in short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made

I AM NOT a student of the firestorm of condemnation that Hannah Arendt received after the publication of her reporting on the trial of Adolph Eichmann but I do know that many of the attacks on her came from those who found some of the issues she dealt with in the book troubling and assumed she  was, by stating questions affirming them.  In some cases I have read enough of the contemporary literature that I know those were questions she certainly found being discussed but would likely not have raised herself.  The often asserted question of "why didn't the Jews rise up against their murderers?" is one I heard raised even many years after that on talk radio, especially the putrid call-ins.  Arendt gave an answer to that, not drawn from the imagination of white, middle-class or affluent Americans but from the real-life crimes of the Nazis, their retribution against not only those who fought back but their use of those who didn't, their use of sadistic, horrific pain and torture before murder of the loved ones who did fight back or resist.   Our imaginations of these things are bound to be different from what those who experienced and witnessed them are bound to be.   Movies, TV shows, fiction, even second or third person reportage has to fall to the testimony of those who witnessed them.   And very few will go to the bother of reading or listening to that, as we get farther from the time, substituting a non-reality formed in their uninformed imagination, that danger will only grow worse.

One that is certainly not escapable is bound to come up among any national entity, one bound to be controversial due to the establishment of the Israeli State that arrested Eichmann in Argentina and transported him to Israel for trial on a new form of law, the same kind of legal procedure that when it was used for the first time in the Nuremberg Trials, trying some of the worst criminals in history on things that were legal in a secular legal sense when those mass murders were committed in the places they were committed.   Eichmann's lawyer raised some of the dangers of that as what of a defense of the indefensible Eichmann he could eek out of what he had to work with.  But those dangers are certainly far less than the dangers of letting such criminals off the hook and standing as an example to others of how much they can get away with and get away with it.

I have inserted breaks in some of Arendt's massive paragraphs for ease of reading and to emphasize some of the important issues that can get lost while reading a large block of text. 
From the epilogue of Eichmann in Jerusalem

All German Jews unanimously have condemned the wave of coordination which passed over the German people in 1933 and from one day to the next turned the Jews into pariahs. Is it conceivable that none of them ever asked himself how many of his own group would have done just the same if only they had been allowed to?  But is their condemnation today any the less correct for that reason?

The reflection that you yourself might have done wrong under the same circumstances may kindle a spirit of forgiveness, but those who today refer to Christian charity seem strangely confused on this issue too. Thus we can read in the postwar statement of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, the Protestant church, as follows: "We aver that before the God of Mercy we share in the guilt for the outrage committed against the Jews by our own people through omission and silence." It seems to me that a Christian is guilty before the God of Mercy if he repays evil with evil, hence that the churches would have sinned against mercy if millions of Jews had been killed as punishment for some evil they committed. But if the churches shared in the guilt for an outrage pure and simple, as they themselves attest, then the matter must still be considered to fall within the purview of the God of Justice. 

I will point out that for someone who believes in the God of the Hebrew tradition,  they may not immediately see that Arendt, taking advantage of the language of the confession,  for the argument, posits two gods, separating the differences between mercy and the act of judgement.  I had to re-read this passage before I got it for that reason.

This slip of the tongue, as it were, is no accident. Justice, but not mercy, is a matter of judgment, and about nothing does public opinion everywhere seem to be in happier agreement than that no one has the right to judge somebody else.

What public opinion permits us to judge and even to condemn are trends, or whole groups of people - the larger the better - in short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made, names no longer be named.

Needless to add, this taboo applies doubly when the deeds or words of famous people or men in high position are being questioned. This is currently expressed in high-flown assertions that it is "superficial" to insist on details and to mention individuals, whereas it is the sign of sophistication to speak in generalities according to which all cats are gray and we are all equally guilty.

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I will forego the post I have been trying to write dealing with a longer passage from her epilogue that contains that passage to make a more currently topical point.

"this taboo applies doubly when the deeds or words of famous people or men in high position are being questioned,"  that should, of course, today, make you think of Trump, of other right-wing criminals and gangsters and dicatators and would be dictators, it makes me think of the terrorism of Reagan and Bush I and to the crimes of Nixon and Kissinger. But the taboo is not applied by the free press on an even handed basis and the American media has a real talent for never applying it to the worst cases but only to smaller infractions, and always on one side in their "even-handedness".  They favor those who favor wealth and destroy democracy.  The application of the taboo on judging the powerful is certainly not the case for Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Democrats, that they are held to the same standards as Republican-fascists.

