The Banality of Evil

"Banality” is not a word that we often hear. The dictionary I consulted defines it as “the condition or quality of being banal, or devoid of freshness or originality.” “Triteness,” “staleness,” and “unimaginativeness” are synonyms for banality.

Hannah Arendt, a German-born Jewish woman, created quite a stir in 1963 when her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” was published.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

The 2012 movie “Hannah Arendt” depicts well the life and work of this fascinating intellectual, who died in New York City on December 4, 1975.

Adolf Eichmann, a high ranking Nazi leader and the primary instigator of the Jewish Holocaust, was captured in Argentina and brought to trial in May 1960. He faced 15 criminal charges, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people.

Found guilty on many of the charges against him, Eichmann was sentenced to death and was hanged on May 31, 1962.

In her study of that trial, Arendt concluded that Eichmann was the embodiment of the “banality of evil,” asserting that he appeared to be ordinary and sane, yet displayed neither guilt nor hatred.

In a similar vein, Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, said this about Eichmann: “We know that one doesn’t need to be fanatical, sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions; that it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one’s duty.”

In wartime, most killing, even by those we consider enemies, is done by people who are just doing their duty rather than by people who are especially vile or evil. That is true even for the pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor on the “day of infamy” that we remember on Sunday.

There are some Americans who even to this day are prejudiced toward Japanese people because of Pearl Harbor.

But if even the deeds of a man like Eichmann can be described as an expression of the banality of evil, as I think they probably can, certainly that can be said about most of the “rank and file” members of any army or air force.

Those who plan war and order others to fight may well be evil, but individual soldiers as a rule are no more evil than anyone else.

The same can be said about other tragic situations. For example, on Nov. 24 the grand jury in St. Louis County decided not to indict policeman Darren Wilson for killing Ferguson teen-ager Michael Brown.

As you know, that touched off senseless violence and protests not only in Ferguson but across the country and even in London.

A young man was killed, and his family and many other people think it was a needless and unjust act of murder.

We certainly don’t know whether the use of lethal force against an unarmed teen-ager was justified, but surely there was some other means for Wilson to get out of harm’s way.

But also quite certainly, Wilson was/is not an evil man. Rather, this is perhaps another example of the banality of evil.

In an interview on Nov. 25, Wilson said, “I just did my job. I did what I was paid to do and that was my job. I followed my training, the training took over, the training led me to what happened.”

So, as enacted by most individuals, including soldiers and policemen, perhaps most evil is banal. The problem is with evil systems that train, and order, people to kill, in war or at other times.

"Forgiving Everything"

A year ago at this time (the first week in Dec.) my posting was about “God’s Samurai.” That was what Capt. Mitsuo Fuchida, the lead pilot of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was called after he later became a Christian. This column is more about that same story, but it centers on Jacob DeShazer, a member of the U.S. Army Air Corps on that fateful day of Dec. 7, 1941.

DeShazer, born in Oregon in 1912, enlisted in the Air Corps in 1940 and rose to the rank of sergeant in 1941. He was stationed in Washington at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, but shortly thereafter he, along with other members of the 17th Bomb Group, volunteered to join a special unit that was formed to attack Japan. They soon acquired the name “Doolittle’s Raiders” after their famous commander, Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle.

In April 1942, DeShazer and his fellow crew members were forced to parachute into enemy territory when their B-25 ran out of fuel. He was captured the very next day by Japanese soldiers and consequently spent some 40 months in P.O.W. camps (both in Japan and China)—and 34 of those months in solitary confinement. During his long, painful ordeal as a prisoner, in May 1944 he was able to get a copy of the Bible. Reading it brought about a great change in his way of thinking.

At the end of the war in August 1945, DeShazer was freed and able to go back to the U.S. He soon decided that he wanted to go into missionary work and began to prepare for that ministry at Seattle Pacific College. During this time he wrote a short account of his experiences, calling it “I Was a Prisoner of Japan.” That story was printed as a Christian tract, and more than a million copies were distributed to the Japanese people.

It was a copy of DeShazer’s tract that Timothy Pietsch gave to Capt. Fuchida that eventually led to his becoming a Christian. (As I wrote last year, Pietsch was the son-in-law of C. K. Dozier, founder of Seinan Gakuin, the school complex where I taught in Japan. In May of this year, I heard this story directly from Pietsch’s son Kelsey, who was visiting Seinan Gakuin at the same time I was.)

“From Pearl Harbor to Calvary” (2011) is the title of the English translation of Fuchida’s autobiography. Florence DeShazer wrote the Introduction and refers to her husband as Jake. She concludes: “The autobiography that follows tells the full story of my husband’s dear friend, Mr. Mitsuo Fuchida, a man who, like Jake, was completely transformed by the Lord and preached and lived a message of forgiveness.”

In his book Fuchida tells that after he finished reading DeShazer’s story, he thought, “If a Bible could change his life, it might change mine.” So the next day he bought a Bible and began reading it. And when he read about the crucifixion of Jesus, he realized there was “the source of this miracle of love that can forgive enemies!”

“Forgiving Everything” is the subtitle of the story of DeShazer as told by Ace Collins in his book “Stories Behind Men of Faith” (2009). He is also the subject of a children’s book, written by Janet and Geoff Benge and published with the subtitle “Forgive Your Enemies” (2009).

DeShazer lived to be 95 years old, passing away in March 2008. His long life of loving and forgiving is worth considering well as once again recall the tragic events of 12/7/41.

