"Absolute trash. I have no respect whatsoever for someone whould tar their own family in this manner. i also suspect that much of it isn't true; the author's account seems highly colored. It's also clear that the publicity surround this book is agenda-driven, merely one more in the shots fired at the conservative and religious. It's rather inept, seeing as how most any intelligent reader should be able to see through it. The fanfare the book has received is baffling, though perhaps not unexpected."

"
I had no real sense of why Arendt's conclusions about Eichmann might be considered controversial until I read the introduction to my fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by a guy named Ron Rosenbaum, and found that a good portion of it was dedicated to attacking Arendt and her notion of the banality of evil. Rosenbaum essentially cherry-picks one thing that Eichmann (might have) said- something about being able to leap happily into the grave knowing that he had so many victims- and concludes that from this point in history on, surely no one will ever again be 'taken in' by Arendt's moral exculpation of this monster.

In other words, Rosenbaum is annoyed by Arendt's interpretation of Eichmann because...he's an idiot. Or disingenuous. Or to put it a little more generously (more generous than he is to Arendt), he has a psychological need to see Eichmann as a movie villain, a cackling psychopath who emerges from a void...or the dregs of a hack screenwriter's coffee mug. But as Terry Eagleton points out in On Evil, context isn't the same thing as an excuse. And if you read Arendt's book with an open mind, I think you notice that she has some really compelling things to say about the nature of conformity. I especially appreciated her focus on Eichmann's use of language- his cliches, the way he seemed unable to speak outside the language system of Nazism. His language, and therefore his thoughts, were the thoughts of the state. This hint that there's something authoritarian in a cliche is a good reminder of why it's not only vanity to make the effort, fail as we often might, to think and write for ourselves, to choose our own forms of expression, to avoid slogans and appending social media hashtags to everything we write (and therefore everything we think). Arendt also emphasizes the value Eichmann placed on 'success', on good standing in society, traits that we tend to encourage in civilized, non-Nazified countries as well:

What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of 'good society' as he knew it...Hitler, he said, 'may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to a Fuhrer of a people of almost eighty million...His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man.' His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which 'good society' everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to 'close his ears to the voice of conscience'...because his conscience spoke with a 'respectable voice', with the voice of respectable society around him.

It seems to me that Eichmann in Jerusalem is part of the body of literature that nobly refuses to see the Nazis as incomprehensible monsters, and instead suggests cultural and psychological habits that could under certain circumstances make it easier for people to participate in a Nazi-like system. Rosenbaum's view is probably more comfortable, but for just that reason it's also more dangerous."

"Sweet irony! A call to rationality from a white old male who is dominated by his irrational fears: Muslims, Covid, anything that might threaten his dominant status. And, like the Christian preachers he despises, whomever doesn't care about his important issues, they are irrational, a white way to say Haram."