Comparing MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail with Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil in Nazi Germany

Today we will learn and reflect on a comparison of Hannah Arendt’s writings on the
The Banality of Evil, an account of the trial of the Nazi fugitive, Adolph Eichmann, to
Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Many Americans are either unaware or do not want to make the connection
between the Jim Crow system of racial segregation and the Nazi ideology of the
master race. In fact, the Jim Crow statutes enforcing segregation were used as
precedents by the Nazi lawyers drafting the Nuremberg Jewish Race Laws soon
after the Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. We reflected on the
academic study of this connection in a prior video.

Similarities between these two works should be expected, both Jews in Nazi
Germany and blacks in the Deep South were seen as an inferior race. Southerners
may be offended by the comparison of the Nazis killing millions of Jews to the Deep
South, but there was plenty of lynching and murdering going on, you can
extrapolate the documented five thousand plus cases of lynching to the tens of
thousands of murders of blacks that were often unreported and rarely prosecuted
and punished.
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for this video. Feel free to
follow along in the PowerPoint script we uploaded to SlideShare. Please, we
welcome interesting questions in the comments. Let us learn and reflect together!

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Comparing Hannah Arendt’s On the Banality of Evil
To Martin Luther King’s Letter fro Birmingham Jail
https://youtu.be/PqFAUEXbi8k

Adolph Eichmann was the Nazi bureaucrat who managed the
bureaucracy that planned and executed the murder millions of
Jews in the Final Solution, the death camps in Eastern Europe.
After the war, he successfully fled in the infamous Vatican
ratlines to Argentina, where he lived with his family as Ricardo
Klement, an ordinary laborer for many years. Eventually the
Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, learned where he lived, and
he was kidnapped and flown to Israel to be tried for his crimes.
The Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt attended his trial,
putting her thoughts to paper in her treatise, Banality and
Conscience: The Eichmann Trial and Its Consequences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo3vzQ9NGL0
This is the first of several
interesting videos on the
ratlines that helped
former Nazis flee to
Argentina and other
countries in Latin
America after the end of
World War II.
The disturbing part of
this story is priests and
cardinals in the Vatican
were part of the ratlines.

Adolph Eichmann before his trial & portrait in 1942

Hannah Arendt knew
firsthand the struggles
that Jews faced in Europe
under Naziism. She
writes, “the trouble with
Eichmann was precisely
that so many Germans
were like him, neither
perverted nor sadistic,
but terribly and
terrifyingly normal.”

Both Adolph Eichmann and Hannah Arendt were born in
the same year, 1906. Hannah Arendt was arrested and
interrogated by the Gestapo for her research into anti-
Semitism in the year Hitler came to power in 1933. After
her release, she fled to Czechoslovakia, then Switzerland,
before settling in France. She was again detained when the
Nazis conquered France, but then she fled through
Portugal to the United States, where she learned English
and found work as a writer for a German-language Jewish
newspaper.

We have told the sordid tale of how Hitler quickly started
persecuting the Jews, as well as Confessing Christians, soon after
he assumed dictatorial powers as Chancellor in 1933. This
persecution started with denying Jews jobs in the civil service and
the professions, then escalated to outright theft and
imprisonment in thousands of work camps and death camps like
Auschwitz. The Nazi regime first experimented with gas chambers
for so-called mercy killings of the disabled and patients in mental
hospitals, and when public opinion curtailed this program, this
killing technology was implemented on a far grander scale in the
Eastern European death camps.

Propaganda for Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program:
"This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the
community 60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Fellow
German, that is your money, too."
Collection bus for killing patients

COMPLACENCY was the norm among both the common Germans
and the Jews. The Nazis controlled the press and fed upon the
grievances of Germans who felt cheated out of the victory their
government propaganda said was imminent at the end of World
War I when Germany surrendered. We explore how this
complacency developed in our video on Nazi Germany, which
includes quotes from many interviews of ordinary German
Christians, and we explore the dark history of anti-Semitism in
Europe and the Dreyfus Affair in our video on Vichy France.

Hannah Arendt recalls that
in 1935, the Nuremberg
Laws had deprived the Jews
of their citizenship and civil
rights. “Sexual intercourse
between Jews and Germans,
and the contraction of mixed
marriages, were forbidden.
No German woman under
the age of forty-five could be
employed in a Jewish
household.”
March or April 1938: Jews are forced to scrub
the pavement in Vienna, Austria.

