Arendt watched a Nazi bureaucrat and found no monster, just a clerk

Covering Adolf Eichmann's 1961 trial, Arendt argued the horror wasn't demonic hatred but thoughtless, careerist conformity — a man who stopped thinking and simply did his job well. She called this the 'banality of evil': atrocity doesn't require monsters, just ordinary people who never ask what they're doing.

— Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil — 1963
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