Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we spend most of our time stumbling around in the dark.
Suddenly a light gets turned on, and there’s a fair share of blame to go around.
Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), Boston Globe editor
I’m not sure if you saw the news yesterday, but they released the text of the clemency plea for Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi lieutenant colonel. After beginning his career as a travelling salesman, he joined the Nazis in his mid-20s and was given the responsibility of arranging the emigration of Jews to other countries. As things intensified, the plan changed from emigration to death, and so Eichmann’s job became arranging the transport of people to the extermination camps.
It was said that he was responsible for the deaths of millions.
He fled Germany after the war and was captured in 1960, and put on trial for crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. In the clemency plea, Eichmann argued that there was a need to draw a line between leaders responsible and those who were mere instruments. He said that he wasn’t a leader, so he wasn’t guilty.
The plea was rejected and he was put to death.
In reports about the trial, many commented that Eichmann was completely normal. He wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t the devil incarnate. He was just a guy who did his job and didn’t challenge his instructions.
Journalist Hannah Arendt called this “the banality of evil.” The evil that was Eichmann was not spectacular. It was ordinary. She described him as “an average `normal’ person, neither feeble-minded, nor indoctrinated, nor cynical, [who] could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong.”
Yehiel De-Nur, a Holocaust survivor came to testify at the trial. But after encountering Eichmann, he broke down and collapsed. In an interview, De-Nur explained his extreme reaction:
“When I saw Eichmann, I realised that he was just a man. Just like me. There was really no difference. I was capable of the very thing that he did, and I collapsed because I saw my reflection in him.”
Eichmann’s story may be a long and unusual way to introduce a review of a completely unrelated film, but I couldn’t help but think of Eichmann when watching the Spotlight film.
Spotlight the film
Spotlight tells the story of the Boston Globe breaking the story of the clerical abuse cover up in 2002, from the perspective of the journalists involved.
The most striking thing about the film was that it was not a particularly thrilling, stay-on-the-edge-of-your-seat type of story. There were no real, identifiable villains (the offenders themselves were not portrayed in the film, only referenced.) It didn’t spend very much time at all on the key players in the Church. They were secondary characters, at best. There was no “big reveal.”
The characters involved were not part of some orchestrated cover up, they just did their job. Most of them met the legal and professional standards required by their role, but did it in a way where they could also avoid scandal. At one point, one of the Church’s lawyers, called on to explain why he never reported anything, said: “I was doing my job.”
And that’s when Eichmann came to mind.
For this type of evil to perpetuate, a big conspiracy wasn’t required. All that needed to happen were people being average in a time when they needed to be extraordinary.
That’s what’s so confronting about this movie.
It’s not that we are shocked by the evil of others so much because the details of the specific crimes and the perpetrators were not included in the film.
It’s that we are shocked with the realisation that the ordinary people were involved, and didn’t even realise it.
But there’s also hope. The film also shows us journalists, lawyers and others who chose not to be ordinary. Who didn’t “just do their job” but did it in a way which showed an extraordinary commitment to truth. We can all be like that.
I will borrow from columnist David Aaronovitch, who wrote a very thoughtful piece on Eichmann:
The antidote must be for us to cultivate that internal voice. To tell our children never to mind their own businesses, to do it because the others do, to go along with things or ignore them. One’s mind should be awkward and sore from the constant friction of conscience against the skull.
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