Opinion: The Banality of Evil
 

The Ether Zone Editorial

"I am reminded of this every time I go through security at an airport. There are all manner of Transportation Security Agents with their hats and uniforms emblazoned with the TSA initials. They direct you to various lines and are always courteous. You place your carry-ons onto the conveyor along with your shoes, wallet, coins, pens, etc., then you go through a metal detector while they go through a different detector. Sometimes you also have to go through a device that puffs air at you from head to toe, I assume to discover hidden items of terror. I find the whole process dangerous.

Most of the agents themselves are probably decent people. They answered the ads for their positions after they were advertised extensively in the aftermath of 9/11. They don’t carry submachine guns and I haven’t seen any weapons, although, undoubtedly, some must carry them or they are in nearby availability. To paraphrase Lenin, when to comes time to destroy the last vestige of freedom for our citizens, there will be one there to do it.

Do these people represent evil at its subtlest, most widespread and therefore most banal? They are agents of an immoral, illegal and unconstitutional venture and they haven’t a clue, as opposed to the Gestapo and KGB, most of whom were aware of the crimes they were committing against humanity. At the same time, there can be no doubt that some among the TSA would not hesitate to shoot any resistor who tried to evade the security checks, even with no evil intent, but only to protest the dehumanizing cattle scene the security screening represents."

Ah, so true.

Up yours, Comrade Hawley!

While I don't like the TSA and am one of the more prolific on this board, any comparison to Nazis is outrageous and unfair. The policies may be outrageous and common sense often goes out the window at the airport, but bringing out the Nazi label just invalidates the several good arguments that are made here every day about why the TSA doesn't serve its intended purpose. There is a term, which currently slips my mind, that essentially says that the person who brings up the Nazis in any argument automatically becomes the loser of that argument, given the atrocities committed by the Third Reich.

Sorry Spiff, I normally agree with you, but I think you missed the mark here.

Mike

Actually, this appears to be a contrast, rather than a labeling of, the TSA vs. the Gestapo/KGB.

Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies: LINK

Nothing personal but:

Godwin can go pound sand.

There's no mathematical evidence for his silly rule.

Ah yes, he should be enshrined in the Internet Hall of Fame with Gordon Moore "of Moore's Law fame".

As soon as I see Nazi, I immediately deduct 100 IQ points from the poster and do everything I can to ignore their blather. It's a disgusting low intelligence habit that demeans the victims of that evil psycho.

1. Deducting 100 IQ points in such circumstances could not be done on any rational basis unless operating on the basis that you're deducting 100 IQ points from someone of extremely high intelligence. Otherwise taking away 100 IQ points is shown to be flawed given the evidence of intelligence manifested in prior posts.

2. Not all such references to totalitarians and authoritarians are a disgusting low-intelligence habit that demeans the victim of genocidal maniacs.

Godwin's Law makes sense when people draw the analogy too easily, but it doesn't serve any purpose when the analogy starts to become apt.

With all respect, if you automatically deduct IQ points, etc, then you need to drop autopilot and think. There's nothing in the realm of ideas today that demands reaction without thought.

For what it's worth, the article Spiff linked to does not mention the word nazi, it merely uses Eichmann as an example of how banal evil can be.

Deleted

Wasn't directing the comment at Spiff, just made mention of my support for the idea behind "Godwin's Law."

I'm sick of the labeling from both sides of the political spectrum. The reaction from the minimum of Americans that actually follow that path of non-reasoning borders on Pavlovian conditioning. <<<<How's that for a label? :D

Providing the "consensual search" has not begun. When does it begin ? When the TSO says it does.

Along the same lines as above:

Today, we are not subjected to a critical mass of people with evil intentions and particularly we do not find ourselves in an environment of near-complete apathy and powerlessness vis-a-vis the dominant. We're just dealing with incompetence that doesn't challenge -- which may even accept -- the moving of the lines that need not be moved. Far from the huge excesses of the past, but making our own mistakes, some small and some large, in the present.

Agreed, except for the baloney part. :)

We don't look like a police state, at least not like the ones portrayed in movies. Yet, the Executive branch now has the authority to classify anyone, including U.S. citizens, as "enemy combatants" and to indefinitely imprison anyone so designated. No habius corpus, no right to challenge it, no need to prove anything in court, no need to even bother with the formality of warrant. Even assuming we can trust the current President and everyone else in the administration to not abuse this power, we are now dependent on the honesty and integrity of individuals for our freedom. The very thing this country was founded to protect against. Remember those quaint notions from civics class? About being the rule of law, not of men? About due process and checks and balances?

I happen to agree with you on the relative dangers of law enforcement versus the TSA, but this expansion of police powers comes from the same fount of public fear that allowed the creation of TSA. Expanded police powers found their greatest ally in the so-called "war on drugs" dating back to the late 70s/early 80s. A dimunition of the Fourth Amendment, greater police firepower, draconian sentencing laws and the like were enabled by political "leaders" who found that exploiting public fear and then pretending "to do someting" were pretty good ways to get reelected. We haven't won the war on drugs any more than we're winning the war on terror, but the approach is the same: fan the flames of fear and then pass draconian legislation that purports to deal with it.

What we have going on with airport security is an overreaction to a real threat that comes at the expense of notions of privacy, freedom from arbitrary search and common sense. Being forced to partially disrobe before boarding an aircraft is an affront to the personal dignity of everyone forced to endure it and the notion of personal privacy as that concept was once understood in this nation has been utterly abrogated in favor of warrantless searches without any veneer of probable cause. We have reached the point where, in order to board a commercial aircraft, one must essentially prove that one is not a criminal. This is a marked departure from American tradition and jurisprudence and represents, I think, a good indication of how far we as a people have allowed our traditional notions of freedom to be eroded in the name of security. I would note that the discovery of contraband at a TSA checkpoint gets reported to law enforcement, so in that regard TSA is an expansion of the police powers you yourself criticize.

While expanded police powers may represent the greater danger than the TSA checkpoint, they both stem from the same cause: a public willing to trade their liberty for a misguided sense of "security" at the behest of leaders who understand neither security nor liberty. In this regard, I am reminded of the maxim that the triumph of evil requires nothing more than for good men to do nothing. I think that we've seen a great deal of that over the last 5 years.

As for whether we're headed down the road toward being a police state, I woud submit that we're already almost there. The passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and its abandonment of the core concept of habeus corpus marked a true turning point in our law. Add to that an Executive Branch that maintains it has a right to spy on US citizens without a warrant and hold them indefinitely without judicial review and one has a nation that looks very different from the one we lived in at the dawn of the 21st Century.