Also, it may be that people like Eichmann had some desire to hurt people, independently of their careerism, and this desire found a suitable outlet in the SS career ladder that was not available elsewhere. Not all careerists want to hurt other people or Jews in particular, they may have scruples, they may be farsighted.

It cannot be careerism alone, but rather careerism without morals and foresight that are to blame.

Prior to Hitler’s ascendancy Eichmann,like the chicken farmer,Himmler,was living a “humdrum life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into history.”

If humanity was to learn any lesson from the evil of Nazism it was not the one Ben Gurion’s targetted kidnapping and show trial of Eichmann would teach them.No if Jews especially were to transcend the grief and destruction inflicted on them by the Holocaust they must see through the manipulations of the trial by which Israel’s political elite wanted to use history to create a society that used its suffering as a mandate for aggression and dispossession of its neighbours.

The truth about the evil that had been done to the Jews was more mundane.It was the acqiescence and acceptance of evil on the part of Eichmann and all those to whom he deferred in the Nazi hierarchy,none of whom questioned the Final Solution,that was the real lesson.This was the banality of evil she detected, not the monstrous evil against which the self-righteous Israeli leadership railed publically, while quietly referring to the Holocaust survivors admitted to Israel as “soap”.

More troubling than this seeming attempt on her part to diminish the significance of their suffering was Arendt’s insistence on the need for Jews to learn from the acquiescence and acceptance of the part of Jewish community leaders in Nazi-occupied Europe.While never denying their having been coerced into confronting the most appalling moral dilemma:who should survive and who should not,Arendt stated bluntly,”this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter in the whole dark history.”

The vituperation of the Israeli Lobby and its minions to Arendt’s account can well be imagined.She never recanted and made clear to hostile,mainly Jewish audiences,that her love of her people (she was herself a Jew)meant that the failings of her people were a graver matter to her than the failings of all other people.

She worried constantly about the state of Israel, seeing in the propagandizing of Ben Gurion and his insistence on the purity of arms of its military the existential dishonesty she despised throughout her life.The Israeli political elite was using Eichmann to justify its state-inspired siege mentality towards its Arab neighbours.The bitter suffering of the Holocaust would not elicit any capacity for empathy with the pain of her neighbours.Rather it would likely beget yet another failure of the human spirit.

Olmert,Likud et al would not have kept Hannah Arendt quiet.She would have seen them for the sad little careerists they are.

I think you have homed in on a fascinating aspect of Arendt’s account of the genesis of genocide.Where democracy has begun to ossify because people have lost the will to make it work properly then the most faceless,talentless,and vacuous individuals begin to take their place in the governing elite.

As the rot sets in these individuals forge alliances with the propagandists and war profiteers who have similar plans to hijack the state for their own enrichment.

Yes,you guessed it for Eichmann in the 1930s and 40s read Mandelson,Kinnock,Campbell,Jowell,Short,Reid,Clarke in the 1990s and first decade of this century.These low-life plankton take over when people lose interest in democracy.When they can no longer be arsed to make the necessary effort to acquire the basic knowledge on which they might be able to make the informed decisions necessary to participate as citizens in a democratic system that’s when scumbags like Cheney,Rumsfeld,Bush who represent the military-industrial complex rather than the people take over.

Where the pursuit of power becomes the raison d’etre for the elite,politics is an avenue of advancement for the most feckless and idle characters in society.

War follows as night follows day,as does torture,and curtailment of civil liberties along with the trivialization of the most pressing political and social issues.

Arendt saw all this compressed and distilled in the form of Adolph Eichmann but she also glimpsed the future of the US/UK and Israeli political systems too.