While Jean-Paul Brodeur is primarily known for his research on policing, his real passion and

fascination, unbeknownst to the public, was for quite another subject — the Holocaust and
extreme forms of violence such as genocide and crimes against humanity. This article will
explore this largely unknown interest of Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul’s thoughts on extreme
criminality — or “administrative criminality”, in the words of Hannah Arendt, a thinker whose
writings he was deeply attracted to — helped orient my doctoral research, supervised by
Jean-Paul and completed in 2008, on the participation of military bands in the mass violence
of the Balkans in the 1990s.

 1 Although based on observations in Rwanda, the ideas developed in this article are discussed in
grea (...)

2In January 2010, I was hired as a professor in the University of Montreal’s School of
Criminology, and the roots of this article can be traced back to a presentation I made,
several weeks after my hiring, in the International Centre for Comparative Criminology
seminar series. My presentation was on my postdoctoral research, conducted in the United
States in 2009, on the participation of armed bands in the mass violence in Balkans of the
1990s, following the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. My
sequential analysis revealed similarities in the ways the Serb and Hutu executioners
participated in mass violence. In particular, I described how, independently of geographic or
political context, recruitment into mass violence comprised at least six stages or decision
points, and how this finding shed new light on the radicalisation of participants in mass
violence.1 These stages culminate in a trivialization of practices, i.e. the trivialization of acts
that in most cases were already familiar to participants, even if they had never practised
them outside of their daily routines.

3Jean-Paul attended this presentation, which immediately triggered a discussion of the place
of banality. Of course, Arendt’s famous thesis, developed in her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A
Report on the Banality of Evil, was at the heart of our conversation, and Jean-Paul suggested
that we re-explore it in light of contemporary mass murders, especially the Rwandan
genocide and the ethnic cleansing of the ex-Yugoslavia. But the omnipresent “you should” of
my doctoral studies was now replaced by a “we might” that suggested the possibility of
collaboration and joint publication. We sought an angle or perspective to attack the problem
from, and every day we took a few minutes to discuss ideas that had recently come to us.
But a few weeks later, we all learned of his death. I thought it important that the reflection
we had started should continue — albeit as an imperfect solo rather than the initial duet —
and this article presents some initial hypotheses on this subject. Firstly, I will summarize the
central elements of the concept of the banality of evil. Secondly, I will provide a detailed
analysis, based on our dialogue, of Jean-Paul’s interest in Arendt’s thesis. Lastly, I will
present an extension of the thesis of the banality of evil, which I will link to events in the ex-
Yugoslavia of the 1990s and to the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Hannah Arendt and

the  banality of evil
4The thesis of the banality of evil is based on a series of observations by Hannah Arendt
during her coverage of the April 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of the
deportation of Jews to the Third Reich death camps, for the New Yorker. Eichmann faced 15
charges for war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and crimes against humanity, and
the trial lasted four months. He was condemned to death — a sentence reserved for cases of
genocide — and was executed on May 31, 1962, following the rejection of his appeal.

 2 This section is based on Arendt’s (2006), and on Amos Elon’s introduction to that volume,
entitled (...)

 3 Arendt, 2006, xii-xiii.

 5The banality of evil has been the object of much controversy and earned Arendt vitriolic
criticism — but it also has been greatly misunderstood. It sets out mechanisms, or logics,
that underlie the destruction of civilian populations and characterize the behaviour of many
bureaucratic agents. Arendt speaks of “administrative crime”, in light of its bureaucratic
nature and its commission primarily by what she calls “office criminals”. From her very first
observations of Eichmann, Arendt was surprised that he did not appear to be a brute or
monster, contrary to his image among the general public, who were convinced that only such
creatures could be capable of such crimes. Rather, he appeared to be an ordinary person, to
some extent pathetic, even miserable, in his bulletproof witness stand. 2 As revealed by
Amos Elon, Arendt even wrote in a letter to her friend Karl Jaspers that “Eichmann is actually
stupid, but then, somehow, he is not.” 3

