplicable that Eichmann could have played a key role in the Nazi genocide yet have no evil intentions. Gershom Scholem, a fellow philosopher (and theologian), wrote to Arendt in 1963 that her banality-of-evil thesis was merely a slogan that ‘does not impress me, certainly, as the product of profound analysis’. Mary McCarthy, a novelist and good friend of Arendt, voiced sheer incomprehension: ‘[I]t seems to me that what you are saying is that Eichmann lacks an inherent human quality: the capacity for thought, consciousness – conscience. But then isn’t he a monster simply?’

Last train for Moscow

"Polonez" train from Moscow to Warsa...
“Polonez” train from Moscow to Warsaw departing Beloruskij Vokazal (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Panorama of Moscow, Borodinsky Bridge near rig...
Panorama of Moscow, Borodinsky Bridge near right, Smolensky Metro Bridge far right (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Elena,a baby wrapped in her woollen clothes,
On the last train,Warsaw to Moscow,
[ change Niegoreloje.]
1939.Father,mother,brother
You passed through the Arctic Wastes of life.
Still as if travellng on a train
To an impossibly far destination.
As you left the German Army crashed into Poland
Lost,your aunts
Your cousins.
Your culture.
How does God select the damned?
Later,you had your own baby,here in England,
Not lost like all those others.
Your father died by his own hand,
The hand of history;
The fingers twitching,
Not sure where to point.
Then settling into frozen grief
A sculpture only your mother saw.
You saw too,Elena.
You always saw,though you can’t remember;
The long journey,your mother’s breast,
Your father’s silence.
Only the dead know that silence.
Only the dead weep
With the rocks and stones .
And the ice in each eye
Fell like snow down your cheeks
As you held your own infant.
Warsaw to Moscow,
Moscow to Jerusalem.
Always journeying
Looking for what they can never find:
The home they left behind
The presence of the dead
Lying in gaunt heaps
Like rubbish
Your aunts, Elena.
Your cousins.
You never knew them.
But there’s a hole in your mind
Through which the Polish wind blows for ever.

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This is well worth reading,if only for the history of one Jewish man’s survival of the Nazi‘s attmept to wipe out Hungarian Jews.I feel his books would be worth reading.I shall post  if and when I read them

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