CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

This is Evil, Not the Banality of Evil!

Photograph Source: Dan Scavino – Public Domain

“There is one thing.  My own morality.  My own mind.  It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”   – Donald Trump, January 2026, In response to a question regarding checks that remained on how he exercised power on the world stage.

“There is one thing.  My own morality.  My own mind.  It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”  

– Donald Trump, January 2026, In response to a question regarding checks that remained on how he exercised power on the world stage.

Sixty-three years ago, Hannah Arendt coined the concept of the “banality of evil,” describing Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann as disturbingly normal rather than a monstrous fanatic.  Arendt didn’t mean that Eichmann was not evil, but that he was a small and ordinary man with an “inability to think for himself.”  She found a “depthless ordinariness” in Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem, which accounted for the provocative term of “banality.”

Today, we are watching Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu conduct a war that is evil.  There is no banality to be observed.  They are not ordinary people.  They are evil.

Netanyahu’s rhetoric over the years........

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