6Taking this fundamentally contradictory observation as her starting point, Arendt developed
a vision of the dynamics underlying Eichmann’s participation in the destruction of European
Jewry. In particular, she emphasized the technical and administrative nature of his daily,
bureaucratic, work. Like all bureaucrats, Eichmann performed his tasks within a well-
delineated system revolving around segmented, depersonalized work — around a routine, in
other words. It is of course true that the entire Nazi bureaucracy Eichmann worked in
pursued an end which did not appear to be, and was never presented as, criminal. Its victims
were never presented as what they were —human beings — but as packages in need of
logistic organization. Thus, the attention of the Nazi bureaucrats and civil servants, including
Eichmann, involved in the conveying and deportation of Jews to death camps was entirely
directed toward the establishment of lists and the conception of transport schedules — in
other words, in the execution of a series of technical tasks for purely logistic ends. Their
actions were consequently evaluated in terms of yield and efficiency, rather than of their
ultimate human, and therefore moral, consequences. The banality of evil is an outgrowth of a
perverted and paroxysmally criminal version of industrial civilisation. It implies a radical
rupture between the daily technical and bureaucratic tasks, on the one hand, and the
consequences, albeit extreme, at the end of the line, on the other. It was by virtue of his
unusual zeal in the application of the technical and judicial guidelines of the bureaucracy that
Eichmann played such an important role in the destruction of the Jews, although he never
personally was in contact with the horror of the consequences of his acts. The administrative
— modern — crime which cloaks itself in bureaucracy creates a distance between the
producer and the consumer, between the agent and victim. Taken to its logical conclusion,
the banality of evil recalls The Odissey and the crime of Nobody, as the Holocaust would
have been impossible without the hundreds of thousands of civil servants acting just like
Eichmann within a bureaucracy that stripped them of responsibility and rendered their acts
anonymous.

7If Arendt’s thesis offends, it is because as soon as Eichmann took the witness stand it was
apparent that he was not the monster expected. He was, instead, the dual product of a
bureaucratic vision. He was an unthinking entity, which is to say that he did not consider the
nature of the action, or enterprise, in which he was participating, or the inhuman
consequences it implied. He thus acted from a completely amoral perspective. For Eichmann,
this enterprise, despite its criminal nature, was simply a question of technical,
administrative, and bureaucratic imperatives, not an opportunity to engage in Arendt’s vision
of “thinking”: the disposition to live with oneself, in a silent dialogue between “me and
myself”. This technical approach to tasks ultimately prevents one from answering the
following question: Would I be capable, after all is said and done, of living with the killer in
me? Yet, Arendt warned, it would be wrong to think that Eichmann merely followed orders.
In reality, she claimed, he consented to them:

 4 Arendt (2003. 46).

all governments [...] even the most autocratic ones, even tyrannies, “rest on consent,” and the
fallacy lies in the equation of consent with obedience. An adult consents where a child obeys; if an
adult is said to obey, he actually supports the organization or authority the law that claims
“obedience”.4

8This consent is characteristic of every modern bureaucracy, regardless of its mission. And it
is an important dimension of the banality of evil: Eichmann, like all civil servants,
internalized the essence of the social and political situational context, as well as his
institution’s structure. Much more than simply obeying superiors, he supported the
 enterprise, and his devotion is largely explainable in terms of his carreerist objectives. As
Arendt so acutely observed:

 5 Hannah Arendt, op. cit., 43.

Finally, it must be realized that although these mass murderers acted consistently with racist or
anti-Semitic, or at any rate a demographic ideology, the murderers and their direct accomplices
more often than not did not believe in these ideological justifications; for them, it was enough that
everything happened according to the “will of the Führer” which was the law of the land, and in
accordance with the “words of the Führer” which had the force of law. 5

 6 This thesis is largely supported by Ian Kershaw, in the chapter entitled “Working Towards the
Führe (...)

9Any initiative which advanced Hitler’s absolutist objectives — which, although usually
broadly defined, were highly emotional embodiments of national socialist ideology —
received the most senior support, regardless of its origin in the Nazi bureaucracy. These
initiatives were the very foundations of the radicalisation that would inexorably lead to the
extermination of the Jews. As long as they directly promoted Hitler’s objectives, they were a
guarantee of career advancement. Given the rivalry between the various wings of the Nazi
bureaucracy for the Führer’s favours, the formulation of the “right” initiative, i.e. an initiative
consistent with Hitler’s views and fully congruent with the Nazi bureaucracy, was a clear
asset in the career path of Nazi civil servants, including Eichmann 6. This being so, the
concept of the banality of evil encapsulates the technical-bureaucratic system of career
advancement and the roles expected of this system’s representatives. As Amos Elon puts it:

 7 Arendt, op. cit., xiii.

He [Eichmann] personified neither hatred or madness nor an insatiable thirst for blood, but
something far worse, the faceless nature of Nazi evil itself, within a closed system run by
pathological gangsters, aimed at dismantling the human personality of its victims. The Nazis had
succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the
foundation of a new "righteousness." In the Third Reich, evil lost its distinctive characteristic by
which most people had until then recognized it. [...] Within this upside-down world Eichmann [...]
seemed not to have been aware of having done evil 7.

Jean-Paul Brodeur and

the  banality of evil
10Something in Arendt’s thesis spoke to Jean-Paul. While I was still working on my master’s
thesis, under his supervision, on the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, he warned me
that any would-be academic research on massacres and mass violence must necessarily
discuss — and in fact take a position on — the banality of evil. In a tone I took to be only
half-joking, he warned me that he wouldn’t even read my thesis if I didn’t discuss Arendt’s
work on Eichmann. It is important to note here that what follows is somewhat speculative, as
Jean-Paul never explicitly explained why he felt the banality of evil to be so important. That
being said, I was one of the students in his general doctoral seminar at the School of
Criminology of the University of Montreal, which focused on the questions and processes
related to the conceptualization and development of a theoretical framework for academic
research and production. In light of that experience, I can identify at least two features of
Arendt’s thesis — apart from its inherent aesthetics — which caught Jean-Paul’s attention: its
conceptual value and its epistemological value.

 8 Brodeur (1984).

11Conceptual value. During our discussions, both as a doctoral student and a colleague, I
observed that Jean-Paul’s often adopted a contrastive approach — more specifically, the use
of two a priori antithetical terms whose juxtaposition or conjunction produced a more
 valuable conceptual tool. An excellent illustration of this method can be found in La
délinquance de l’ordre [crimes of order], one of his best-known works, which deals with
commissions of inquiry on police practices 8. Jean-Paul often told me that one way to
approach a phenomenon, at least initially, is to observe it from a sheltered position rather
than tackling it head on and “staring it in the face”, with that approach’s attendant risk of
paralysis. In particular, this posture requires identifying the phenomenon’s constituent
characteristics and the strategic nexuses which provide the foundation for understanding and
eventually theorisation. Arendt’s sheltered position consisted of focusing on the banal
circumstances surrounding Eichmann’s actions, rather than blindly assuming — despite the
weight of public opinion and the pressure exerted by the public on researchers of that period
— that Eichmann was a monster. This contrastive conceptual approach is particularly useful
when a phenomenon or object elicits astonishment (in the philosophical sense). It provides
additional resources for an epistemological approach, or the construction of a phenomenon
as an object of knowledge, and by so doing, it seems to me, lays the groundwork for the
second feature of the banality of evil which fascinated Jean-Paul: epistemological value.

12Epistemological value. One of the merits of Arendt’s thesis is the opportunity it affords to
conceptualize collective crimes as eminently collective acts rather than the sum of individual
acts to be analyzed, as is common in criminology, from an individual-centric perspective. The
almost systematic interpretation of Eichmann’s crimes in terms of individual intentionality,
and the application of a legal overlay to his practices can only produce a partial and
imperfect understanding of these forms of extreme violence. It is worth repeating that
Eichmann’s crimes were examples of administrative violence — albeit one whose
consequences were the destruction of an entire population. As outlined above, the primary
intention of the bureaucrat was not so much to destroy, in whole or in part, an inherently
undesirable group, but rather to fulfil the expectations of a bureaucracy, and from a career
perspective, anticipate the desires of that hierarchy and the Führer. The crime of the Nazis
was not the sum of the individual decisions of all the executioners. In addition, the banality
of evil is an epistemologically rich theoretical framework: the bureaucratic operations
themselves elucidate the consent or support of the bureaucracy’s representatives to acts, in
some cases radical, and are worthy of study. Thus, the corollary of the paradigm of the
banality of evil is that participation in Nazi crimes was not an act of hate or sadism — in
short, a question of individual disposition — but, ultimately and paradoxically, an act of
voluntary compliance to a bureaucratic system that itself tends towards criminal goals. It
seems to me that one of the reasons Jean-Paul was interested in this paradigm was because
it, or the language in which the theory is formulated, redirects thinking and research related
to the “elimination of a population” construct towards a new criminological terrain. Arendt
provides us a way to think about a largely neglected dimension of this criminality, namely its
collective, administrative, nature. In Eichmann’s case, it was the collectivity, the
administration — incarnated in the Nazi bureaucracy — that smothered or distorted any
moral sense. This administration allowed concrete and highly technical daily acts to be
compartmentalized from their dramatic consequences.

An extension of the banality of
evil?
 9 Notably Bauman (1989).

 10 Tanner. (2011, 2012a, in press, 2012b, in press).

13A striking element of Arendt’s thesis is its presentation of the diversion of the moral sense
of actors who no longer think or no longer exhibit a disposition to live with themselves and in
a silent dialogue between “me and myself”. While this absence of thought was shown by
Arendt, amongst others9, to derive in large part from the phenomenon of modernity and its
characteristic bureaucratic organisation, it appears that it may also be conceptualized as the
product of other sources. This insight first came to me while I was researching the actions of
executioners10.

