Chapters 14–15

Eichmann in Jerusalem - 4th session (Chapters 14 and 15)

Participants: mori, Nanuri, Born to Run, kdg, G, tgifya

Date: Friday, 2026.1.30

Online

Discussion notes by: Born to Run

Main Topics

The importance of international law and principles

The limits of realist international relations theory and whether it should be recognized

Possible sanctions for Venezuela’s violations of international law

Additional Discussion

Problems with the progressive tax system and value-added tax, and ways to improve them

Ways to address the regressivity of indirect taxes

Ways to address capital accumulation issues resulting from abolishing the progressive tax system

Discussion Summary

The Killing Centers in the East

- Chapter 13, “The Killing Centers in the East,” shows the reality of the massacres.

- Chapter 13 describes how the Jews were moved there.

- Chapter 14 deals with evidence and testimony.

- Chapter 15 shows the trial process.

Arendt’s Universal Moral Law

- The lesson from the fact that Hannah Arendt’s universal moral law appeared wherever it was well observed is that there are always people somewhere who live by universal moral law.

- When Eichmann was sentenced to death, some argued that he should not be executed, raising the question: if killing people is wrong, can one punish by killing?

The History of the Massacre of the Jews

- There were two positions on how to deal with the Jews: a hardline position and a more flexible one.

- The moderate position tended to think it would be better not to kill all Jews unconditionally, but to hold some in reserve for exchange purposes.

- It was even argued that Jews with influential relatives in the United States should be specially set aside alive and classified as exchange targets.

- From the beginning, Eichmann’s trial felt less like one about an individual’s crimes and more like one attempting to define historical facts under a single framework.

The Formalization of Historical Events

- In court, it may be possible to establish guilt for individual crimes one by one through evidence, but it raises the question of whether it is justifiable to lump historical issues together and officially codify some collective memory.

- Some philosophers opposed the trial, arguing that because it was a crime against humanity, it should have been handled by creating an international criminal court.

Perón in Argentina

- In Argentina, Perón systematically brought in collaborators, developed society and the economy, built power plants, organized gatherings, held seminars, wrote books, and left behind writings.

- There was no cooperation in Argentina, and while it was right to put Eichmann on trial, the issue of Eichmann kept coming up in war crimes discussions, and his name had been mentioned for a very long time.

German War Crimes

- After reading the book on Eichmann, Hannah Arendt concluded that his crime was his failure to think.

- Those people themselves believed such ways of thinking were right, thoroughly grounded in a totalitarian mindset.

- Arendt came to think that one could not help but say that the German people had participated in war crimes.

The Eichmann Trial

- Eichmann called for judgment on antisemitism.

- Eichmann had to be held accountable because he was a symbol of the massacre.

- Even those who did not participate actively should be held accountable.

Condemnation of Totalitarianism

- This was a condemnation of the very mode of thought called totalitarianism.

- In the trial, the dispute over whether he had committed crimes became a question of judging whether a mistaken ideology was right or wrong.

- It also became the result of a judgment on ideas and ideology.

People Whose Conscience Is Alive

- The conclusion drawn from Eichmann before Jerusalem was that the very fact that people worry about being placed in such a moral dilemma already shows that their conscience is alive.

- If such a situation were to arise, as long as I did not ideologically move as far as Eichmann did in carrying it out zealously, I would not so actively and faithfully join others in such wrongdoing.

Argentina and Eichmann’s Capture for Jerusalem

- One reason Eichmann could be brought to Jerusalem was that Perón had fallen from power and lost influence.

- Argentina announced that it would not treat the matter as an issue.

- There is clearly room for controversy over procedural jurisdiction and infringement, but that is the reality.

- The recent Iran situation also made me think it should be viewed somewhat differently, because when you look at people on the ground in Iran or Iranians in our country, they plead for Trump to come and stop it through intervention.

Principles of International Law

- It is necessary to ask whether the principles of international law are being applied too uniformly based only on standards used in domestic law, and to carefully search for principles unique to international law.

- It is recognized that undermining principles can be the starting point of a problem, which makes judgment difficult.

- It is not a matter of the logic of force; undermining principles accepted by common sense can become the starting point of a problem.

The War in Ukraine

- In the case of the war in Ukraine, if nearby countries such as Poland or others had stepped in and bombed Russia, or had moved early to stop it, there would likely have been far fewer victims.

- Even though it was a conflict in a non-military-alliance region, it became so severe that the issue of ethnic massacre arose, so people watched and watched, and in the end bombing was used to end the war.

- It was said that one must act at the level of common sense and respond quickly in the early stages so that evil does not grow.

Characteristics of Realist International Relations Theory

- Realist international relations theory is of a different character from trying to uphold principles in reality.

- To say one cannot recognize realist international relations theory is simply to say one cannot recognize realist international relations theory.

- It is thought that U.S. intervention under Trump should be approached cautiously.

Venezuela’s Violations of International Law

- In Venezuela’s case, there is no means to sanction it even if it violates international law.

- It should be accepted as an empirical unwritten rule that even great powers must observe at least this level of principle if they are not to lose power.

The Fragility of Principles

- Principles were not something fixed from a certain point with a clean starting line; rather, they were like unwritten rules that emerged from experience after the world wars.

- Principles are very fragile.

- Principles may seem to operate only within states, but in fact even the rule of law within a state does not function solely through police or military force.

Our Country’s Tax System

- In our country, by the end of the Park Chung-hee era, indirect taxes were unified into a single value-added tax.

- There was also an attempt to organize direct taxes so that they would be levied only on the basis of income, but it did not progress further and became complicated.

- Indirect taxes are regressive.

- Indirect taxes tend to impose a heavier burden on people with less money.