“God’s Samurai”

December 7, 1941, was a big day for Mitsuo Fuchida, a day he had long prepared for and looked forward to. For, you see, Fuchida was the lead pilot of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And his life story is quite amazing.

I have heard Fuchida’s story from time to time through the years, maybe first in 1954 when his article “I Led the Attack on Pearl Harbor” appeared in the Reader’s Digest, which I often read when I was in high school.

But I have just finished reading for the first time a book that impressively tells of his preparation for 12/7/41, his battles over the next 3½ years, and then the remarkable story of his becoming a Christian and an evangelist after the war. The book is titled God’s Samurai: Lead Pilot at Pearl Harbor (1990).

Gordon W. Prange, professor of history at the University of Maryland, is the primary author of God’s Samurai, but it was not published until ten years after his death in 1980. Prange’s manuscript, completed by two colleagues, was based mostly on his extensive interviews of Fuchida (b. 1902) in the mid-1960s. Prange and Fuchida first met in the late 1940s and had regular contact with each other until Fuchida’s death in 1976.

Lieutenant Fuchida was thrilled when he was chosen to lead the attack on Pearl Harbor. “No moral qualms assailed him,” according to Prange (p.26). So it was that on the morning of December 7, 1941, Fuchida led the attack, triumphantly shouting over the radio to the other fighter planes following him as they neared Pearl Harbor, “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (Tora, the Japanese word for tiger, was the code word indicating that complete surprise had been achieved.)*

Prange remarks that after the attack Fuchida “was filled with pride of his men and of himself, and from his standpoint he had every right to be. The airmen had succeeded beyond all expectation” (p. 37).

The next 150 pages narrate events in the Pacific War, detailing the initial Japanese successes, the decisive battle of Midway that changed the course of the war, and then the dropping of the atomic bombs and the subsequent end of the war. It was rather miraculous that Fuchida came through all that alive.

A little over three years later, in October 1948, Fuchida was handed a Christian tract near the famous Hachiko (a dog) statue in Tokyo. Nearly a year later he decided to become a Christian, and then contacted the man whose name and address was on the tract. That man was Timothy Pietsch, a missionary.

I was quite interested to see Prange’s reference to Pietsch, for his wife Helen was the sister of Edwin Dozier. And Dr. Dozier was the chancellor of Seinan Gakuin in Japan when I became a faculty member of the university there in 1968. (Although I never met Pietsch, I have met his wife, Helen, and their son. And their grandson, Billy Pietsch, is one of my Facebook friends.)

After becoming a Christian, Fuchida soon began giving his testimony and later sailed with Timothy Pietsch to the United States where he spent several months, speaking in numerous churches and even being interviewed by Billy Graham. That interview was telecast on Graham’s “Hour of Decision” on December 7, 1952.

The story of Mitsuo Fuchida is a fascinating one, and Christians can easily understand why he has been called God’s Samurai. 
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* “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (1970) is the title of a movie on the Pearl Harbor attack, and Prange was a technical consultant during its production. This weekend June and I plan to watch the video of it that we checked out of the local library.

Days of Infamy

President Roosevelt called December 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy.” He was referring, of course, to how Pearl Harbor “was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

And he was right. Now, seventy years later, Americans remember that date well and December 7 does live in infamy.

As it turned out, though, the war with the U.S. initiated on 12/7/41 was a day of infamy for Japan also. In my thirty-eight years in Japan, I never heard Japanese people speak of the attack on Pearl Harbor except in embarrassment, with shame, and, often, with resentment toward the Japanese militarists who (mis)led their nation into war.

The loss of around 3,000 American lives at Pearl Harbor on that fateful Sunday morning was tragic, indeed. And, of course, a vastly greater number of U.S. servicemen (and perhaps some servicewomen) were killed in the ensuing war. The number of Japanese, though, who died as the result of the war begun on that day of infamy was considerably larger.

In one of the biggest understatements in history, the Japanese Emperor said in his surrender speech on August 15, 1945, “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage.” That surrender came after what can legitimately be called other days of infamy earlier that year.

“All’s fair in love and war” is an expression sometimes heard. But international ethicists believe that there are legitimate rules of war, and the wanton killing of civilians is against those rules. In September 1938 the League of Nations unanimously passed a resolution for “protection of civilian populations against bombing from the air in case of war.” That resolution was clear and direct: “The intentional bombing of civilian populations is illegal.”

Thus, March 10, 1945, could also be considered a day of infamy. On that day the U.S. Air Force firebombed Tokyo. Some 100,000 people were killed, most of them civilians! Then in August the terrible war ended soon after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And again, most of the causalities were civilians. Two more days of infamy!

In this country September 11, 2001, can be considered a day of infamy worse than the attack on Pearl Harbor. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were on American soil, and almost all the causalities, about the same number as those killed on 12/7/41, were civilians.

And then there is good reason to consider March 19, 2003, a day of infamy also. That was the day the preemptive U.S. war on Iraq began. In the eight and a half years since then, more U.S. soldiers have been killed than the number of people killed by the attack on Pearl Harbor.

But even more, 3/19/03 is a day of infamy because the war initiated on that day has taken the lives of at least 100,000 civilian Iraqis, and perhaps considerably more than that.

Military and terrorists attacks, the wanton bombing of civilians, and the launching of preemptive wars are all days of infamy. And they are the very opposite of the Christmas vision of “peace on earth,” God’s dream for the world, about which I plan to write later this month.

P.S. I had not heard of others calling 3/19/03 a day of infamy, but after I posted the above TF Phil Rhoads sent me this picture: