Today
Israel continued with its systematic massacre of
Lebanese citizens. Its aerial Einsatzgruppen selected
for mass killing the civilian population of Qana.
At least 60 reported fatalities were occasioned
by the US sponsored flying death squads, 34 of them
children. This came at the end of a week in which
the ground was carefully prepared for the intimidation
of the international community. United Nations peace
keeping troops were also butchered by Israelofascist
military death squads in a bid to deter other governments
from committing themselves to a UN presence in the
Lebanon short of Israel securing its strategic objectives.
Hanna
Arendt, having observed the 1961 Jerusalem trial
of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, coined the
phrase 'banality of evil.' Since Arendt's death
in 1975 others have stepped into the breach to show
how the mediocrities of ordinary daily life perpetrate
the extraordinary monstrosities that have blurred
the line between human and beast; none more so than
Christopher Browning in his aptly titled Ordinary
Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland.
There
seems little that would merit special attention
for the mass murderers of Israel in the absence
of their penchant for infanticide. They epitomise
Arendt's banal. Just as victims of child molestation
are not inured against dishing out the abuse in
kind, those who have strong cultural roots in the
holocaust seem inclined to seek out vulnerable victims
so that they too can do what was done to them. Uruguayan
writer Eduardo Galeano makes the caustic rejoinder
that:
It
is a cause of puzzlement from where the banal pilots
who make up the IDF Einsatzgruppen draw inspiration
when they take to the air for the purposes of executing
their murderous mission. Perhaps they have heard
of the names Otto Ohlendorf, Franz Walter Stahlecker,
Otto Rasch and Artur Nebe. If so, why do they embrace
the activities of such men rather than recoil from
them?
Evil,
because it is banal, does not always come with an
accompanying explanation. The world may ultimately
uncover only sanitised snap shots of the lives of
Israeli war criminals which show them in their banality
rather than their evil. We might find:
that
little Gretchen from Gevin's normal passion in life
was music from which she was wickedly wrenched by
the enemies of Israel. And so to take her mind of
the odious task of strafing the fleeing children
in her sights, she hummed Wagnerian opera in the
blue skies above Beirut in tune with the staccato
of her weaponry;
that
Jurgen from Jaffa really preferred photography to
flying. Consequently, for solace, at night when
the day's bombardment was over, he found himself
staring at the 1942 photo of the Jewish woman running
across fields at Ivangorod, gripping her child as
some Nazi brute takes aim to murder both;
that
big Heinrich from Haifa with a love of history,
before he lapsed into sleep in the evening ahead
of the massacres planned for the following day,
ran through his mind the 1942 events at the ravine
at Babi Yar simply to acquire some idea of what
a mass murder pit should look like. It is much easier
to carve out with a F16 than a shovel;
that
Reinhard from Regavim, an avid reader who in his
time out from the unpleasantries of necessary infant
incineration, turned the pages of Daniel Goldhagen's
Hitler's Willing Executioners for a more
rounded understanding of what rationale may be employed
to abdicate individual responsibility for one's
genocidal urges and transfer it to the amoral and
amorphous collective that is the state.
Who
knows what ultimately will be written about such
bomberkommandos? The motivations prompting mass
murder on the part of those claiming to be from
God's chosen people may remain as mysterious as
God himself. What we do know is that their actions
come accompanied by that old refrain, 'nothing new
under the sun.' They have visited the world before.
The names of the places previously scarred by them
have a special significance because human society
underscored such names in bold print with the words
'never again'; places like Jósefów,
Lomazy, Sebezh, Bikernieki Forest, Ivangorod, Babi
Yar.
The
banal evil that pulverises children from the skies
high above Lebanon goes uncurbed. Rather than evil
being prevented from manifesting itself in the Middle
East Israel receives military hardware from the
president of the country which prides itself on
confronting the so called axis of evil. The George
Bush pretext is that Israel is under some serious
external threat. Yet the death rate ratio is 14:1
in Israel's favour. US endorsement of Israel comes
on similar terms as it did to Chile at the time
of the 1973 Allende overthrow. While Pinochet was
busy squelching US life in Santiago, President Richard
Nixon was pumping in support. American citizens
stranded in Lebanon and at risk from Israeli air
strikes has not diminished US ardour for the murder
campaign nor its endorsement of Israeli ethnic cleansing
of Southern Lebanon.
Consequently,
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary
of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, in
seeking to explain the current situation in Lebanon,
poses the very pertinent question, 'why would the
puppet be any less evil than the puppet master?'
That
we are on occasion hoaxed into thinking otherwise
is explained by the ability of the puppet master
to conceal his vile hypocrisy behind democratic
and humanitarian rhetoric. Hanna Arendt, had she
been around, might have chosen to provide us with
the following insight in response to the Roberts
question.
