The Banality of Evil v. The Splendor of Goodness

One  might  wonder  if  Hannah  Arendt’s  disposition appears  to  us today so gloomy and bitter because she had witnessed and understood the banality  of  evil during  the  Eichmann’s  Jerusalem  trials. Yet, it  is  more certain         that         it         was from her         not         having         witnessed (although, theoretically, she might have approached an understanding of it) the Splendor of Goodness any time in her life, even in the days of Evil’s apparent defeat and the Allies’ false victory over it. Victory and triumph are satisfactory and make one avenged, but only being in the presence of Goodness, and basking in its splendor, make one magnanimous and content.

It has been a social and scientific/academic dogma that Nazism is pure evil until the unbelieving and faithless West magically transformed it into a cause célèbre and the most visible symbol of its racketeering compact, a.k.a. democracy and  freedom  –  exactly  because  the  time is  fulfilled  for them to admit that the West and Nazism are of the same totalitarian essence, moved  by  the  same  lethal  spirit  hovering  over  the  primordial  moral void, from which all contemporary ills have come into being.

No    short    circuits happened in    the    minds    of    the    Western masses because  of the contradictions,  pains,  and  humiliations  through which  they  have  been intensely living  the  last  few  years.  The  masterful rewiring of the most precious human organ (by which we are truly made in the image of the Creator – Who created by the spoken thought) has been so thorough, and the vacuum was filled by a primitive mechanism of pure instinctive stick and carrot behaviorist reductio ad absurdum primordial slops of base urges, fed through the trough operated by the private-public corporation called the State/Media Complex and CEO-ed by Evil itself.

The    greatest   victory   of    the    Devil   is    not    his convincing the human race that he didn’t exist but its joyous acceptance of his disabling of its will to think and judge! For not only was it necessary first to reject the existence of the Sly One, but even more was it imperative to judge judgment as inadmissible in the court of the moral law, so that the ultimate goal could be achieved – that of the de-divining the being created in the image of the Divine, by eliminating the prerequisite for humanness: Thinking.

Hannah is said to have believed – “Evil comes from a failure to think […] It defies thought […].” That is why Hannah was so criticized even by her own in her own time – she saw, recognized, and exposed her own people’s social distancing, financial dispossessions, religious fanaticism, and political discrimination in the very state which mechanisms were used to judge and punish the same deeds done to them in another state. How broken her noble heart would be today, in our current inhumane events, where she would see that the embryo of fiendish wickedness has grown into this globalized brain- monster whose main purpose, despite its nourishment, is the failure to think.

One is tempted to declare hybris as the West’s driving force but its disbelief (in God, or even in gods) disqualifies it, just as its disbelief in its own mortality does… Even corrupt faith – but faith nonetheless – is required for elevating one’s own humanity above divinity. It is anti-hybris that is the main tragic flaw of the anti-hero of today’s historical farce.

The  West’s  chicken-brain-level attention  span,  combined  with  its epistemological nihility of insipid and fruitless monads forced by greed into an unwanted community is capable only of a collective spoiled child’s searing tantrum on permanent replay and set on full public view in its virtual reality universe.

That artificial environment has clashed directly with the real world of human dignity, existential needs, and the genius of conscientious love and sacrifice.

That is why the West – that is, the ruling caste in the states of the so- called Collective West – has unmade the Russians (as it was done to the Serbs in the 1990s) a people among peoples, a nation among nations, a state among states, while it has made itself a people above peoples, a nation beyond nations, a state superior to states. While wallowing in its undeserved exceptionalism in the imagined plurality of equals, the West has expelled Russia into a singularity of a true chosen-ness and irrevocable opposition to her persecutor – the only competent and willing enemy of its dichotomy, anchored in the West’s age-old racial and religious blindness, in which the world’s reality is divided into Humans and Russians (and Serbs as Honorary Russians), while the enslaved non-Western subhuman masses are enjoying the exceptional opportunity to be taught a harsh lesson in global hierarchy (although they also must pretend it is not taking place in the carefully constructed imaginary plurality of equals).

So far, the West’s triumph was blasted around the globe not only through the silencing bombing of any aspiring rebel but even louder through the deafening stillness of the exploited and humiliated victims, who have renounced and denounced their own selves, emptying themselves of their own identities and pouring into the vast void the globalization garbage of barbaric multiculturalism. The West loves the parade of such zombies in the form of  “national leaders” gathering at  the  UN  in  New  York  City  each September, or at the Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. each February.

Until Putin… Until Russia… Until February 2022!

(OK, there was the developmental task of the Serbian example in the 1990s, but it was a teachable moment for Russia, and maybe China)

Unlike the Warsaw ghetto abandoned and helpless youth’s heroic and suicidal refusal to go to the slaughter like sheep, The Russian Refusal was the decision by the equally heroic but life-affirming, aware and prepared, wise, and visionary elders who, maybe heuristically, sacrificed themselves for the generations to come.

And not only Russian but global!

That is the Splendor of Goodness – in both its meanings: as virtue and kindness, but also, from its Slavic root, as fit, suitable, valid.

We are witnessing it today, but it was lacking in Hannah’s time for her to transcend the gloom and doom she was witnessing.

And that is the reason why the Banality has dropped its mask and has reared its ugly face for the world to see – not only is it not good but it is invalid, unfit, and unsuitable for humanity.

Evil, in its banality, cannot abide Russia’s wealth and splendor, be it state or private, material or spiritual, from the human realm or the animal: Russian gold has been robbed, her assets confiscated, and her gas is requested for free; the more vicious and public the seizure at the mention of Russia the better, but there is no disgust while seizing Russian yachts and mansions;  Western  artists  and  intellectuals cannot  abide  their  Russian peers, even the dead ones, but they support the looting of her art and crafts; the only way to be better than Russians in sports is to ban them; even Russian cats are beyond competition and are canceled at exhibits; although Russia doesn’t use the Latin script, certain Latin letters are forbidden for they enrage the vapid Western imagination by their Russianness; the West has indignantly pulled its garbage out of Russia for even its junk food and diabetes-inducing sodas are not to be bestowed upon her hated people, and the Westerners are delighted to shower with cold water, freeze in their civilized homes, and desist from production in their factories so that the barbarian heretics may be put in their place.

It is not only the West’s politicians who have started snapping at Russia but most “spiritual” leaders too. There, among the West’s “pers@ns” of cloth are multitudes of today’s Haj Amin el Husseinis1, blessing the obligatory and public Hate Russia religious rites, praying at crossroads with disfigured faces2, to their god of wrath, coming out with pride, which only self-loathing can churn inside those soulless clones.

Nothing is so maddening to them as the Manifest Destiny voiding their masters’ lies and granting the “R2P”3 straight into the steady hands of Russia whose feet are not swerving from their Dokkōdō4 but are beating a trail to be followed by the herd as it transcends into a congress of peers.

Even if this rebellion turns out to be just “a burning and a shining light” in which we “were willing for a season to rejoice”5 our lives will have had a purpose: to witness it and to keep a memory of it, be it only as the “bright sadness” that every Orthodox Christian knows each Resurrection Day, which interrupts the endless days of “toska”, “sevdah”, “saudade”, and “duhkha”, that the Third World has suffered through the ages of Evil’s banal dominion.

Višeslav Simić, Ph.D.

Professor of Geopolitics & Award-winning Author

Buenos Aires, Argentina

April 7, 2022

 

Endnotes:

1 The Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem

2 Mat. 6:5 & 16

3 Right to Protect

4 The Path of Aloneness

5 John 5:35

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