Hannah Arendt writes, “When Eichmann was
asked how he had reconciled his personal
feelings about Jews with the outspoken and
violent anti-Semitism of the Nazi party he had
joined, he replied with the proverb, ‘Nothing
is as hot when you eat it as when it’s being
cooked,’ a proverb that was on many Jews lips
as well.”
Hannah Arendt writes, “Many Jews lived in a
fool’s paradise.” “It took the organized
pogroms of 1938, the Kristallnacht or Night of
Broken Glass, when 7,500 Jewish shop
windows were broken, all synagogues went up
in flames, and 20,000 Jewish men were taken
off to concentration camps, to expel them
from it,” their foolish complacency.”

Early in the regime the Nazis tried to encourage the Jews
to emigrate, and Eichmann, always very courteous to the
Jewish leaders, sought to streamline the process so Jews
could quickly obtain the needed paperwork without having
to trudge from office to office to office. So, he relocated
the government bureaus in one centralized building, so the
Jews could quickly go from one line to the next.

Potsdamer
Straße 26, Berlin,
the day after
Kristallnacht,
November 1938

SA paramilitaries outside a Berlin store posting signs with:
"Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!"
But when Eichmann invited the Jewish
functionaries from Berlin to observe
the process, they were appalled. “This
is like an automatic factory, like a flour
mill connected with some bakery. At
one end you put in a Jew who still has
some property,” “and he goes through
the building from counter to counter,
from office to office, and comes out at
the other end without any money,
without any rights, with only a passport
which says, ‘You must leave the
country within a fortnight. Otherwise,
you will go to a concentration camp.’”
The main problem is that few countries
are eager to accept immigrants who do
not have any money at all.

BLINDLY FOLLOWING UNJUST RULES
Eichmann was an enthusiastic bureaucrat, or as
enthusiastic as a bureaucrat could be, always
eager to follow the rules, as if following a rule
devoid of morality possessed a twisted type of
virtue. Hannah Arendt observed that Eichmann
had an odd notion of idealism, he believed that
“an idealist was a man who lived for an idea,”
“and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea
everything and, especially, everybody. When he
said in the police examination that he would have
sent his own father to his death if that had been
required, he did not mean merely to stress the
extent to which he was under orders, and ready
to obey them; he also meant to show what an
‘idealist’ he had always been.”
Defendants in the Beer Hall Putsch trial,
1 April 1924. From left to right: Heinz Pernet,
Friedrich Weber, Wilhelm Frick, Hermann
Kriebel, Erich Ludendorff, Hitler, Wilhelm
Brückner, Ernst Röhm, and Robert Wagner.

“Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to
feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not
deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had
once been in perfect harmony. And the German society
of eighty million people had been shielded against
reality and facts by exactly the same means, the same
self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now
become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality. These lies
changed from year to year, and they frequently
contradicted each other.” “This practice of self-
deception had become so common, almost a moral
prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years
after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the
specific lies have been forgotten, it is sometimes
difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an
integral part of the German national character.”

“Eichmann’s astounding
willingness, in Argentina as well
as in Jerusalem, to admit his
crimes was due less to his own
criminal capacity for self-
deception than to the aura of
systematic mendacity that had
constituted the general, and
generally accepted, atmosphere
of the Third Reich.” And later
Hanna Arendt observes,
“Despite all the efforts of the
prosecution, everybody could
see that the man Eichmann was
not a ‘monster,’ but it was
difficult indeed not to suspect
that he was a clown.”
Hitler announcing the declaration of war against the
United States to the Reichstag on 11 December 1941

UNCARING CRUELTY OF EICHMANN
Hannah Arendt writes, “Bragging was
the vice that was Eichmann’s undoing.
He boasted to his men during the last
days of the war” ‘I will jump into my
grave laughing, because the fact that I
have the death of five million Jews,
enemies of the Reich, on my
conscience gives me extraordinary
satisfaction.’” Bragging this was,
overstating the barbarities he
committed. Arendt continues,
“Bragging is a common vice, but a
more decisive flaw in Eichmann’s
character was his almost total inability
ever to look at anything from the other
fellow’s point of view.”
Defendant Adolf Eichmann (inside glass booth) is sentenced
to death by the court at the conclusion of the Eichmann Trial.

