Not banal at all
Whatever your thoughts are on Hannah Arendt and her phrase the “banality of evil,” there are some fellows whose evil does not appear banal at all. Mark Steyn:
[A]s the Palestinian “nationalist” movement descended from airline hijackings to the intifada to self-detonating in pizza parlors, it never occurred to their glamorous patrons to wonder if maybe this was, in fact, a terrorist movement conveniently adopting the guise of nationalism.
In 1971, in the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton, Palestinian terrorists shot Wasfi al-Tal, the prime minister of Jordan at point-blank range. As he fell to the floor dying, one of his killers began drinking the blood gushing from his wounds. Doesn’t that strike you as a little, um, overwrought? Three decades later, when bombs went off in Bali killing hundreds of tourists plus local waiters and barmen, Bruce Haigh, a former Aussie diplomat in Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, had no doubt where to put the blame. As he told Australia’s Nine Network: “The root cause of this issue has been America’s backing of Israel on Palestine.”
Suppose this were true — that terrorists blew up Oz honeymooners and Scandinavian stoners in Balinese nightclubs because of “the Palestinian question.” Doesn’t this suggest that these people are, at a certain level, nuts?
For what it’s worth, our view is that the head-choppers and other practitioners of ultra-violence work themselves into a frenzy in their snuff videos in part because at some level they know what they are doing is evil, that it is in reality devil-worship. The activities of these gents are not banal at all; the banality is left to those who chronicle their activities with approval, tacit or explicit.
UPDATE
Speaking of the banality of evil, it is the 45th anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the event that gave rise to Arendt’s famous phrase. Eichmann was the chief of the Jewish Department, Bureau IVB4, of the SS head office, and had considerable responsibility for implementing the Final Solution. David Cesarani has an interesting and well-reviewed new book on Eichmann.