 11 Tanner (2012a).
 12 Indeed, Jean-Paul often warned us against attempting to rank genocides, explaining that it was
very (...)

14Executioners are knee-deep in front-line violence. While Eichmann — an executer —

wielded the pen and the administrative form, the executioners discussed here wielded the
knife and the machete. From an epistemological perspective, executioners are distinct from
executers11. This paradigm is a promising approach to the actions of executioners, although
of course it cannot provide a rigorous validation of the thesis of the banality of evil in the
contexts of Rwanda and the ex-Yugoslavia12.

15Because hate and psychopathology are not the sole credible explanations for the massive
participation of the executioners, and despite the fact that the executioners acted in close
proximity to their victims (literally, as most of the executioners discussed below did not use
firearms), and were thus confronted with the immediate consequences of their actions,
the absence of thought and moral judgement appears to be a promising perspective from
which to approach the understanding and analysis of their acts. However, the details of this
concept and its application to actors whose operational context differs radically from that of
office criminals remain unexplored. It is precisely this enigma that will concern me here.

 13 In this connection, it should be recalled that the results of the psychological tests
administered (...)

16Let us follow Jean-Paul’s advice and adopt a sheltered position with regard to
the participation of executioners in mass violence construct. It appears that in the same way
that the power of Arendt’s thesis is paradoxically dependent on its laying bare of a logic
whose banality is an affront to its unspeakable consequences (or which could be related to
an extraordinary cause, like the event itself) 13, the logic of the executioners’ acts is an
extension of their daily routines. It would therefore be inaccurate to speak of a rupture,
although this would be expected given the extreme, factual, nature of mass violence. Thus,
the praxis, or enabling acts —not themselves actually criminal — for this violence are not as
strange or extraordinary to those who commit them as might seem, and are fully integrated
into their lifestyle. In the following discussion, I will focus on the habits and lifestyle of the
executioners involved in mass violence, just as Arendt focused on Eichmann’s bureaucratic
framework. My ultimate goal is to establish whether the aforementioned continuity with daily
routines — abstracted from the context of mass violence — is, like the Nazi bureaucracy, a
source of Arendt’s absence of thought, itself a prerequisite for the possibility of eliminating
the Other. I will base my discussion on the events in Rwanda and the ex-Yugoslavia.

Sequences and continuity of mass

violence
 14 Tanner (2011).

 15 Kershaw (1998), Browning (2007).

17I have written elsewhere that research on mass violence and crimes has, for the most
part, revolved around the most staggering aspect of this phenomenon, namely its tragic
human consequences14. This state of affairs, a priori legitimate and well founded, is
nevertheless problematic, as it tends to reduce the concept of mass violence, inherently
highly complex, to its most extreme tangible and observable dimension. Consequently, with
rare exceptions15, most of the proffered explanations have analysed situational factors —the
here and now of the violence — to the detriment of the events’ historicity and origin in
processes of radicalisation. For example, the work by Philip Zimbardo on the Stanford prison,
or by Stanley Milgram on obedience to authority, have been extensively cited with nary a
word about the fact that the context of mass massacres rarely has anything in common with
the experimental conditions of the social psychology laboratories in which the theories were
developed. For example, the sequence, or history, that allows us to understand how an
individual can find themselves complying with authority or belonging to a group — both of
which exert pressure to conform, to act, to finish off their victim — remains unexplained. My
 point here is not to reject this body of research, but to delineate its external validity, that is,
its application to the concrete situations in which executioners actually find themselves.

 16 Tanner (2011).

18In addition, I would like to propose an alternate hypothesis that posits participation in
mass violence to be the product of a series of six pivotal moments in executioners’
experience of political and social events16. As political, economic, and social events unfold,
these pivotal moments, or stages, result in qualitative innovations of the executioners’
representations of their situation. And in return, these representations strongly orient their
actions. Participation in mass violence is thus a phenomenon of emergent intentionality and
progressive radicalisation, both in terms of macro-politics and the objectives of individuals,
who, little by little, consent and participate in a collective criminal enterprise. The violent act
constitutes, of course, the most tragic dimension, but must be understood as the culmination
of a complex process.

