Banality Of the Bombers

"The deeds were monstrous, but

the doer . . . was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous."

-- Hannah Arendt,

"The Life of the Mind"

The banality of evil that Hannah Arendt glimpsed in Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann lives on in this visual age. It emerges from surveillance photographs of four terrorism suspects in London that were splashed across the world's television screens, Internet sites and newspapers earlier this month.

Those police photos, as did Eichmann's words and appearance during his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, show the face

of evil as all too human and surprisingly mediocre -- a face not of mysterious supernatural forces that we cannot comprehend or combat, but one of petty criminality and hatred that we can easily recognize. In that sobering reality are reasons for comfort, and for anguish...more here