"The Banality of Evil" - 21st Century Version

What is it with Belgium? For decades, it had a reputation for being Europe's most boring country. Perhaps we simply didn't know it: Recent stories emerging from the home of the EU's "capital" reveal that it's also one of the continent's creepiest and weirdest places...

Here's one recent revelation, from the Brussels Journal:

The Belgian authorities have destroyed archives and records relating to the persecution and deportation of Jews in Belgium in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of this happened as recently as the late 1990s. This was revealed during hearings in the Belgian Senate last Spring. Though the Senate report dates from 4 May the Belgian press has not yet mentioned the affair. The Senate report says that “documents about the period 1930-1950 have been destroyed on a massive scale.”
The systematic destructions of the records of police and judiciary from the 1930s and ’40s happened chiefly in Brussels and Wallonia, the French-speaking south of Belgium.

French, huh? Shocked, I am!

Are we rewriting the past to justify the present? Fausta directs us to this release from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, exposing the perfidity of Brussels:

In a letter to the IFJ General Secretary, Aidan White, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Director for International Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, noted that "your camouflage for terror has already borne fruit: your Brussels neighbour, La Libre Belgique, in its op ed of 25 July entitled 'C'est le sionisme qui mène à la guerre' (It is Zionism which leads to war), has blatantly endorsed Iranian President Ahmadinejad, Hizbollah's commander and bankroller, 'to wipe the State of Israel off the map'".
The letter continued, "the newspaper goes beyond legitimate criticism of Israeli policy, maliciously crossing the red lines of civilized press discourse: In distorting quotes from Jewish protagonists of Zionism as the only national liberation movement of the Middle East, La Libre Belgique states that 'the founding doctrine of Zionism was racism and colonialism… the people of Israel, as a superior people and the modern continuation of the Chosen People… Israel in the Middle East is the apartheid South Africa of southern Africa - a Euro-American colony'".

Now check out the "final solution" proposed by this Belgian daily, and you may see why so many records of Belgium's complicity in the Holocaust are suddenly disappearing:

'We were shocked to hear the Iranian President say that Israel should be wiped off the map. It would, however, surely be the only solution to see the State of Israel disappear, politically of course. … The policy of 'two peoples, two States', the policy of the partition of Palestine on a political and ethnic basis, is a policy of apartheid that will never bring peace. Let us return to what was always, until Oslo, the project of the PLO…'"

Appropriate that these remarks should be published in a paper centered in the home of the European Union. Which brings me to the title of this post...

The concept of the banality of evil came into prominence following the publication of Hannah Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which was based on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt's thesis was that people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, a top administrator in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, may not be crazy fanatics at all, but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good bureaucrats.

And what is the EU, besides a bureaucratic enterprise? It issues decrees with the force of law that affect the minutia of the day-to-day life of the average European. And their subjects (not citizens; citizens vote for their representation) dutifully do what they are told; with no thought of dissent or rebellion.

So when the EU finally issues the order that declares the Jews of Europe to be "persona non grata" and regretfully declares that they must be turned out, there is no doubt that the people of Europe will willingly oblige, with no thought as to the morality of their actions. Nor will they offer any type of spirited defense after the job is done.

After all, that is the banality of evil.

And that is exactly what is unfolding in Brussels as we speak.

We recognize the evil that we vowed never to allow again, yet we do nothing (in Brussels or Iran) to stop its cancerous growth. America screams on the top of its lungs, and Europe offers nothing but a shrug, and shambles toward the abyss, again.

Nothing changes in this wretched, blood-stained continent....