Migrant Children & The Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt listened to the war crimes trial testimony of Adolf Eichmann and realized that he relied on euphemisms, clichés, and Nazi "officialese" to justify his complicity in the incarceration and the Final Solution mass murder of Jews. She made the controversial observation that Eichmann had no insane hatred for Jews and in his view he was "doing his job", following orders and obeying the law. The book she eventually wrote, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was the source of a phrase which is used often to describe how ordinary people can engage in extraordinarily destructive acts without seeming to have a conscience.

I thought of this phrase as a Department of Justice lawyer, Sarah Fabian, calmly and persistently argued that the horrendous conditions under which migrant children in detention in the southern United States does not violate the law about safety and sanitary conditions. She conceded that small children are held in facilities that amount to cages, sleep on the floor under foil blankets and that they aren't provided with basics such as toothbrushes and soap. But she also argues before a panel of justices that there is nothing in law to require these provisions. The justices are baffled, one going so far as to ask whether she would personally consider these provisions as necessities for safety and sanitary conditions. She calmly evades the question, returning to the twisted logic that there is nothing in writing requiring them. The judge responds that this may be because the assumption was that they are a "given."

 
Sarah Fabian DOJ lawyer

In a later post on Facebook Fabian said she shares “many people’s anger and fear” about the nation’s future. Saying she is “not an official of any administration,” Fabian points out that she’s a career federal employee who’s served in her role since 2011, long before President Donald Trump took office. While that may be true it sounds too much like "I was just following orders."

It's interesting that employees of Wayfair have organized a protest because the company will be providing beds for these detention centres. The workers don't want to be complicit in the inhumane treatment of children.

I've heard supposed Christians in the United States maintaining that the children shouldn't be in the country in the first place, so what can their parents or "bleeding hearts" expect? It is a chilling response from those who are probably moved to tears by the suffering of Christ two thousand years ago but can harden their hearts to the suffering of children on their doorsteps today. Children do not make these choices, and many of the parents have actually made formal requests for asylum rather than entering the US illegally. The failure of compassion and the de-humanizing of these children stuns me.

No, Fabian is not a Nazi -- she may well be an exemplary person in her daily life and she doesn't deserve to be harassed and threatened, as has been the case. Nor are those people of faith who are so inexplicably cold in their response to fundamental human need. Still, what is happening violates any code of moral decency. Arendt argued that Eichmann failed to apply the "Golden Rule", a basic principle of many religions, and so are those who treat those who treat children so cruelly.

Thoughts?