A drop on a hot stone that evaporates without purpose or success or failure or anything

SOMEONE WHO READ what I wrote the other day asked me if I'd ever seen the movie "Hannah Arendt" that was made in 2012 and sent me a link to it on Youtube.   Now, you may know that I have a severe allergy to movies made about real People and, especially, People with such fraught biographies as the great thinker,  so much more than just a philosopher, who was the subject of the movie.   Especially anything around the subject of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.   But I watched it and, a few somewhat minor liberties taken with some actual events in her life, it's very much worth watching, though no where near as much worth it as reading her or listening to the number of interviews and lectures you can read online.   Margarethe von Trotta made one fine film.  Barbara Sukowa,  Janet McTeer, Axel Milburg etc. gave extremely fine performances as Arendt, McCarthy and Heinrich Bluchner (Arendt's husband) and all of the smaller roles were well acted, as well.  

It was especially satisfying, if only in a movie,  to have her very close friend,  the novelist and intellectual Mary McCarthy tell off what I believe is supposed to be the putrid racist and what passed as an American intellectual, Norman Podhoretz, pointing out to him and some other so-called New York intellectuals deriding Arendt, that, unlike them, she had been in a concentration camp and had escaped from it as well as directly experiencing Nazism as a Jew.   There were a number of such satisfying occasions in the movie as well as some disturbing ones.   Especially effective was the use of actual footage from the Eichmann trial, using the actual words of witnesses,  the prosecutor, the judges and Eichmann instead of using actors saying their words.  The skillful use of that black and white film inter-cut with color reenactment of Hannah Arendt sitting in the courtroom, in the press room, was very effective.  

But I wouldn't be telling you about this without one real life exchange between one of the judges*and Eichmann in the actual footage,  in which the judge, Benjamin Halevi, asks him, in German, about his motive in carrying out the deportation of Jews to their deaths, which Eichmann said was his duty in wartime,  you should follow the  closed captions that translate it to English.  I've transcribed those here, with one change in emphasis I could catch (I really need more practice in listening to German). 

Judge: Did you experience any conflict between your duty and your conscience?

Eichmann: One could call it a state of being split.

Judge: Split?

Eichmann:  Yes.  A conscious split state where one could flee from one side to the other. 

Judge:  One's conscience was to be abandoned?

Eichmann:  Sorry? [I'd have translated that, "Excuse me."]

Judge:  One's personal conscience was to be abandoned?

Eichmann: You could say that.

Judge: If there had been more civil courage, things could have been different. Am I right?  Answer. 

Eichmann: If civic courage had been hierarchically organized,  then yes, absolutely. 

Judge:  So this was not destiny.  It was not inevitable. It was a question of human behavior. 

Eichmann: A question of human behavior  and, of course, it was wartime, upheaval.  Everyone thought, "It's useless to resist. . . "  Yes.  A drop on a hot stone that evaporates without purpose or success or failure or anything.  It was connected to the times, I think.  To the times, how children were raised, with ideological education, rigid discipline, that sort of thing. 

Hearing what Eichmann said to excuse himself in the murders of millions of People made my blood run cold because it almost exactly matches, almost verbatim,  something I've repeatedly warned of here about the total and absolutely guaranteed consequences of holding a materialistic, a scientistic view of human life.   Here is one of the times I said it:

Materialist-atheist-scientism is an ideology that can only be true if it is false, though that argument requires a few more steps dealing with the inevitable debunking of human minds, which, as mentioned, is one of the more vigorously pursued goals of materialist-atheist-scientists including many of the biggest names in it such as Francis Crick.  And with that any reason to believe in any of the work of such scientists evaporates.  And with it the very category of truth as opposed to error or falsity evaporates into a banal and meaningless chemical reaction like water evaporating or iron oxidizing.  Materialism is the one ideology that can only be true if it is false because it corrodes the meaning of the idea of truth.

Early in the movie, when Arendt and some others are listening to a news report that said Eichmann had escaped through the infamous "ratline" that was tied to the Vatican (I won't get into that right now, but there is certainly a lot that could be said about both the reality and the myths regarding that),  one of them snarks that they helped him due to his Catholicism, though what he said is not only antithetical to Catholicism and Christianity, it proved that his faith was not in revealed religion but in the ideology of materialist scientism.   The same materialist scientism which is, actually, the default ideology that is the ubiquitous ideology of the educated class, world-wide, so ubiquitous that many of those whose academic and professional life is in Christian and other theologies adhere to it.   

I don't recall if Arendt, the person and not the character in the movie, directly addressed that, alas, I don't own the book and would have to get a copy to look it up, but it is a key to understanding how he chose to do what he did, without any reference to the moral absolute that would have told him that, apart from being instrumentally "useless" for him to have refused to obey orders, even during wartime, that he had an absolute obligation to disobey them.    And if you think that is something relevant to only the crimes of the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s,  you are entirely discounting those who are reproducing Eichmann's crimes right now, today, Americans, Israelis, Iranians,  Russians, . . . 

I had thought at first, when I was so struck by that quote that I decided to write about this that it was a departure from what I should be writing about,  Holy Week, but now I can see that this is a Holy Week post.   Pilate washed his hands when he was modeling what Eichmann was claiming was his lack of responsibility for his crimes.   Materialists in the governments, judiciary, media, academia don't bother to even notice the blood on theirs.  

*  It is one of the criticisms of Hannah Arendt's famous book on the trial that she was scathing in her criticism of the prosecutors and the Israeli government under Ben Gurion but she had a lot more respect for the judges in their questioning of Eichmann.   When I finally read the entire book a few years back, it was clear that she hadn't made excuses for the Nazis or Eichmann while reaching what was a far deeper and more troubling view of the trial than just about everyone wanted.   The lies that were told about her in the American media, and elsewhere, have, unfortunately survived, especially for those who never read her to see what she really said.  And a lot of those who lied about that have come close to repeating the thinking of Eichmann, either as active participants in history or of commenting and approving of subsequent crimes in history.