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" Little Eichmanns" is a term used to describe people whose actions, while on an individual scale may seem relatively harmless even to themselves, taken collectively create destructive and immoral systems in which they are actually Complicity. The name comes from Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi Party bureaucrat who helped to orchestrate the The Holocaust, but claimed that he did so without feeling anything about his actions, merely Superior orders.
The use of "Eichmann" as an archetype stems from Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil". According to Arendt in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Eichmann relied on propaganda rather than thinking for himself, and carried out Nazi goals mostly to advance his career, appearing at his trial to have an ordinary and common personality while displaying neither guilt nor hatred. She suggested that this most strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi war criminals were manifestly Psychopathy and fundamentally different from ordinary people.
The idea that Eichmannor, indeed, the majority of Nazis or those working in such regimesactually fit this concept has been criticized by those who contend that Eichmann and the majority of Nazis were in fact deeply Nazism and extremely Antisemitism, with Eichmann, in particular, having been fixated on and obsessed with the Jews from a young age.for example, see German political scientist goes so far as to say the phrase "belittles the Holocaust".
Barbara Mann wrote that the term was perhaps best known for its use by anarcho-primitivist writer John Zerzan in his essay Whose Unabomber? written in 1995, although it was already common in the 1960s, as various prior examples are known.. Reprinted and analyzed in: It gained prominence in American political culture several years after the September 11 attacks, when a controversy ensued over the 2003 book On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, republishing a similarly titled essay Ward Churchill wrote shortly after the attacks. In the essay, Churchill used the phrase to describe Technocracy working at the World Trade Center:
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