On one occasion
Eichmann did violate
orders in the early days of
the war, sending a group
of Germans to a Polish
ghetto rather than to the
death camps, so they
could emigrate, so he
said, but they, too,
eventually were sent to
the camps to die. Hannah
Arendt comments, “His
conscience rebelled not
at the idea of murder but
at the idea of German
Jews being murdered.” Aftermath of Warsaw Jewish Ghetto Uprising, after Jews learned
they would be shipped to the concentration death camps.

But there were many more stories of an
uncaring bureaucrat, for whom suffering was
stifled by paperwork and procedures. Once,
when an SS man told him that the Jews could
not be fed in the winter, Eichmann wondered
“whether it would not be the most humane
solution to kill those Jews who were incapable
of work through some quicker means. This, at
any rate, would be more agreeable than to let
them die of starvation.” “It was firmly
anchored in Eichmann’s mind that the
unforgivable sin was not to kill people but to
cause unnecessary pain.” Gassing was morally
superior to shooting, in his twisted mind.
The Todesstiege ("Stairs of
Death") at the Mauthausen camp
quarry. Inmates were forced to
carry heavy rocks up the stairs.
Few prisoners survived.

EICHMANN WAS NOT UNIQUE
Adolph Eichmann was not an isolated phenomenon; he was one of a vast
national mob of ideological Nazis. Hannah Arendt spoke both of the
moral blindness of the German leadership and the German people, how
the July anti-Hitler conspiracy sought to assassinate Hitler not for his
crimes against the Jews and against humanity, but to rescue the nation
from total defeat at the hands of the Allies. These conspirators were
clueless that the monstrousness of the Nazi brutalities led to the demand
for unconditional surrender, they thought that if Hitler were gone, they
could simply negotiate with the Allies as if they were equals.

Martin
Bormann,
Hermann
Göring, and
other Nazi
officials view
the briefing
room where an
assassination
attempt on
Hitler nearly
succeeded,
July 1944

Hannah Arendt regrets, “the situation was just
as simple as it was hopeless: the overwhelming
majority of the German people believed in Hitler,
even after the attack on Russia and the feared
war on two fronts, even after the United States
entered the war, indeed even after Stalingrad,
the defection of Italy, and the landings in France.
Against this solid majority, there stood an
indeterminate number of isolated individuals
who were completely aware of the national and
moral catastrophe; they might occasionally know
and trust one another; there were friendships
among them and an exchange of opinions, but
no plan or intention of revolt.”

Why did Eichmann follow Hitler and his evil
designs? Hannah Arendt tells us, “What
Eichmann fervently believed in up to the end
was success, the chief standard of ‘good society’
as he knew it.” “Hitler, according to Eichmann,
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 to Fuhrer
for eighty million Germans. His success alone
proved to me that I should subordinate myself
to this man.” “He did not need to ‘close his ears
to the voice of conscience,’ not because he had
none, but because his conscience spoke with a
‘respectable voice,’ with the voice of
respectable society around him.”

Young survivors at the camp, liberated
by the Red Army in January 1945

COMPARISON WITH MARTIN LUTHER KING
Martin Luther King was initially hesitant about becoming the voice of the
civil rights movement, from the start he suspected this would doom him
to death by assassination by white supremacists, which is what
eventually happened. He was arrested while leading a nonviolent protest
in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, and was thrown in jail with brutal
conditions. The Attorney General, Robert F Kennedy, was in constant
contact with Alabama authorities to guarantee his life and safety as much
as possible. Eight white Alabama clergymen published “A Call for Unity”
in the newspaper condemning King and his tactics. The Letter From the
Birmingham Jail responded to these criticisms.

