I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think Ive come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. Its the one characteristic that connects all the [Nazi] defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.Captain Gustav Mark Gilbert, a United States psychologist assigned to attend and closely observe the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials at the end of World War II, identified this common personality trait among all those who testified. Related Its time to remember why we started the LGBTQ+ movement in the first place Assimilation was never the goal. Though I have studied the Holocaust and other genocides, I always had the gnawing and seemingly unanswerable question pulling at me, How could these episodes have taken place throughout the ages? Never Miss a Beat Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights. Subscribe to our Newsletter today As we understand in psychology, unless there is a developmental delay, infants demonstrate the rudimentary beginnings of empathy whenever they recognize that another is upset and show signs of being upset themselves. Very early in their lives, infants develop the capacity to crawl in the diapers of others even though their own diapers do not need changing.Though empathy is a human condition, the process of socialization often teaches us to inhibit our empathetic nature with messages like, Dont cry, Youre too sensitive, Mind your own business, or Its not your concern. We learn the stereotypes of the individuals and groups our society has minoritized and othered, and we learn who to scapegoat for our problems. Through it all, that precious life-affirming flame of empathy can wither and flicker. For some, it dies entirely. As the blaze recedes, the bullies, the demagogues, the tyrants take over, filling the void where our humanity once prevailed. And then, we have lost something very precious. The Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg Trials represent the termination of empathy on the individual micro level, resulting in the otherwise potentially preventable mass murders of Jews and other groups targeted by the Hitler regime. When the demise of empathy comes from powerful leaders, the consequences on the macro level become exponentially deeper, more toxic, and unimaginably catastrophic.Several brilliant texts have investigated the unifying themes that connect the rise of dictatorial, autocratic regimes throughout history, including Ruth Ben-GhiatsStrongmen: Mussolini to the Present, and Timothy SnydersOn Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth CenturyandOn Freedom.The acclaimed pioneer of discussions on totalitarianism, political responsibility, and the nature of evil is Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a German Jewish historian and philosopher. Arendts work focuses on the nature of political life. She explores the concepts of power, action, andtotalitarianism, defining the latter as a novel form of government characterized by both terror and false logic. She emphasized its reliance on ideology, isolation of individuals, and the concept of superfluous people, where individuals are reduced to their bodies and deemed expendable.Arendt differentiated between power and violence by asserting that power arises from collective action and shared decision-making, while violence is a tool of control. Totalitarian regimes terminate individual freedoms while manipulating public opinion.She found that totalitarian regimes use the element of terror not merely as a means of eliminating the opposition, but also as a primary means of controlling the entire population. They do not rule through a sort of haphazard power, but rather, through a cruel logic justifying their actions. These regimes depend on powerful ideologies to isolate individuals from one another. Severing their ties with other people then creates feelings of loneliness and vulnerability. Totalitarianism feeds off the collapse of social connections, which makes individuals more receptive to exploitation and control.Arendts notion of superfluous people informs us how totalitarian regimes diminish and cheapen human life to mere bodies, which one can reject and dispose of without any moral significance.She refers to totalitarianism as rather different from other forms of oppression by underscoring its distinctive means of control and domination. The Nazi movement, for example, was based on grievance, retribution, fear, scapegoating, and stereotyping, noton a clear ideology. Arendt saw the crisis as something that humanity could easily repeat. She believed her entire generation needed to answer the questions:What happened?Why did it happen?How did it happen?Her answers to these questions resonate with those of us today who live in so-called democratic republics whose institutions are under attack due to the unbalancing of power by hostile executive branches.We live in an era of uncertainty, where the current United States government no longer conforms to the rules in its cherished Constitution, in which the three branches legislative, executive, and judicial were created as equal partners in the balance of power.Arendt wrote extensively on the process by which formerly democratic republics were destroyed from within, rather than by external invading forces. Arendts Journey Born in 1909 in Hanover, Germany, into a secular Jewish family, Arendt grew up in a highly educated home in which her parents endorsed Enlightenment principles of equality. Her great-grandparents fled the pogroms that targeted Jews throughout central and eastern Europe, and she studied the roots and causes of antisemitism.Her family moved to Konigsberg when she was