Abolition of the Progressive Tax

- I support abolishing the progressive tax, but in reality it is impossible to do so by generally raising the VAT slightly at the point of consumption.

- The problem with the progressive tax system is that the capital of individual economic actors is not accumulated effectively.

- The government must be prevented from trying to collect more taxes.

Nanuri

Eichmann argued that the acts revealed through testimony and evidence were merely administrative duties faithfully carried out in accordance with legal formalities. However, the court indicted him on charges including crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and war crimes, and sentenced him to death. In that he had no moral reflection whatsoever on acts that violated the dignity of others, he demonstrates the danger of a totalitarian worldview. Even universal “morality” had been made to conform to totalitarian thinking. As Arendt argued, he is understood not simply as an ordinary man who failed to think, but as a man captured by a Hitler-style moral view.

Separate from Eichmann’s individual evil acts, Arendt pointed out problems concerning procedural legality:

Was Eichmann’s capture, carried out in the form of an abduction, a violation of sovereignty under international law? Did an Israeli court have the authority to try him? Could a law enacted after the acts be applied retroactively? These are the questions she raised. The court applied universal jurisdiction, holding that because Eichmann’s crimes were crimes against all humanity, regardless of where they were committed or the perpetrator’s nationality, every state had jurisdiction to try them.

The subsequent trial showed not merely an intent to punish an individual, but also a will to uncover historical truth and shape collective memory.

The question remains whether a courtroom can contain the full historical truth and serve as a venue for the realization of historical justice.

Mori

Eichmann in Jerusalem (and Eichmann Before Jerusalem)

The controversy stirred by Hannah Arendt’s book was, in fact, because it touched the fundamental fear inherent in individualism.

Unlike the status-based society of the premodern era, individualism, the core of modernization, is a system that holds each person responsible for his or her own judgment and actions.

The Jesuit slogan “Cadaver Obedience” and the phrase “greater glory through absolute obedience” contain the values of life in the premodern, status-based world. In other words, the operating principle of the world before modernization, before individualism, was that faithfully carrying out duties handed down from above without question could achieve the good.

With the beginning of modernization based on individualism, people came to enjoy the prosperity and freedom it produced. But new doubts and anxieties also emerged. People began to wonder whether the role they played within the group they belonged to was truly contributing to the good, and whether the results to which they had contributed were really fully their own responsibility.

As capitalism’s division of labor developed and individuals found themselves in an ever-larger system of specialized roles, this sense of “alienation” led them to doubt individualism itself and generated distrust of reason, one of individualism’s key tools, contributing to a longing for the totalitarianism of the past.

Then came economic crises, which spread the realization that the prosperity promised by modernization was not guaranteed forever. Eventually, a new social movement opposed to individualism and its foundation, rationalism, emerged: fascism.

Nazism in particular, a geopolitical nationalism aimed at the absolute value of ethnic permanence, became obsessed with removing the Jewish people from the space of “its own people” for the sake of that people’s continued existence. The failure of this new totalitarian movement meant that modern values survived as universal values of humanity.

The operation to annihilate the Jews created a new form of collective crime: a crime against humanity. According to the modern values grounded in individualism, one cannot help but hold guilty those individuals who faithfully performed their assigned roles within the collective of Nazism.

If a group acts toward a common goal, and that group is based on nation and state—something I cannot choose or avoid—then how can responsibility be assigned to the individual within that group for a collective crime committed through a system of division of labor? Victims exist, but is it really impossible to hold any individual accountable?

Hannah Arendt defended Eichmann’s execution by calling it the crime of thoughtlessness.

But holding someone responsible by such an ambiguous standard as “thoughtlessness” was still hard to accept. More precisely, the idea that simply living diligently within a social system could, at some point, become participation in enormous evil touched the deepest fear produced by the “alienation” of the long age of individualism.

In the midst of that, someone told me there was a book showing that Eichmann had not in fact been merely a bureaucrat dutifully doing his job without thinking, but a genuine criminal.

Eichmann Before Jerusalem

That book tells of Eichmann’s true nature, which was never fully brought to light during the trial.

Before the trial, Argentine homegrown National Socialists (Nazis), among whom Eichmann had been hiding, could not believe in the large-scale ethnic massacre. They met and interviewed Eichmann, carefully recording him in hopes of finding proof that no such massacre had taken place. This book later tracked down those records, which had not been discovered at the time.

Their efforts to prove the massacre false instead clearly exposed its massive scale, and preserved Eichmann’s long speech lamenting that, for the future of the German people, they had not killed everyone more thoroughly. At trial, Eichmann had acted the part of a mere bureaucrat who had simply done his job without thinking and without agreeing with the massacres, all in hopes of avoiding execution.

Once I knew the full story, I felt relieved.

Even under a totalitarian system, active participation in the crimes of the group was only possible if one fully subscribed to its ideology.

Under any system, in any circumstance, the individual’s reason remains alive to judge which ideology to choose and how to act accordingly. Rather than confirming “alienation” as an unavoidable reality, this is actually reassuring—it suggests that it may still be only a hypothetical fear.

A sudden thought occurs to me.

What are U.S. ICE agents thinking now? How will the actions of those who aggressively took the lead be judged later? Will Eichmann’s trial be reenacted once again?

* The “Liberalism Reading Group” Kakao Open Chat or Band group is a communication space operated by members of the reading group.

This is not a channel operated by the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE), so please keep that in mind when joining and participating.

▶ Join the Liberalism Reading Group: https://open.kakao.com/o/g4Nn1uud

---

Original title: <예루살렘의 아이히만> 14장~15장

Author: Ja-yujuui Ipmun Dokseo Toron Moim

Date: 2026-02-03

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=reading01&pn=1&idx=28587