Eichmann and the future

If Hitler could have been brought to justice— or Stalin, or Pol Pot, or Idi Amin— what should the civilized world have done with him?

That was the implied question I raised here last month concerning the 1961 Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, a genuine architect of a genuinely new and radical evil: the Holocaust. After affording Eichmann all the trappings of a civilized modern court, the judges sentenced Eichmann to the same old same old: death by hanging. That verdict struck me, as I said, as a "failure of imagination." (Click here.)

My column has since provoked three thoughtful responses— all of which, I would argue, also suffer from a failure of imagination: specifically, the failure to perceive that the future will inevitably differ from the past and the present.

Was stoning barbaric?

Gresham Riley eloquently defends both the Jerusalem court and its critical observer Hannah Arendt, but on the larger issue I raised he seems at a loss. "There can be no appropriate societal response to radical evil," Gresham laments. (Click here.) Robert Zaller agrees: "There is no way to rectify what evil does— it rends the world permanently, that is its very nature— and so, there was no satisfying way to deal with Eichmann." (Click here.)

Of course they are right— for now. But surely humankind's responses to wrongdoing have evolved over the centuries and will continue to do so in ways we can't imagine.

The ancient concept of execution by stoning, for example— which we now consider barbaric— was once perceived as enlightened: It required every member of the community to share responsibility for a death sentence, and also afforded each member a measure of vindication.

Support for lynching

Death by hanging— the method of execution prescribed for Eichmann— was favored at one time for its high visibility, which was thought to deter potential criminals, especially if the hanging took place at a crossroads. We know how that worked out, but it seemed like an eminently pragmatic idea at the time.

Lynch mobs, to cite another example, were once widely regarded as healthy manifestations of direct democracy. "When the laws failed of execution," wrote the Western historian Emerson Hough in 1906, "then it was the people's right to resume the power that they had delegated, or which had been usurped from them."

As recently as a century ago, lynch mobs routinely commemorated their deeds by posing for photographs with the victim dangling behind them (see the photo above). To them this execution was nothing to be ashamed of, but (as another Western writer put it) "the protest of society on behalf of social order and the rights of man."

Trial's by-product

For that matter, a thousand years ago feudalism, slavery, cruelty, torture, the subjugation of women and the divine right of kings were accepted as necessary evils without which no society could function effectively. Today, most of us (with a few exceptions— Dick Cheney comes to mind) perceive them as impediments to functioning societies.

Robert Zaller argues that Israel had no legal right to try Eichmann and that, in any case, "The notion of a crime against humanity is a matter for philosophical debate," one that's "incapable of judicial resolution." True enough. But Robert neglects to suggest what should have been done about Eichmann or who should have done it.

Nor does Robert seem to perceive that the Eichmann trial promoted precisely the sort of "philosophical debate" he advocates. And it's still generating debate, as our own BSR dialogue attests, 52 years later. As the psychologist Havelock Ellis put it, the by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.

Arendt aroused

Victor Schermer is on to something, I think, when he argues that Eichmann's trial, for all its shortcomings, was "one of the most necessary and civilized acts of justice in human history." Instead of assassinating Eichmann, Victor points out, "The Israelis chose to give him a fair trial and, indeed, treat him with dignity and civility throughout— a triumph of human reason." (Click here.)

That trial represented an attempt to deal with a new phenomenon— radical evil— in a new way: through public exposure rather than simple retaliation or narrow legal processes. It provoked observers like Hannah Arendt to ponder questions about radical evil that they might not otherwise have considered. (I, for one, had never heard of Eichmann before the Israelis brought him to trial.)

The Israelis didn't get it completely right in 1961, but that trial was a remarkable first step, and surely it was churlish of me to point out flaws in the judges' final sentence— sort of like criticizing the Wright brothers because their first plane lacked jet engines, rest rooms and in-flight movies.

Freud's new science

Unfortunately, Victor offered no new ideas about what to do with Hitler or Eichmann. "In such cases," he writes, "our obligation is to carry out justice— but, for the sake of civilized life, to do it not as vigilantes but in accordance with established laws and principles."

Here's my point: It's time to stop thinking about the past and present and start thinking about the future. It will be here soon enough, and it won't simply be an extrapolation of the past. It never has been.

The bad news is: Radical evil of the Third Reich variety is still in its infancy, and right now we have no way of stopping it. The good news is: The study of the human psyche is in its infancy as well— Freud's first theory of psychoanalysis dates only from 1896— and it offers hope of addressing the problem. (Some future Dostoevsky may call his novel Crime and Therapy.) So does the rise of voluntary non-governmental organizations that utilize the Internet to address a broad range of issues.

But the solution will probably require revising, if not discarding, our traditional notions about justice, punishment, mercy, forgiveness, retaliation and vengeance. The Eichmann trial was a small step in that direction. South Africa's post-apartheid "truth and reconciliation" hearings, as an alternative to punishment, represented another. But we still have a long way to go.♦


To read responses, click here.
To read a follow-up by Victor L. Schermer, click here.