"The Banality Of Evil:"
When The Process Is More Important Than Life

In her book, "Eichmann In Jerusalem," Hannah Arendt uses that phrase to describe Eichmann's peculiar and detached attitude toward the monstrous evil that he perpetrated on the Jewish people. Her thesis is a bit more complex than that, but the phrase applies so well to the clerks and administrators and judges whose slavish attention to the process and the rules and the reinforcement of their own power made sure that Alfie Evans died.

It is nothing more than a firm and unshakable belief that government knows best; that the individual is secondary and subordinate to to the wishes and goals of the central planners and the career bureaucrats whose contempt for Everyman is palpable.

What saddens me almost as much as the death of an innocent child is the obtuseness of the political and medical establishment, who have become so inured to the concept of government as the ultimate arbiter of...everything...that they have lost sight of the basic human right of self determination. As Alfie Evans dies, calls grow for better ways to support grieving parents There are a bunch of awful quotations from the article, but here is one that encapsulates it, from a physician no less...

Looking forward, there is a real need to try to resolve disagreements between parents and doctors. Entrenched disagreement can reach a point where it's very difficult to step back from...

Why? because those are the rules, and rules must be obeyed slavishly, or society will soon be filled with individuals who do what they want with their own lives.

The first thing Hitler did when he gained power was to change the law, to make his desire for the destruction of the Jewish people a legally acceptable result.

Alfie Evans' death does not rise to the level of genocide, but it is on the continuum.

When The Process Is More Important Than Life&bodytext=In her book, "Eichmann In Jerusalem," Hannah Arendt uses that phrase to describe Eichmann's peculiar and detached attitude toward the monstrous evil that he perpetrated on the Jewish people. Her thesis is a bit more complex than that, but the...&topic=world_news"> posted by CBD at 12:25 PM

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