Martin Luther King, Jr. with his wife, Coretta Scott
King, and daughter, Yolanda Denise King, in 1956
Above: Rosa Parks with Martin
Luther King
Below: Birmingham Jail mugshot

Martin Luther King
with LBJ, Robert
Kennedy, and
other black
leaders, 1963

COMPLACENCY IN BIRMINGHAM
Martin Luther King said in his letter,
“Birmingham is probably the most
thoroughly segregated city in the
United States. Its ugly record of
brutality is widely known. Negroes
have experienced grossly unjust
treatment in the courts. There have
been more unsolved bombings of
Negro homes and churches in
Birmingham than in any other city in
the nation. These are the hard, brutal
facts of the case. On the basis of these
conditions, Negro leaders sought to
negotiate with the city fathers. But
the latter consistently refused to
engage in good faith negotiation.”
The 16th Street Baptist Church in 2005.
The steps beneath which the bomb was
planted can be seen in the foreground.

Martin Luther King compares himself
with Socrates, the gadfly who was
gifted to Athens. King queries, “You
may well ask: ‘Why direct action?
Why sit ins, marches and so forth?
Isn't negotiation a better path?’ You
are quite right in calling for
negotiation. Indeed, this is the very
purpose of direct action. Nonviolent
direct action seeks to create such a
crisis and foster such a tension that a
community which has constantly
refused to negotiate is forced to
confront the issue.”

But Martin Luther King was able to fight complacency, his
was a different time, a different place than Nazi Germany.
Like in the Civil War times, the federal government and
Congress wanted to pass civil rights legislation and provide
the justice and equality to blacks in the South, but they
were opposed by many segregationist governors, mayors,
and police chiefs. Complacency was rife in the South; many
whites did not welcome the civil rights protests and
agitation.

Governor George Wallace's
1963 Inaugural Address:
"Segregation now,
segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever"
Attempting to block integration at the University of Alabama,
Governor George Wallace blocks the door, confronting Deputy
U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.

Governor George Wallace's
1963 Inaugural Address:
"Segregation now,
segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever"
African American Vivian Malone registering for classes at the
University of Alabama. The crowd that includes
photographers, National Guard members, and Deputy U.S.
Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.

MARTIN LUTHER KING TELLS
OF THE SUFFERING OF BLACKS
Martin Luther King
persuasively exclaimed: “We
have waited for more than 340
years for our constitutional
and God given rights. The
nations of Asia and Africa are
moving with jet-like speed
toward gaining political
independence, but we still
creep at horse and buggy pace
toward gaining a cup of coffee
at a lunch counter. Perhaps it
is easy for those who have
never felt the stinging darts of
segregation to say, ‘WAIT.’”
Little Rock, 1959. Rally at state capitol, protesting
the integration of Central High School.

One embarrassment prodding greater Civil Rights in America was the mistreatment
suffered by black UN diplomats from other countries.

Martin Luther King then tells us of the vicious
treatment of blacks in the Deep South, which
was similar to the cruelties and persecutions
the Jews faced in the Holocaust: “But when
you have seen vicious mobs lynch your
mothers and fathers at will and drown your
sisters and brothers at whim; when you have
seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even
kill your black brothers and sisters; when you
see the vast majority of your twenty million
Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage
of poverty in the midst of an affluent society,
then you will understand why we find it
difficult to wait.”

King continues, “But when you suddenly
find your tongue twisted and your speech
stammering as you seek to explain to your
six year old daughter why she can't go to
the public amusement park, and see tears
welling up in her eyes when she is told that
Fun-town is closed to colored children, and
see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning
to form in her little mental sky, and see her
beginning to distort her personality by
developing an unconscious bitterness
toward white people; when you have to
concoct an answer for a five year old son
who is asking: ‘Daddy, why do white
people treat colored people so mean?,’
then you will understand why we find it
difficult to wait.”
Protestors in Birmingham in May 1963,
being hit by a high-pressure water hose

King continues, “When you take a cross county
drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night
in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile
because no motel will accept you; when you are
humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs
reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name
becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes
"boy" (however old you are) and your last name
becomes ‘John,’ and your wife and mother are
never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’; when you are
harried by day and haunted by night by the fact
that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe
stance, never quite knowing what to expect next,
and are plagued with inner fears and outer
resentments; when you are forever fighting a
degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness,’ then you will
understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

“There
comes a
time when
the cup of
endurance
runs over,
and men
are no
longer
willing to
be plunged
into the
abyss of
despair.”
Selma Protest, by Ted Ellis

