Question:React to one of the following quotes. In your analysis, tie the quote to themes that have emerged in our discussion of Arendt, explaining how the quote you select illustrates one of her principal ideas. If you prefer, you may select a quote other than the ones I’ve posted below.
First choice: “If the judges had cleared Eichmann completely on these counts connected with the hair-raising stories told over and over by witnesses at the trial, they would not have arrived at a different judgment of guilt, and Eichmann would not have escaped capital punishment. The result would have been the same. But they would have destroyed utterly, and without compromise, the case as the prosecution presented it” (219).
Second choice: “For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that ‘it could happen’ in most places but it did not happen everywhere” (233).
Third choice: in place of the above quotes, analyze one of your own choosing from these two chapters.
Answer: (option 2) Arendt closes the 14th chapter of Eichmann in Jerusalem with this quote. I think this quote ties largely into the discussion in class on Monday, that resistance and rebellion did work. Arendt’s main idea that we extracted from chapters 10 through 12 was that when people in countries resisted the proposal of the Final Solution, the outcome was not as severe. Arendt says in the above quote that “under the conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not” (233). I think this is the most important part of the quote because it encompasses the idea that resistance does yield some successful result. We saw that in some countries, namely Bulgaria and Denmark, noncompliance was key to saving the majority of their people. While fear was what the Nazi’s wanted to instill in their victims, some people realized that the Nazi’s lacked manpower over their victims. While tons of Germans/Jews participated in rounding up and deporting Jews, still more Jews were being victimized. What I am saying is that the one thing the Jews had to their advantage was power in numbers. Luckily, some Jews realized this and came together to resist the notion of the Final Solution. While it seems that the extermination of 6 million people was a huge undertaking, many more could have been killed in surrounding countries if no rebellion was met.
While Arendt focused in earlier chapters that she could not understand why more people did not rebel, she later shows that some rebellion was present. She attributed a lot of the success of the perpetrators in the Holocaust to the compliance of the Jews and even the help of the Jewish Council. While she pointed out her anger towards those people that did not put up a fight, she devotes three chapters to explaining that resistance did work in some countries. I believe her main point, as reflected in the quote above, is that when an idea is proposed to a large group of people, some will comply without question, but not everyone will give in so easily.
