#A human being died that night free pdf trial

As Pumla says in her book, she came to understand through this process that the only way for a society to move forward is through tolerance and forgiveness: РІР‚СљРІР‚В¦the work of the TRC suggests that cycles of political violence can indeed be broken, and there are alternatives to revenge and retributive justice.РІР‚Сњ Pumla acknowledges that South Africa still has a long way to go to be healed completely, and that many individuals still do not find it possible to forgive those who hurt them or their loved ones. Their ultimate goal was an open and honest discussion of what really happened, and why that would engender a sense of empathy and even forgiveness between former combatants. This group, which Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela was asked to join in its early stages, was tasked with investigating the histories of both sides of the conflict. The resulting legislation, known officially as the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 34 of 1995, established a remarkable body known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He began the process by spending a year soliciting the input of constituent groups in South Africa, international organizations, human rights advocates and both perpetrators and victims of apartheid-era violence. Mandela, however, chose a different and radical course. Some three decades later, after the long nightmare of apartheid had finally ended in South Africa and the recently-freed Nelson Mandela was elected president, that nation was faced with a similar question: what was the best way to move forward, to leave the damage of the past behind without ever forgetting it? Surely, there must have been great temptation to execute vengeance upon the many white South Africans who had willingly and thoughtfully participated in the barbarism against the black population. For Arendt, EichmannРІР‚в„ўs execution was the only way for a civilized world to move on. In other words, the kind of mass murder perpetrated by Eichmann and his kind had to be punished in the most extreme way to express complete and total rejection of his crimes and of the ideals that gave rise to those crimes. In short, Eichmann must hang because his crimes are irreconcilable with a civilized world. Rather, the world in which Eichmann's crimes could and did happen must simply be said no to. This does not mean it should be forgotten, not at all. He must hang, in other words, because what he did was so horrific that it must simply be rejected, eradicated, and said no to. He must hang, instead, because no human being must be expected to share the earth with him. As Roger Berkowitz writes in the Journal for Political Thinking: Eichmann must hang, Arendt argues, neither because he broke the law, nor merely as a setting right of the scales of justice through revenge.

This was not the time for forgiveness and empathy for her, revenge was a necessary next step. When Eichmann was found guilty and ultimately executed, Arendt, with some reservation, agreed with the verdict. To the contrary, Arendt noted that he looked and behaved like anyone else he believed that he was someone who was given a job to do and set about accomplishing it like anyone would with any job. What was so striking to Arendt about Eichmann was not that he was a monster, an РІР‚СљotherРІР‚Сњ who was a distorted and twisted version of humanity.

#A human being died that night free pdf trial

In the piece that she wrote about the trial for The New Yorker, Arendt coined the famous phrase РІР‚Сљthe banality of evilРІР‚Сњ to describe Eichmann. Eichmann had managed to avoid capture for nearly fifteen years before he was finally tracked down in Argentina by the Israeli secret service. Eichmann had been a crucial part of HitlerРІР‚в„ўs Final Solution, from its inception to his overseeing the deportation of nearly all of HungaryРІР‚в„ўs Jews to death camps. In 1962, the brilliant German philosopher and writer Hannah Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.