WHEN CAN YOU BREAK UNJUST LAWS?
Many whites pleaded with Martin Luther
King, “How can you advocate breaking
some laws and obeying others?” Martin
Luther King answered, “The answer lies in
the fact that there are two types of laws:
just and unjust. I would be the first to
advocate obeying just laws. One has not
only a legal but a moral responsibility to
obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral
responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I
would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an
unjust law is no law at all.’”
St. Augustine by Rubens, circa 1638

King continues, “Now, what is the difference
between the two? How does one determine
whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a
man-made code that squares with the moral law
or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is
out of harmony with the moral law.
To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An
unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in
eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts
human personality is just. Any law that degrades
human personality is unjust. All segregation
statutes are unjust because segregation distorts
the soul and damages the personality. It gives the
segregator a false sense of superiority and the
segregated a false sense of inferiority.”
St Thomas Aquinas, Carlo Crivelli, 1476

Martin Luther King himself makes the
connection between the blacks and the
Jews: “We should never forget that
everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was
‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian
freedom fighters did in Hungary was
‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a
Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure
that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I
would have aided and comforted my Jewish
brothers. If today I lived in a Communist
country where certain principles dear to
the Christian faith are suppressed, I would
openly advocate disobeying that country's
antireligious laws.”
Reichstag Fire

COMPLACENCY OF BLACKS
We told the tale of how, in Nazi Germany, Hitler tried to
control the German churches. Under Hitler, only about
twenty percent of the Protestant Churches joined the
Confessing Church movement that took a stand for
independence from state control, while another twenty
percent adopted Nazi racial ideology, even abandoning the
Old Testament and declaring that Jesus was not a Jew,
while the rest of the churches refused to choose between
good and evil.

Nazi Corruption: German Christian Rally, 1933

Likewise, Martin Luther King confronted the
complacency of many clergy and many blacks. “You
speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At
first, I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen
would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an
extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand
in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro
community. One is a force of complacency, made up in
part of Negroes who, because of long years of
oppression, are so drained of self-respect and a sense
of ‘somebodiness’ that they have adjusted to
segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes
who, because of a degree of academic and economic
security and because in some ways they profit by
segregation, have become insensitive to the problems
of the masses.”

“The other force is one of
bitterness and hatred, and
it comes perilously close to
advocating violence. It is
expressed in the various
black nationalist groups
that are springing up
across the nation.” “I have
tried to stand between
these two forces, saying
that we need emulate
neither the ‘do nothingism’
of the complacent nor the
hatred and despair of the
black nationalist. For there
is the more excellent way
of love and nonviolent
protest.”

Just as in Nazi Germany, many churches in America,
particularly in the Deep South, did not want to rock
the boat and oppose segregation. Many ministers
preach the gospel of individual salvation, that
everyone is responsible for their own salvation, they
are not responsible for the well-being of their
distant neighbors, a problematic outlook we have
reflected on before.

Martin Luther King lamented,
“Perhaps I have once again
been too optimistic. Is
organized religion too
inextricably bound to the status
quo to save our nation and the
world? Perhaps I must turn my
faith to the inner spiritual
church, the church within the
church, as the true ecclesia and
the hope of the world. But
again, I am thankful to God that
some noble souls from the
ranks of organized religion have
broken loose from the
paralyzing chains of conformity
and joined us as active partners
in the struggle for freedom.”
Bloody Sunday: Alabama officers await demonstrators
at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma March, 1965

“They have left their secure
congregations and walked the
streets of Albany, Georgia, with
us. They have gone down the
highways of the South on tortuous
rides for freedom. Yes, they have
gone to jail with us. Some have
been dismissed from their
churches, have lost the support of
their bishops and fellow ministers.
But they have acted in the faith
that right defeated is stronger
than evil triumphant. Their
witness has been the spiritual salt
that has preserved the true
meaning of the gospel in these
troubled times.” White Minister James Reeb with children of Dr Ralph Abernathy with
Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King in 1965 Selma March.

MAINTAINING LAW AND ORDER
The police in the Deep South were as concerned with
enforcing unjust laws as was the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.
Martin Luther King chides his opponents, “You warmly
commended the Birmingham police force for keeping
‘order’ and ‘preventing violence.’ I doubt that you would
have so warmly commended the police force if you had
seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent
Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the
policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane
treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to
watch them push and curse old Negro women and young
Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro
men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they
did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we
wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your
praise of the Birmingham police department.”