It is certainly not the case for Hillary Clinton, beyond any doubt the most exonerated Person in American history, that is when tried under a judicial process instead of the more politically potent trial by media.   If you are to consider the Washington DC and NYC and other national press those who emblemize "sophistication" they are engaged in exactly what Arendt said EXCEPT THAT, IN THE END, IT WILL SOMEHOW TURN OUT THAT DEMOCRATS ARE MORE "EQUALLY GUILTY" THAN THE SERVANTS OF MONEY AND POWER AND GANGSTER GOVERNANCE. This is a real life example of Orwell's famous phrase "some are more 'equal' than others" which under America's willfully stupid "free speech-press" the "less equal than others" will  be those who want real equality, especially  economic equality or even a lesser form of economic justice.  Only it turns out in a secular democracy under a bill of rights that it will be the media who settle the case for the most publicly consequential of results, politics.  

That is why the American free press is equating the presence of classified documents found secured in a think tank associated with Joe Biden and his entirely orderly and legal notification and return of documents to the Archive, even his compliance to the independent investigation of the matter with the total and complete illegality of what Trump did with far more classified documents which, it is certain he took and knew of and kept and tried to use and which he refused to give back when they were found.  Those who believe that journalism will save us, the kind of journalism which is typical under the Warren Court version of The First Amendment is, at this point, a willing idiot.  

Journalism or as it has been expanded and even more corrupted, "media" is not a regulated industry or even professional practice.  It has no professional standards to prevent or punish things like lying and bearing false witness that makes its product designed for easy acceptance by its partner industry, advertising, using all of the skills of a conman, unsafe for democracy of any kind.  Under the Supreme Court's orgy of adding to the privileges to its worst end, liars, partisan and corporate liars, the lying servants of billionaires, billionaires and multi-millionaires who have no problem with trying to harness the most dangerous of psychopathic factions, such as gained the Nazis  power in Germany to start with, even billionaires foreign as well as domestic, EVEN BILLIONAIRE GANGSTERS WHO ARE DICTATORS OF OUR ENEMIES, we, again, find ourselves in extreme danger.  

In the American context, it is, of course, tied in with that foremost tool for oligarchs, plutocrats, the rich who are gangsters and the more genteel of  affluent schemers and mere tax resenters, white supremacy.  

The pudding-headed liberal "civil libertarians" who took money from the porn industry, the alcohol, tobacco and other industries who sell addictive and unhealthy products using "the First Amendment," etc. did far more to get us here than they can stand anyone bringing up even as their old guard whine about those lawyers and others who, quite often being in groups targeted by white supremacy learned something from recent history.  But even quite liberal and quite informed journalists will never take a deep and critical look at that.  I once thought out of some misguided principle but I can't help guessing it's a matter of their professional self interest.

One of things you cannot fail to notice from reading Hannah Arendt's incredibly deep and critical look at the Eichmann trial and the evidence produced in the trial is how terribly complex and difficult and dangerous this all is. The naive faith that the First Congress put in some terribly dangerous slogans put into the Bill of Rights has, over and over again, proved to be more dangerous for their inspecificity and stunningly stupid "even handedness,"  EXACTLY  THE FAILURE TO MAKE DISTINCTIONS,  the failure to specify the difference between the absolute right to tell the truth and the fact that there is no such thing as a right to lie, the language of the Amendment thus stupidly and irresponsibly creating a privilege to lie, a privilege which can only be extended to liars.   The Warren Court and subsequent courts only making that already dangerous situation far worse and it being called a crowning virtue by those with a professional interest in being freed from the tedium of fact checking.   The Second Amendment is equally if not actually far more dangerous, both of those will have to be seriously amended to remove the deadly dangers that they contain.  Those dangers are so among us that to regard those and the Constitution itself as sacred objects is objectively morally irresponsible.

In her first chapter which I based my previous post on, She noticed this about her fellow journalists (she was acting as a reporter, so I guess she was one of them):

If the audience at the trial was to be the world and the play the huge panorama of Jewish sufferings, the reality was falling short of expectations and purposes. The journalists remained faithful for not much more than two weeks . . .

I'm surprised their attention even in 1961 lasted that long, no doubt their employers were ready to move on even faster.

Update:  I should, certainly, have pointed out that even more so than for Democrats, it is certainly not the case for poor people, especially for poor people and others who are Black, Latino, LGBTQ, other members of other targeted groups, especially those targeted by  hate-talk media and "comedy" and in that group, it's especially not true for all Women but only certain Women.