 17 An excellent presentation of this idea can be found in Welzer (2007).

19The overall effect of this sequence is to transform the representational frameworks of the
executioners, who progressively appropriate the idea of elimination of an out-group that is
progressively dehumanized. However, the conditions necessary for the violence remain a
major enigma. These conditions are dependent on individuals’ moral and physical capacities,
or resources, to commit violent acts. Without pretending to resolve this issue here, my
thoughts on the question of the banality of evil is an extension of the sequential model and
the idea of emergent intentionality, and aims at providing a framework for the development
of a heuristic instrument that would elucidate the participation of executioners in mass
violence. In executioners, the banality of evil appears to take four forms: banality of
similarity, banality of familiarity, banality of ideas, and banality of routine. As we shall see,
and has been extensively described in the literature 17, executioners’ progression towards
mass violence is paralleled by a transformation of their referential frameworks — particularly
their moral framework — and a tendency to situate the Other beyond their circle of moral
obligation. However, their prior habits and lifestyles must also be taken into consideration, as
they have enabled the development of capacities, or skills, that facilitate  de facto acts of
violence. It is nevertheless crucial to note that these habits and lifestyles are in no way
inherently criminal: it is simply a question of it being easier to wield a machete if you have
been doing it every day of your life than if you have never held one in your hand before.

Banality of similarity
20One form of banality characteristic of the executioners is what can be termed the banality
of similarity. This concept signifies that the praxis, or procedural specificity, of the violent act
— for example, the use of a knife or machete — is not, at first glance, all that strange to
those who commit it. In Rwanda, for example, the executioners interviewed by the journalist
Jean Hatzfeld spoke of their familiarity with the machete they used daily prior to the
outbreak of the 1994 genocide. One of them mentioned that:

 18 Élie, in Hatzfeld (2003 44) [translation].

[...] Rwandans are taught how to use the machete when they’re children. Catching a machete in
the hand is something we do every morning. We cut sorghum, we cut banana trees, we clear
vines, we kill chickens. Even the women and little girls use the machete for minor tasks, like
splitting firewood. The same motion is used for different purposes, and we never lose our touch. 18

21Thus, because the motion of the machete was the same in both daily and mass violence
contexts, the use of the machete became dissociated from its real consequences. Concretely,
the use of machetes to kill chickens facilitated habituation to the use of this tool to kill
people. Similarly, data obtained from the ex-Yugoslavia, where a significant proportion of the
executions performed during the mass violence of the 1990s were carried out with a knife,
indicates the existence of strategies designed to desensitize the militias, whose goal was to
 kill. This is clear from the following excerpt from a filmed interview with a young Serb,
Borislav Herak, in which he describes his part in the killings:

 19 Kanovic, Arnaulatic (1992) [translation].

We were trained in the city of Bioca by Pustivuk Risto. He was a police officer in Sarajevo. He
demonstrated with pigs. He would pick up a pig by the ears, throw it to the ground, take a knife,
and cut its throat. And we all did it. Throw a pig to the ground, take a knife, cut its throat. 19

22Although nothing suggests that Borislav Herak had been accustomed to executing pigs,
our field studies, particularly those in rural Serbia, revealed that cutting a pig’s throat is a
common, entirely normal, practice to the people of this region. Thus, by the time the
executioners were called upon to put their experience into action, they had become
desensitized to executing humans with knives or machetes, regardless of the precise
moment at which they had become socialized to do so, either long ago or more recently. This
desensitization took the form of a separation of, or at least a distinction between, the act,
strictly speaking, and its consequences: thanks to their “training”, which in fact had never
involved practice on humans in non-belligerent contexts, once the act had been committed
against men, women and children, it was considered only in light of its technicality,
dissociated from its criminal and moral consequences. The act was not perceived as
“unusual” per se, because in contexts outside of the war or mass violence, it was never
committed against humans. This is one of the logics that underlies the absence of thought
characteristic of executioners: like Eichmann, the executioners exclude de facto the victim
from their moral compass. Nevertheless, the banality of similarity cannot account for the
complexity of all the logics responsible for the absence of thought in executioners. It is only
part of the answer, and must be understood in light of other forms of banality — notably the
banality of familiarity — which complement it and potentiate it.

Banality of familiarity
23The banality of familiarity is intimately related to the banality of similarity, as it refers to
the habituation to the details of killing living beings. Furthermore, it is a manifestation of a
certain type of professionalization that raises the threshold of insensitivity to, or tolerance
for, the decorum of these practices. In daily life, empathy for animals, which should not be
confused with anthropomorphism, is counterbalanced by legitimate justification: for
example, pigs are killed for food, in keeping with local customs and traditions, and as a way
of satisfying fundamental human needs.

