During the Second World War, Adolf Eichmann had been the head of Section IV-B-4 in the Nazi SS, overseeing the deportation of the Jews to their deaths. After the war Eichmann escaped to Argentina where he lived under an assumed name. In May 1960, the Israeli Security Service, Mossad, kidnapped Eichmann in Argentina and smuggled him to Jerusalem to stand trial for wartime activities that included 'causing the killing of millions of Jews' and 'crimes against humanity.' The trial commenced on 11 April 1961 and Eichmann was convicted and hanged on 31 May 1962. Arendt's Thesis Enormous controversy centered on what Arendt had written about the conduct of the trial, her depiction of Eichmann and her discussion of the role of the Jewish Councils. Eichmann, she claimed, was not a 'monster'; instead, she suspected, he was a 'clown.' He had no 'insane hatred of Jews' and did not suffer from any kind of 'fanatical anti-Semitism.' She reported Eichmann's claim that 'he had never harbored any ill feelings against his victims' and accepted it as fact. As far as Arendt was concerned, Eichmann simply had 'an inability to think.' She concluded: 'The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and Democratiya 9 | Summer 2007 | 142 | terrifyingly normal.' In a postscript to later editions of the book she added that Eichmann simply 'never realized what he was doing' and that his criminal actions were due to 'sheer thoughtlessness.' Still more shocking to Arendt's critics was her discussion of the Jewish Councils (Judenrat). These Councils were administrative bodies that the Nazis forced the Jews to establish in many occupied countries. The leaders had to follow Nazi orders under threat of immediate execution for disobedience. These orders included providing Jews for slave labour and organising the deportation of Jews to death camps. Although Arendt's discussion of these Councils took up no more than a few pages, it provoked outrage. 'To a Jew, ' asserted Arendt, 'this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.' The next two sentences proved to be the most controversial: Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had been really unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and half and six million people.
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded uses a literary form of legal complaint to argue that Pamela has been injured by B's violent advances. Richardson suggests that these advances should be treated as legal wrongs and that Pamela deserves to be righted. However, her social status and her servitude to her local justice of the peace make recourse impossible. Along with the rest of the characters, B rejects her complaint, insisting instead that it is his reputation that has been injured by Pamela's pleas and that he, not Pamela, stands in need of remedy. Their contest over harm and remedy is an allegory of common law justice for victims of sexual violence: it tends to treat their complaints as malevolent prosecutions, directing legal scrutiny toward the victims of sexual violence rather than toward its perpetrators. Richardson's political critique of the legal system engenders an outsider theory of rights. Institutional accounts of rights suggest that rights are personal attributes of the individual or the unique inheritance of the English subject, but Pamela argues that they arise out of political conflicts over what counts as harm and what harm should be remedied. Historians, political theorists, and literary critics tend to agree that the novel reflects and consolidates these institutional rubrics, but this reading shows that outsider demands for legal remedy pose a unique threat to institutional political power.
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