young. They resettled over safety concerns in Berlin during WWI. In 1924, following the war, Arendt entered the University of Marburg to study philosophy and ancient Greek.Arendt barely escaped the terror of Nazi Germany and moved as a refugee to the United States, where she eventually became a naturalized citizen. There, she lived through the uncertainty and turmoil of the McCarthy and Watergate eras, but she was also encouraged by the youth movements resistance to the countrys incursion into Vietnam and Cambodia. Even before entering university, she was well grounded in the ideas of the major philosophers, having read many of their works in her parents well-stocked home library. She was particularly drawn to the ideas of Kant, Hegel, and Plato, who discussed how humans are thinking beings, and the fact that how one thinks has consequences for others.At Marburg, she studied with philosopher and professor Martin Heidegger, one of the early thinkers in the emerging branch of existentialism. Heideggers work expressed the idea that there is nothing to ground us except what we make of our own being and that one can exist fearlessly on ones own terms.Arendt pursued the idea of a unified passionate thinking over the traditional philosophical distinction between reason and passion. Shewrote, We are so accustomed to reason over passion, spirit over life, that the idea of a passionate thinking in which thinking and aliveness become one, takes us somewhat aback. In 1924, Arendt and Heidegger became lovers. Arendt was 18, and Heidegger a married man with young sons was 35. Though Arendt eventually married two different men a Jewish man named Gunter Stern and later, a non-Jewish Marxist,Heinrich Blcher and though Heidegger seemingly embraced Nazism later in life, Arendt and Heideggers stimulating intellectual and complex relationship continued for decades and remained an essential feature of their lives and legacies.Arendt lived in Berlin in 1929 and became a journalist while working on her university dissertation on the ideas of St. Augustines theme of love, specifically neighborly love in which one holds a responsibility to others in the world. St. Augustine believed that when new people populate the globe, they can act to change the world: Man was born, a beginning was made.But Arendt witnessed what she referred to as a culture of death following WWI in which the world was in turmoil with extreme homelessness and financial insecurity, where peoples roots had been torn apart and where migrants moved between borders, especially Jews, Slavs, Pols, and Roma. The world economic crash of 1929 increased Germanys hyperinflation through which the Deutschemark lost most of its value. Within an environment where the people were extremely uncertain and fearful about the future in their nation, one that was already saturated with antisemitism, Hitler and his Nazi party saw the vision of the migrant Jews as their stepping stones to come to the very center of politics.He blamed the Jews for the nations problems, inventing the conspiracy of the menacing and controlling Jews who are invading the country .In the general elections that followed, Hitlers propaganda advanced the false claim that the Nazis constituted a majority, even though they never did numerically. They presented the Illusion of popularity to give the appearance of strength. Arendt identified that Hitler used his lies to convince the German people that he existed as their cherished leader who would lead them to better times. He made it so the distinction between fact and fiction no longer existed.Hitler was skilled at understanding that the people were lonely and longed for a sense of meaning and belonging. His movement recruited followers from the extensive pool of indifferent and disconnected people whom the other political parties had considered apathetic or too ignorant to become involved.Ultimately, Nazi members comprised those who had not before engaged deeply in the political process. Leaders offered them the possibility of being part of something big, which gave them a sense of meaning and purpose. Other conservative politicians may have tried to dominate him, but Hitler was wise enough to play them against each other. After realizing they could not control him and recognizing the need for his support, they assisted in his promotion to Chancellor of Germany in 1933.Though Arendt was not particularly involved in electoral politics, February 27, 1933, became a turning point with the destructive burning of the Reichstag building and the illegal arrests and detentions the following night. Though evidentiary reports point to the Nazis themselves being responsible for the blaze, they blamed the communists and declared martial law.Arendts first husband, Gunter Stern, was forced to flee. She somehow felt responsible. Some people were shipped to concentration camps. She felt that at times like this, one must spring into action and not become a bystander. She converted her apartment into a safe space for communists who were preparing to leave Germany as the Nazis were readying themselves to take over all the levers of government. Hitler promoted himself as a calm, steadfast leader [a stable genius?].Arendt worked for an old friend, Kurt Blumenfeld, who served as secretary of theZionist Federation of Germanyfrom 1909 to 1911 and later served as president of the organization from 1924 to 1933, when he fled the rising tide of antisemitism in Nazi Germany for Palestine.Blumenfeld wanted to document antisemitic statements and actions, and he wanted to publicize his work around the world to bring it to the attention of world leaders. He asked Arendt to spearhead this project because members of the