 20 Rémy (2005).

 21 Arborio (2001).

24The banality of familiarity serves to dissociate the act — not from its ultimate
consequences (taking the life of a person), but from the scene that the executioner must
tolerate. This question has been studied in the context of the professionalization of so-called
“dirty professions” — e.g. slaughterhouse workers 20, medical professionals21, the police,
crime-scene investigators — which require individuals to develop coping mechanisms for dirt,
filth, and discomfort. This phenomenon can also be detected in the accounts of Rwandan
executioners, notably Élie:

 22 Hatzfeld (2003, 44) [translation].

The iron is silent, whether you use it to cut a branch, an animal, or a man. Really, a man is like an
animal, you cut his head or neck, and he dies. In the beginning, those who had already killed
chickens, and especially goats, had an advantage, which is understandable. Later on, everyone
got used to this new activity and got just as good. 22

25Here, once again, the professionalization over time is an expression of a preoccupation

with the development of techniques and skills related to an activity which — because only
 certain occupations (butchers, medical professionals, police, etc.) perform it in our societies
— is unusual. This professionalization leads actors to concentrate on the act’s instrumental
role — i.e. its ability to satisfy the necessities of daily living — and thus suppress or
disregard its collateral effects. In a way, this is a form a cognitive dissociation or wilful
blinding, barely conceivable to those who have had not been habituated to this decorum. We
strongly felt this during our field studies in the ex-Yugoslavia, where we witnessed the
slitting of a pig’s throat. Some field notes:

[...] the farmer, his son and [a friend of the family] prepared the equipment necessary for the
execution of the pig: a sledgehammer, a knife scarcely longer than the palm of a hand, and a
tripod taller than a man, equipped with a winch and cable with a hook at its end. The three men
were concentrated; they talked together for a few seconds, and then the father signaled to the
third one to go get the animal. Events unrolled rapidly: the man returned from the barn with a
pig, a good-sized beast, and led it to [what would be] the site of execution; the son struck it with
the long-handled sledgehammer; the pig collapsed on its side, shuddering, and the father,
standing behind it, immediately wrapped his left arm around its head and with an extremely rapid
motion of his right hand slit its throat. The knife stroke was so effective that the pig had no time
to struggle [...] [translation]

 23 Hatzfeld (2002).

26I found this scene anything but banal, as it was the first time I had attended such an
event. And the anxiety I felt stemmed precisely from this lack of habituation to such scenes
— or, equivalently, a lack of professionalization — that would have allowed me to approach
the scene from a technical rather than emotional perspective. Equally, this episode evinces
professionalization of a different sort, in that there was a specific division of labour, which
served to dilute individual responsibility, Furthermore, every the actions of every protagonist
were interrelated: leading the pig to the site of execution was not fatal in itself, nor was
stunning it, and the act of execution once the pig was on the ground was part of a farmer’s
weekly, if not daily, routine from time immemorial. The division of labour was just as
noticeable in Rwanda, where one of the Hutu villagers’ tasks was to drive the Tutsi victims
from the marshes and thus steer them, like a herd of animals, to the Interahamwe militia
who systematically executed them23.

Banality of ideas
 24 For example, Straus (2006).

 25 It has recently been alleged that the attack could have in fact come from the Hutu camp: Le
Monde, (...)

 26 For the designation of internal enemies, or intimate enemies, see Conesa (2011).

27This form of banality encapsulates the consent to the very idea of the action to be
performed, that is, the elimination of a group in order to preserve order. As a corollary, the
elimination is understood as a defensive action. The very idea of group elimination does not
arise out of some sort of “big bang”, and must be understood as the endpoint of a
progressive exclusion of the group from public life, and ultimately, from the executioners’
moral compass. This exclusionary mechanism generally occurs when there is resentment,
antipathy, or frustration between two groups. The resentment is provoked by a change in the
social, political, or resource balance between religious, ethnic or national groups within a
society. In the case of Rwanda, several studies have documented the progressive
transformation of the Hutus’ perception of their Tutsi neighbours 24. This process can, of
course, be observed elsewhere; however, understanding of the Rwandan violence requires
an appreciation of the numerous episodes of Hutu-Tutsi conflict over the years. Briefly, the
political relations between Tutsis and Hutus became severely strained in the 1990s,
particularly following the attempt by the Front Patriotique Rwandais (FPR), a Tutsi
organisation, to reconquer territory from neighbouring countries. The Arusha Accords, signed
by both parties in 1993, were intended to calm the strife and establish a basis for the sharing
of power between the two groups. However, tensions between Tutsis and Hutus exploded
 following the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, on April 6, 1994,
when his airplane was downed by missile fire. Although this cannot be considered the sole
cause of the genocide that was to come, the assassination was nevertheless a trigger for
massacres, which were generally presented as acts of war by the Tutsi FPR 25. From that
moment on, Hutu propaganda and hate media, especially Radio Télévision des Mille Collines,
progressively designated the Tutsi internal enemies, cockroaches, illness, that had to be
immediately eradicated26. Thus, it was expected that, in order to maintain order and protect
society, the Hutus would eliminate the cockroaches and the source of the epidemic — which
is to say, their Hutu neighbours. Élie’s testimony, once again, is eloquent here:

