The Banality of Evil

Was Hannah Arendt's description of the Nazi death machine during WW2.  It consisted mainly of normal people leading otherwise normal lives, but swept into the management of concentration camps and their attendant horrors.    As long as most of those bureaucrats did the job they were tasked with, the system allowed the killing of 6,000,000 Jews and other "undesirables".  Most of us think we would never participate in such a crime, but faced with the retribution if you disobeyed your orders, how many family men and women would expose their own families to hardship and possible death to save a faceless, nameless human being.   For every Schindler, there are hundreds of Eichmanns who obeyed orders and wittingly participated in racial extermination.  Nearer to our own time is the "ethnic cleansing" in Serbia.  Again, it was abetted by many otherwise exemplary citizens, although there were some monsters in both cases.   The internment of American citizens of Japanese origin during WW2 is a shame the US must bear.  Despite some individual heroism, most who participated in the roundup and imprisonment of fellow citizens did so without question.  The possibility of a Trump Administration fills me with foreboding.   The Donald is banal and evil.  What could possibly go wrong!