Zionist Federation of Germany could not, as they would be exposed and arrested. She said yes. A librarian reported Arendt to the Gestapo for reading too many newspapers. She was arrested while walking out of the library and imprisoned at Alexanderplatz, Gestapo headquarters.She remained in prison as the Gestapo searched her apartment, but they could only find her Greek notebooks. She lied about her involvement with the Zionist organization, and they released her. They confiscated her passport so she could not leave the country. She fled to Czechoslovakia and eventually reached Paris in 1933.There was a massive anti-immigrant backlash in France. There,, she worked for an organization that helped send youth to Palestine Jungen Aliah. She spent 3 months in Israel, where she advocated for a binational federation where Jews and Arabs could live and work together and where they all could make Palestine their homeland. She met Heinrich Blcher, who was not Jewish, and separated from Stern, her husband. Blcher had no formal education. He was a cabaret performer and a Marxist street fighter during the Russian Revolution.In March 1938, Germany invaded Austria. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and started WWII. Arendt was sent to a transit camp in southern France, where she eventually escaped, while most others were shipped to Auschwitz.Heinrich and Arendt reunited. They went to Marseilles to get a permit to leave France, and they fled on a boat to New York City. She tracked the atrocities occurring in Germany and its conquered territories and began her book,Origins of Totalitarianism, in 1943. It was published in 1951. Some of the recurring themes she discovered in the totalitarianism of the Nazis included: 1.Propaganda provides the foundation for building totalitarian power.2.The Nazis translated the propaganda lies of the movement into a functioning reality.3.Totalitarianism replaces all first-rate talent with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is the best guarantee of their loyalty.4.The Nazis acted as if the world were dominated by the Jews and needed a counter-conspiracy to defend itself. Arendt was convinced that while it may not recur identically as in Germany, totalitarianism is very likely to return. Therefore, the people must continually remain vigilant, prepared, and informed. She was reminded of her work on St. Augustine in the phrase: Man is born, a beginning is made, and that people have the ability to make the world anew.At the end of the war in Europe, Hannah worked for a Jewish reconstruction organization. She traveled back to Germany to reclaim Jewish property. There, she visited Heidegger, and they talked for many hours in constructive and healing dialogue.Back in the United States during the McCarthy terror campaigns, she taught courses in political science at the University of California Berkeley, and officials in the U.S. government threatened todenaturalizeher. McCarthys totalitarian elements emerged even in the absence of an organized movement and without a clear ideological foundation. Arendt rightly claimed that McCarthyism held more fear for Jewish refugees than native-born Americans could imagine.For Arendt and most of her Jewish refugee friends, the original trust they had had in the protection of their adoptive country for their right of free thought disappeared during those years and never fully returned.She traveled to Israel in April 1961 as a reporter to attend the Adolf Eichmann trial beginning in April 1961. Eichmann was responsible for many logisitcs of the concentration camps, one of which she was once held in. He was charged with crimes against humanity. His defense was that he obeyed legal orders, and he could not think from the standpoint of someone else, from the standpoint of his victims. In other words, he lacked empathy.This Arendt termed the banality of evil, whereby, in Eichmanns case, herding Jews and others into the gas chambers and ovens became as regular and normalized as herding cattle for slaughter. For ordinary people, the routine killing of masses of people became normalized.In 1963, she published herEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, andwrote: The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together. From her work on St. Augustine, she was encouraged by the youth whom she understood as maintaining the possibility of being the agents of social change. She was clear when she wrote that: I have no desire to watch another republic going to the dogs.The Watergate conspiracy under Richard Nixon had revealed one of the deepest constitutional crises the United States had ever known. Arendt believed that the entire fabric of government was actually at stake.She wrote that the nations founders never believed tyranny could arise from the executive office.However, we know today that the greatest danger of tyranny is of course from the executive. If fascism is going to come to America, it is from the executive branch.In her final public address, her Home to Roost speech, presented at the Bicentennial Forum in Boston, Massachusetts in 1975, she said, One of the discoveries of totalitarian governments with the method of digging giant holes in which to bury unwelcomed facts and events, for the past was condemned to be forgotten as though it never had been. But I rather believe with Faulkner who wrote that the past is never dead. It is not even past. And this for the simple reason that the world in which we live in at any moment is the world of the past.Hannah Arendt died in New York City on December 4, 1975.Find more information from thePBSdocumentary: Hannah Arendt: Facing TyrannySubscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.