 27 Hatzfeld (2003, 216).

In 1991, the headlines of the military newspapers called, in bold letters, for the complete
elimination of the Tutsi, identified as the natural enemies of the Hutu. Afterwards, the targeting
continued, slowly increasing in intensity, on the radio. In political meetings, we were taught not to
share parcels or goods with Tutsis. Not to help them farm, not to marry them, not to let them get
away with anything in day-to-day affairs; because one day, we would get around to killing them
and these relationships would be hindrances. But we received no information about the date or
way27.

28In this context, the banality of ideas can be seen in the fact the executioners did not
eliminate individual Tutsi fathers, mothers, friends, neighbours, children etc., but rather
the collective category of “Tutsi”, i.e. cockroaches and illness. What is frightening here is
that, like Eichmann, the executioners were not motivated by racist ideology. To consider
them fanatics is to advance a “non-explanation”. Instead, this violence should be seen as an
action — pest control — that the public not only understood to be necessary but
also expected to be performed. Although the executioners materially benefited from their
participation in the mass massacres, they appeared to see their acts as a sort
of prophylaxis that preserved both order and their own place in society. This in turn led to
dissociation, observable by the framing of the act as the elimination of a danger, not of
humans.

Banality of repetition
29Finally, there is the banality of repetition — the normalization and habituation that
develops in parallel with participation in massacres and killings. It should be noted that this
normalization is inversely proportional to the mobilisation of the executioners. As a result of
the banality of repetition, tasks or acts are considered only in terms of their instrumental
value, in this case their effectiveness in maintaining social order and protecting society
against vermin. This is the ultimate form of moral weakening, in which individuals see their
acts only in terms of their technical virtue. This normalisation is a further mark of
professionalism: now, the executioners’ concentration on their tasks blocks out any
awareness of their surroundings and of the larger enterprise in which they participate. The
nature and application of this idea are particularly clear in the testimonies of Ignace and
Joseph-Désiré, both of whom were executioners:

 28 Hatzfeld (2003, 56) [translation].

In the beginning we were too worked up too think straight. Afterwards, we were too used to it. In
the state we were in, it didn’t bother us to think that we were in the middle of cutting up our
neighbours, one by one. It became a matter of course. They were no longer our long-time good
neighbours, people who had offered us a drink at the cabaret, because they shouldn’t have been
there. They had become people to be gotten rid of, if I can put it that way. They were no longer
what they had been, and neither were we. We weren’t embarrassed about what we were doing to
them, or about the past, because we weren’t embarrassed about anything 28.

 29 Hatzfeld (2003; 60) [translation].

It was a madness that took on a life of its own. You got on board or got out of the way, but you
followed the crowd. If you had a machete in your hand, you didn’t listen to anything. You forgot
 everything, starting with your intellect. This repeated program freed us from thinking about what
we were doing. We went out and came back, without a thought in our heads. We hunted because
that was our daily routine until everything was over. Our arms drove our minds, or in any event
our minds never spoke up29.

 30 At least, this is what Élie’s testimony (Hatzfeld, 2003, 56) indicates.

30Thus, the more the executioners killed, the easier the killing got. To the external observer,
it is this form of banality that is the most troubling. The desensitization and the gulf between
the executioners’ construction of their acts and the acts’ consequences were so great that
they ultimately thought of what they were doing not as killing living beings, but as “a job to
get done”30. This is the paroxysm of “absence”, or blinding, of killers in the face of their
acts.

