The Banality of Evil

Great evil never rises to the occasion. We have expectations of it that are never met. The philosopher Hannah Arendt gave us that singular lesson in her extraordinary Eichmann in Jerusalem, first published in 1963. The crimes had been monumental, but the man she glimpsed in a glass booth was a disappointment: “medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes, who throughout the trial keeps craning his scraggy neck toward the bench.” The very ordinary—“banal”—man, and the extraordinary crimes.
A March 15 dispatch from Phnom Pen underscored the timeless power of Arendt’s insight. Ieng Sary, the “foreign minister” of the Khmer Rouge, died in a local hospital on March 14, at age 87. He had been hospitalized for “digestion problems,” no verdict had been issued against him by a United Nations-backed tribunal investigating the crimes of that genocidal lot.
   
Ieng Sary had an exalted Khmer Rouge pedigree; he was a brother-in-law of Pol Pot, yet he was to succumb to a natural death. His wife, Ieng Thirith, a government minister, did him one better: the charges against her were dropped last September; she was ruled unfit to stand trial on grounds of dementia. No violence against the victims could be greater: the perpetrators of terror being spared even the pain of memory.

An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians perished in the time of those killing fields. The Khmer Rouge all but extirpated urban life as a nation was dispatched to the countryside to scramble for survival. In the face of that great sorrow, the tribunal has managed to secure one conviction, and two principal remaining defendants. The head of state under the regime, and its chief ideologue, are likely to succumb to natural death before the tribunal pronounces on their crimes.