Responsibility and Judgment

Chapter One

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY UNDER DICTATORSHIP

To begin, I want to comment on the rather furious controversy touched off by my book Eichmann in Jerusalem. I deliberately use the words "touched off," rather than the word "caused," for a large part of the controversy was devoted to a book that was never written. My first reaction, therefore, was to dismiss the whole affair with the famous words of an Austrian wit: "There is nothing so entertaining as the discussion of a book nobody has read." As this went on, however, and as, especially in its later stages, there were more and more voices who not only attacked me for what I had never said but, on the contrary, began to defend me for it, it dawned on me that there might be more to this slightly eerie exercise than sensation or entertainment. It seemed to me also that more than "emotions" were involved, that is, more than honest misunderstandings that in some instances caused an authentic breakdown of communication between author and reader-and more too than the distortions and falsifications of interest groups, which were much less afraid of ... read full excerpt from: Responsibility and Judgment ebook