Furry FeetNotes: Adolph Eichmann versus Sinéad O’Connor
Speaking truth to power and fighting the real enemy.
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
Hannah Arendt from The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt was a historian and political theorist, whose career was birthed from post-World War II Germany. She was a brilliant woman.
She was also a concentration camp survivor.
She wrote prolifically. I’m currently dipping into her most well-known tome The Origins of Totalitarianism. Dense yet fascinating stuff — and all too relevant in 2023. I started her book because earlier this week I stumbled across a couple of fascinating New Yorker articles Ms. Arendt wrote back in 1963.
She was present in 1961 when the newly formed State of Israel put Adolph Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem for genocide and crimes against humanity. He was found guilty and hanged. Arendt’s New Yorker articles are worth the read time (they are quite long - so plan on a couple of hours).
One would expect a man like Alfred Eichmann to be the mustache-twisting caricature of evil. Hard, cynical, stone-cold killer. The man was directly responsible for the death of 5 million people. He is the one who orchestrated the moving and murdering of Jewish people in Europe, calling his system for Jewish elimination The Final Solution. He should have been the real-life incarnation of Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lector.
Arendt found the normal human behavior of Eichmann, both alarming and strange. She termed this “the banality of evil”. No mustache-twisting. Just a middle-aged man who had spent his life doing a string of jobs, from working in his father’s mine to traveling salesman. The architect of “the final solution” for Jews in Europe being just another feather in his resume.
Alfred Eichmann came across as just another schmuck followed orders and did his job.
Who also did horrific evil.
He was eventually hanged for it.
But he spent the last ten years of his life in relative normalcy, working as a shift manager at a BMW in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina — as if nothing ever happened.
And we know we shall win
As we are confident
In the victory
Of good over evil
Bob Marley
Sinéad O’Connor died this week.
As I’m writing this, we still don’t know why or how.
She was my age.
O’Connor was a once well-known Irish singer/songwriter from the late 1980s/early 1990s. With a signature shaved head, her voice was melodic and haunting. Her emotional and gutsy cover of the Prince song “Nothing Compares 2 U” won awards and spent a lengthy amount of time as a number one song.
But none of this was really what we knew her for.
She's most remembered for tearing up a photograph of the Pope on live television, after singing a poignant a Capella version of Bob Marley’s classic song, War.
I confess, in October 1992 Saturday Night Live was not in my regular TV viewing. We just had our first child and purchased our first home. The American Dream, you know? I was working three jobs and living life. Just another schmuck following orders. News of the O’Connor incident came over the radio, and I vaguely remember thinking, “That seems unnecessary and over the top.”
I honestly hadn't given SNL affair another moment’s thought until this week.
What I didn’t know or understand at the time was that she wasn’t desecrating the Papacy for views or likes or subscribes (most of which didn’t exist in 1992 as we know it today — but whatever the PR equivalent would have been in those days). Abuse inside the Church was coming to light. This news was mostly a trickle here and there. Little streams of rumors and allegations which fully erupted 10 years later when investigative reporting from the Boston Globe uncovered rampant abuse and cover up in the Church, all over the world. Since then we’ve learned, it’s more than a Catholic problem. She used her unique platform to hold power accountable.
And that was the beginning of the end for O’Connor.
She was booed off the stage at a Bob Dylan tribute show a week later. Her music was never universally popular again and she lived a relatively turbulent life. Her struggle with mental health affected relationships at a multitude of levels. She went through as many religions as marriages, suffered from agoraphobia, and had to live through the suicide of her teen-age son.
But Sinéad O'Connor was never one for falling in line and following orders.
She was no schmuck.
When told later in life that she’d most certainly ruined her career with the SNL incident, her reply was telling. She claimed she did not ruin her career — the record company executive who was hoping to buy their third home in Antigua because of her, on the other hand? Yeah, she admitted freely she likely ruined that guy's career.
Sinéad O'Connor spoke truth to power and made zero apologies for that.
History tells us she was right.
Quite the opposite for Adolph Eichmann. In the end, he strangely painted himself as a victim and not a perpetrator.
“I prepared and planned, everything went wrong,” he said. “My personal affairs as well as my years-long efforts to obtain land and soil for the Jews came to naught. I don’t know—everything in my life was as if under an evil spell; whatever I planned and whatever I wanted and desired to do, fate prevented it somehow. I was frustrated in everything, no matter what.”
From The New Yorker, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Pt. 1 Hannah Arendt, 1963
The moral courage for speaking truth to power may ruin careers.
But it will always be better to live with truth that stands on the right side the story history will tell.
Sinéad O’Connor’s words after abruptly scattering fragments of Pope John Paul II over the SNL studio floor were:
Fight the real enemy.
Words that were brave, bold and true.
And more relevant than ever.
Where do you need to speak truth to power today?
You are doing better than you think.
You have more potential than you know.
B.
This is my every Sunday-ish newsletter containing bits and bobs of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with this week. Every month I also send my complete notes from a book I’ve read, so you can decide if you want to read it too! Like the old version of Cliff’s Notes. But more Hobbit-like. Furry feetnotes.
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I am a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, specializing in non-profit and cross-cultural business and leadership. Check out the Growability® Podcast at all your favorite podcast places.
Interesting analogy. BTW, a young woman, Kathy McN----h, did a thorough major report on Adolph Eichmann back in the 60s. It was a big news deal when he was caught. Ask her about it sometime.