I read this essay today about US government employees who it says carry out policies which harm people around the world. It invokes Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil":
https://starkrealities.substack.com/p/ofacs-banality-of-evil-small-us-agency
It made me think of Ward Churchill's essay "Some People Push Back", On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which suggested the people working in the World Trade Center on 9/11 were "little Eichmanns":
https://cryptome.org/ward-churchill.htm
I'll point no fingers at either group of employees. It's up to them and their families to decide their level of culpability, if any.
But all three publications now make me think about my own role as a former nuclear submarine officer, one of whose duties was to validate orders for the launching of nuclear weapons. Had such orders ever been given and executed on my watch, what would that have made me?
Some may say that anyone in such a position is hardly "banal"; after all, the whole point of our role would have been to literally unleash hell on earth. But to be honest, I never thought of it that way at the time. Unlike the recruiting slogan, it was just a job ... not really an adventure. [In fact, I admitted as much during my job interview with ADM Rickover.]
Right now there are hundreds of military officers out there who are ready, willing, and able to launch such weapons, complete with super-fuze warheads in a preemptive first strike attack against the latest putative "axis of evil". What should we call them? Will there even be anyone left to make such a determination once the missiles fly?
Shouldn't we all right now stop and think about what we're doing and what we might be called upon to do ... before the time comes? Or should we all just carry on doing our jobs efficiently, just following orders?
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