Conclusion
31With the executioners, as with Eichmann, the disconnect, or gap, between the nature of
the facts or acts, on the one hand, and their underlying logics, on the other, is striking.
There is a major cleavage between the acts’ horror and the perpetrators’ ordinariness —
“ordinariness” because the executioners were neither monsters nor psychopaths, despite
what one might think, and because of the customary, daily or weekly, nature of the acts. It
is precisely in this second sense that the idea of banality appears to have the most to offer
from a heuristic perspective. It is precisely because they are routine and part of the daily life
of the executioners that these acts are immune to the psychological — and thus moral —
activation experienced by every person committing them for the first time. It appears that
the executioners — like Eichmann, who devoted himself to tasks situated within the limited
horizon of bureaucratic work — fixated on acts that were overwhelmingly seen as technical.
But in this case the fixation on technicality appears not so much situational — although
Arendt provides little detail on Eichmann’s pre-war life — as an extension of the
executioners’ habits, lifestyles, and socialisation in the use of weapons: the machete for
subsistence purposes in Rwanda, the knife as an essential traditional tool in the rural
Balkans. Regardless of whether it is due to the situational context or to the habits —
or habitus — of the executioners, this monopolisation of the mind by technical minutiae leads
to the same consequences, namely tunnel vision and an absence of the disposition to live
with oneself, in a silent dialogue between “me and myself”. In short: an absence of thought.
Thus, to paraphrase Arendt in her letter to Karl Jaspers, the executioners are actually stupid,
but then, somehow, they are not: the banality of evil is situated between the rock of a
premeditated moral deficit and the hard place of a disposition to cruelty or hatred of the
Other, a disposition which emerges from familiarity with the tools and acts related to
execution. This conclusion, offered with all due modesty, appears to have been as true for
the Nazi bureaucrats as it was for the Rwandan or Serbian executioners.

32The preceding discussion may of course be open to debate from a number of perspectives.
Firstly, from a methodological perspective, it requires validation with a larger data set and a
much more systematic analysis. In addition, the original terminology is open to debate:
Arendt herself regretted having labelled the fruit of her research “the banality of evil”, a term
which caused a public uproar and set off a wave of indignation. Despite these questions, the
notion of the banality of evil is a rich starting point for knowledge construction.

 31 The functional conceptualisation is based on the idea of competition between bureaucratic actors
an (...)

33Let us now return to this article’s raison d’être, and see how the preceding discussion
relates to Jean-Paul Brodeur’s interest in Arendt’s thesis. From a conceptual perspective, the
banality of evil lends itself to contrastive approach which, although in its infancy, appears to
me a promising approach to the phenomenon of executioners. It provides an alternative to
intuitive analysis, and a framework for an approach to the mental gymnastics required to
embrace both the reflexive indignation attendant on the horror of one’s acts and the
meticulous analysis of the (revolting) ordinariness that surrounds these acts. These
gymnastics allow the reconciliation of these two a priori antithetical terms related to the
participation of executioners in mass violence, and the emergence of a new qualitative
 concept. This in turn creates a framework for an understanding of the role of executioners
that is fundamentally different from conventional situational, dispositional, and functional
conceptualisations31.

34The notion of the banality of evil allows us to see violence, hitherto exclusively viewed in
terms of its hic et nunc, as part of a vast phenomenon which should not be seen as
exclusively vertical, i.e. in terms of a complex relationship between actor and system, but
rather horizontally, between actor and the actor’s habits prior to the mass violence. And it is
precisely by interrelating these two dimensions of the phenomenon that the banality of evil
provokes thought while providing a basis for a response to the philosophical astonishment
elicited by the participation of executioners in massacres. This marks a transition from a
conceptual to an epistemological approach.

 32 Tanner (2011; 2012b).

35From an epistemological perspective, the thesis of the banality of evil sets the stage for
the development of a new understanding of executioners: under this new paradigm,
our understanding is based on analyses of the executioners’ history, experience,
socialisation, and even, dare one say, habitus, rather than merely the collective nature of the
executioners’ actions and the role of the bureaucracy. Additionally, this conceptual
framework implies the need to ground reflection and knowledge construction related to
executioners in a broader temporal horizon than the crisis period, which has generally been
the norm. Although they are not of course the sole explanations for escalation to concrete
action, lifestyles have important heuristic value, as they draw attention to the absence of
morality demonstrated by the executioners on the killing fields, a phenomenon that has
generally been tacitly assumed but not empirically analysed. This wider perspective, in terms
of the duration and collective context of violence — on Arendt’s conjecture has allowed me to
extend my thinking, begun in my earlier work 32, on the roles of time, sequence, and
executioners’ individual development. Possible future work could consist of further thought
on the notion of technical compliance and its connection to executioners’ daily habits, as well
as more rigorous identification of the role of modernity, a factor considered essential by both
Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman. Indeed, it should be apparent from the preceding discussion
that the prerequisites for the paradigm of banality extend well beyond the
civilisation/bureaucracy construct, which is now merely one of many etiological factors.

36In closing, I would like to emphasize that although Jean-Paul and I never had the
opportunity of writing together on this question, this article was largely inspired by the
confluence of his philosophical astonishment by the question of mass massacres, and
Arendt’s thinking. I hope that this outline will inspire further research on this question, which
would no doubt immensely please Jean-Paul Brodeur.