Abstract

The eminent philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt once attended a similar trial with a similar plea: the 1961 trial of the mid‐level Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. She portrayed him as an exemplar of what she termed the banality of evil. After his capture in 1960, Eichmann was tried on charges including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Eichmann was an exemplary case of the thoughtlessness and lack of self‐reflection that goes into setting unthinkable atrocities into motion. Like Eichmann, Mao doesn't cut the figure of a hardline fanatic, blinded by ideology. Mao's unwillingness to place the cause ahead of his own desires should indicate that he isn't wholly blinded by fanaticism, as Dresden is. In her characterizations of Eichmann, Arendt noted his odd lack of imagination, his inability, in other words, “to think from the standpoint of someone else.”