Himmler, the chief of SS, adopted the heroic attitude of ‘Somebody has to do the dirty job, so let’s do it!’: it is easy to do a noble thing for one’s country, up to sacrificing one’s life for it – it is much more difficult to commit a crime for one’s country. In her Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt provided a precise description of this twist the Nazi executioners accomplished in order to be able to endure the horrible acts they performed. Most of them were not simply evil, they were well aware that they are doing things which bring humiliation, suffering and death to their victims. The way out of this predicament was that, “instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!” [2] In this way, they were able to turn around the logic of resisting temptation: the temptation to be resisted was the very temptation to succumb to the elementary pity and sympathy in the presence of human suffering, and their “ethical” effort was directed towards the task of resisting this temptation not to murder, torture and humiliate. My violation of spontaneous ethical instincts of pity and compassion is turned into the proof of my ethical grandeur: to do my duty, I am ready to assume the heavy burden of inflicting pain on others. The same perverse logic operates in today’s religious fundamentalism.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2euu6IJ