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"Little Eichmanns" is a phrase used to describe persons participating in society whose actions, while on an individual scale may seem relatively harmless even to themselves, taken collectively create destructive and immoral systems in which they are actually complicit. The phrase gets its name from Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat who unfeelingly helped to orchestrate the Holocaust. The use of "Eichmann" as an archetype stems from Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil; she wrote in her 1963 book '' Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil'' that Eichmann relied on propaganda rather than thinking for himself, and carried out Nazi goals mostly to advance his career. She called him the embodiment of the "banality of evil" as he appeared at his trial to have an ordinary and common personality and displayed neither guilt nor hatred. She suggested that this most strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and fundamentally different from ordinary people. ==Published examples of usage== Poet Anne Sexton uses "Eichmann" as a metaphor representing one's own guilt and murderous impulses, first (specifically as "little Eichmanns", perhaps the earliest usage of the phrase) in "Live" (1967):〔. Reprinted and analyzed in: 〕 She reiterates this theme (simply as "an Eichmann") in "The Wonderful Musician" (1971):〔. Excerpted and analyzed in Horváth (2005), p. 117.〕 Lewis Mumford collectively referred to as "Eichmanns" the people willing to placidly carry out the extreme goals of socio-political "megamachines", in ''The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine'' (1970): John Zerzan used the phrase in his anarcho-primitivism essay ''Whose Unabomber?'' in 1995: The phrase gained prominence in American political culture several years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when a controversy ensued over the 2003 book ''On the Justice of Roosting Chickens'' (republishing a similarly titled 2001 essay) by Ward Churchill, shortly after the attacks received renewed media scrutiny. In the essay, Churchill used the phrase to describe technocrats working at the World Trade Center: 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Little Eichmanns」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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