Instead, Martin Luther King lamented, “I
wish you had commended the Negro sit
inners and demonstrators of Birmingham
for their sublime courage, their
willingness to suffer and their amazing
discipline in the midst of great
provocation. One day the South will
recognize its real heroes.” “They will be
old, oppressed, battered Negro women,
symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old
woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who
rose up with a sense of dignity and with
her people decided not to ride
segregated buses, and who responded
with ungrammatical profundity to one
who inquired about her weariness: ‘My
feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.’”
Bill Hudson's image of Parker High School student Walter
Gadsden being attacked by dogs, New York Times 5/4/1963.

“They will be the young high school and
college students, the young ministers of the
gospel and a host of their elders,
courageously and nonviolently sitting in at
lunch counters and willingly going to jail for
conscience' sake. One day the South will
know that when these disinherited children
of God sat down at lunch counters, they
were, in reality, standing up for what is best
in the American dream and for the most
sacred values in our Judeo-Christian
heritage, thereby bringing our nation back
to those great wells of democracy which
were dug deep by the founding fathers in
their formulation of the Constitution and
the Declaration of Independence.”
Student sit-in at Woolworth in Durham, NC, 1960
Woolworths, first lunch
counter protest

CONCLUSION
One troubling aspect of the Holocaust for Hannah Arendt was how
some Jewish leaders were complicit in administering the program, since
Eichmann sought their cooperation so the camps could be run more
smoothly. Some made a devil’s bargain when Eichmann offered to let
some thousands of Jews to emigrate in return for their cooperation, a
devil’s bargain in return for the orderly execution of millions of Jews.
And as in nearly all instances of religious persecution in history, the
Holocaust were very much about stealing as much as possible from the
Jews, including the hair and gold fillings yanked from their corpses. This
sad tale is told in detail in many pages by Hannah Arendt.

"Selection" of
Hungarian
Jews on the
ramp at
Auschwitz II-
Birkenau in
German-
occupied
Poland, around
May 1944.
Jews were sent
either to work
or to the gas
chamber.

We see the same dynamic occurring among the blacks in
America, how a minority of blacks seem to lean towards and
sometimes further the fascist and white supremacist side of
conservatism. We phrase it in this way since we realize that the
Booker T Washington approach towards accommodation is often
beneficial as blacks try to prove themselves by their hard work,
but this approach is often condemned by more radical black
activists as being a betrayal, so this conversation can quickly go
too far when you start calling people names. We may scratch our
heads when Thomas Sowell says some of what he says, but he
does add a sane voice to the conversation.

On the other hand, when this video was cut there was
controversy over whether the vote by Supreme Court
Justice Clarence Thomas on Trump’s papers was prejudiced
by his right-wingnut wife attending the January 6th rally
and, though so far there is no evidence she chose to
trespass on the Capitol building, her text messages were
cheering on the insurrection. And we have black right-
wingnut commentators on Fox News drawing huge
paychecks for their propaganda.

Hannah Arendt comments on how thoroughly the
average German bought into the Nazi racist
ideology. She remembers that what the court
trying Eichmann demanded was that they be
“human beings capable of telling right from wrong
even when all they have to guide them is their
own judgement, which is completely at odds with
what they must regard as the unanimous opinion
of all those around them.” She continues, “Since
the whole of respectable society had succumbed
to Hitler, the moral maxims which determine
behavior and the religious commandments, such
as Thou Shalt Not Kill, which guide conscience had
virtually vanished.”

SOURCES:
Hannah Arendt was quite the independent thinker, and very
controversial, in her day. She stridently opposed both fascist and
communist totalitarianism, but she also took positions that made
liberals feel uncomfortable on occasion. For instance, she wrote an
essay on the desegregation of the schools in Little Rock, Arkansas,
where she said the state does not have the right to tell people where
they can send their kids to school, this is an essay we plan to study,
possibly in a future video.
You can find Martin Luther King’s complete Letter from a Birmingham
Jail on several websites, this is the site we used for this video.

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail

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Comparing MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail with Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil in Nazi Germany

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Comparing MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail with Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil in Nazi Germany