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Eichmann

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1961 the Israeli Secret Service, the Mossad

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discovered that Eichmann was living under an assumed name in Buenos Aires

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they went there and kidnapped him

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brought him back to Israel

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charged him with

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crimes against humanity

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crimes against the Jewish people

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they sentenced him to death

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executed him

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who was Eichmann?

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a concentration camp and transportation logistics manager

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he was not a designer of the "final solution" but an implementer

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personal characteristics

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looked like anyone we know

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not obviously an extremely unethical person

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he wanted to please his superiors

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he wanted them to think he was doing well

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one must ask how he didn't question his actions

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what makes us most uncomfortable about Eichmann's actions?

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the banality of evil

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what unnerves people about Eichmann is that he doesn't seem that different from any of us

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it's important to question what my actions are producing, e.g. are they producing harm or not

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it seems Eichmann didn't ask this question at all

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he seemed to have no interest in the purpose of what he was doing

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"My interest here was only in the number of transport trains I had to provide. Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people loaded on these trains meant nothing to me. It was really none of my business."

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he wanted to do as good of a job as possible without any reference to the goods, he wanted to be a good manager

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he believed that you could separate means from ends

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he speaks about being a good manager without reference to what he was managing

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he didn't make any moral judgement of his own

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he seemed to have no moral compass

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it didn't occur to him that he should, perhaps, question the authority that he was being asked to obey

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he didn't ask any moral questions about the rightness of what he was doing

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what the Israeli government did

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they found out where he was living

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brought him back to Israel

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passed laws to try him by including a death penalty

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then tried him and executed him

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the State of Israel had not existed in the 1940s when he committed his crimes

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the judicial system exceeded its authority

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they kidnapped him from another country

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didn't go through any appropriate channels

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Argentina probably wouldn't have extradited him

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the moment he became alerted to the fact that Israel was looking for him, he probably would have disappeared

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so they had no intention of going through the appropriate legal channels

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NATO bombing of Kosovo

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March-June 1999

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to protect Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing and murder

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but they didn't have UN Security Council Authorization for doing this

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it would have been opposed by the Russians and the Chinese

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violated the UN Charter

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since nobody was threatening to attack a NATO country

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after the Kosovo affair

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an independent international commission established in August 1999 concluded that the NATO military intervention was illegal but legitimate

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all diplomatic avenues had been exhausted

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1994 genocide in Rwanda

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Clinton administration failed to intervene

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therefore 800,000 to 1,000,000 people were slaughtered

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this is the kind of situation where you are going to have to ask for forgiveness rather than permission

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because if you ask for permission, by the time you get permission, if you ever get it, the disaster will already have occurred

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when moral considerations are sufficiently compelling, it becomes unavoidable that you make the decision to act and you recognize that what you are doing is illegal, but it will be forgiven afterward

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