Are there levels of Evil?

If over the course of a couple of thousand years Hitler and his mass extermination policies represents the deepest level reached so far (only a tad deeper than Stalin/Mao, but, yes, deeper), is there anything still deeper waiting to emerge?

This is a great piece by Ron Rosenbaum relentlessly demolishing famous intellectual Hannah Arendt and her much quoted idea of the Banality of Evil:

To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It’s a bankrupt phrase, a subprime phrase, a Dr. Phil-level phrase masquerading as a profound contrarianism.

Oooh, so daring! Evil comes not only in the form of mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash types, but in the form of paper pushers who followed evil orders. And when applied—as she originally did to Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s eager executioner, responsible for the logistics of the Final Solution—the phrase was utterly fraudulent…

Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn’t know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on.

Arendt should have stuck with her original formulation for the Nazi crimes, "radical evil." Not an easy concept to define, but, you might say, you know it when you see it. Certainly one with more validity than banality. (Wasserstein dryly notes that "her epigones have tried valiantly to reconcile the two positions, she herself recognized the inconsistency"—between radical and banal evil—"but never satisfactorily resolved the fundamental self-contradiction.") But Arendt fled from radical evil into banality in more ways than one…

Ron Rosenbaum’s own superb book Explaining Hitler takes one by one all available explanations for Hitler’s behaviour (eg he was crazy; he had a bad childhood; he was rational; he didn’t really mean it; he was evil) and takes them to bits, drawing on extensive research and tight arguement. A book for grown-ups thinking about Cause and Effect:

 

The following Comment is from Anticant; it somehow got lost in the comment moderation process. Apologies

Yes, Rosenbaum’s book is fascinating but I’m not sure it takes us any closer to understanding the Hitler phenomenon. Was he really ‘uniquely evil’ – a once-off human aberration? I doubt it. He was an acute psychopath and sociopath and a spellbinding orator whose delusions happened to chime in with the post-1918 demoralisation of a Germany which had, since Bismarck, been accustomed to regard itself as the up-and-coming European (and ultimately World) Power, and which was literally and emotionally shell-shocked by the self-inflicted military defeat resulting from the incompetence of Ludendorff, who promptly invented the ‘stab in the back’ myth and became Hitler’s ally in the abortive Munich beer-cellar putsch.

And it isn’t plausible to hold Hitler solely responsible for the Holocaust, even if he was its main midwife. Anti-Semitism – which Klaus P. Fisher in his brilliant book “The History of an Obsession” says should more accurately be called Judeophobia – has a long and sordid history not only in Germany but also in many other European (mostly Roman Catholic) countries as well as in Russia.