By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.
Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt developed
the idea of the “banality
of evil” while observing the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the
central administrators of the Holocaust. Her insight—that immense cruelty can
be carried out by ordinary people performing routine tasks—has shaped how many
of us understand evil today. From her writings, from the lessons of history,
and from our own experiences, we have come to accept that evil is not abstract.
It exists, and we recognize it long before we can explain it.
Most of us sensed this even as children. We learned about good and evil through stories—superhero cartoons, comic books, films. There was always a hero protecting the innocent and a villain bent on destruction, indifferent to the suffering they caused. Perhaps that is why hundreds of millions around the world have flocked to theatres to watch superhero films since the genre exploded in popularity in the early 2000s. People want to see good triumph over evil, because in the real world that victory feels increasingly rare.
The collapse of childhood morality
As we grew older, the simplicity of childhood morality gave way to a harsher truth. Evil was not an abstraction. It was not confined to fictional villains or imaginary worlds. It was a real force—systemic, organized, and embedded in institutions, policies, and individual acts that inflict pain and suffering on innocent people. Like many raised in the West, we were taught a comforting moral vocabulary, that democracy triumphs over tyranny, rule of law over brutality, human rights over barbarism. But the lessons of history tell a very different story.
History catalogued humanity’s depravity and the catastrophic capacity of states and individuals to degrade, dispossess, exterminate, with acts that are inherently evil. We learned about the genocide of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania, the evils of European colonial empires, the two world wars, the Holocaust, and the many other atrocities of the previous two centuries. We were taught how Cold War geopolitics led both blocs to support ruthless dictators, how propaganda laundered cruelty into necessity, and how the language of morality became political camouflage—allowing governments and leaders to commit acts that, at the level of individual conscience, most of us would find abhorrent and unacceptable.
The myth of Western innocence
In Canada, these lessons were never distant abstractions. We learned about the treatment of Indigenous peoples by colonial authorities and later by the Canadian state—how government policies, disease, displacement, and deliberate neglect produced a demographic collapse so severe that roughly 95% of Indigenous people died from the time of first contact with Europeans to the end of the 19th century. We learned how these policies were not accidental or peripheral, but central to the project of building Canada. They included land seizure, forced starvation, residential schools, the pass system, and the suppression of Indigenous governance, and were all instruments of a state determined to eliminate Indigenous presence as a political and cultural force.
And the brutality did not end with the 19th century. Explicitly genocidal policies—child removal, cultural destruction, coerced assimilation, and systemic land dispossession—remained in place well into the late 20th century, with some saying they continue today. The history we inherited made clear that evil was not confined to foreign regimes or distant eras. It was woven into the institutions, laws, and administrative practices that shaped Canada, and it operated within living memory. This country’s national story is often told as one of peace, order, and good government, but the record shows a state willing to inflict organized suffering on a massive scale when Indigenous lives stood in the way of its political goals.
Despite this history most of us likely assumed—naively—that Western societies contained less evil than their rivals. These were the nations that defeated Hitler and ended World War 2, championed civil liberties, enshrined human rights, and built institutions, like the International Court of Justice, dedicated to accountability (at least on paper). We came to believe that the West was less compromised, less willing to inflict mass suffering as policy. We believed its leaders lived by a higher morality and were constrained by law, ethics, and democratic norms.
We were very wrong.
How Western institutions normalize cruelty
In recent years, many in the West have begun to understand that evil is not something that only happens “over there.” It can take root within Western political classes, media ecosystems, academic institutions, and corporate boardrooms. We have learned—sometimes gradually, sometimes through shocking events—that these institutions seek to profit from aggression and injustice, both politically and economically. Whether we want to accept it or not evil can manifest itself in our society among elites who decide what counts as truth, whose suffering is acknowledged, and what forms of violence can be justified or ignored. And once embedded within these structures, once normalized and reinforced by power, it becomes remarkably resilient.
What changed things for many was a single event—the way Western political, media, and corporate elites responded to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel—and the uncritical support they offered for the Israeli campaign of retribution that followed in Gaza. Rage and grief after the attack were expected, even without acknowledging the context in which it occurred—decades of oppression and mass killing of Palestinians, and the Israeli blockade and siege imposed on Gaza since 2007 that had turned the territory into the world’s largest concentration camp.
What was not expected was the speed and certainty with which Western political and media elites transformed one terror attack into a sweeping license for Israel to wage a campaign of genocide against Palestinians. The world witnessed not simply support for Israel’s right to defend itself, but an almost reflexive embrace of a war of vengeance—a refusal to de-escalate, and a demand that everyone accept the fiction that the Israel-Palestine “conflict” began on October 7th, as if decades of Israeli occupation, dispossession, and brutality toward Palestinians could be erased without consequence.
Western framing—and the deliberate elimination of history and context—did real work. As it shut down moral inquiry. By stripping away the historical conditions that preceded the Hamas attack and erasing the political reality in which Palestinian suffering has been sustained for generations, Western leaders and media outlets created a narrative in which only one side’s pain mattered. This framing implied that Western audiences need not consider proportionality, civilian harm, international law, or the ethical distinction between legitimate self-defence and collective punishment. When history can be dismissed so casually and so completely, almost any atrocity in the present becomes permissible.
Bureaucratic violence and the banality of atrocity
This instinct—violent aggression as the default moral position when Western interests or alliances are implicated—is not new. A clear look at the post‑9/11 era shows a consistent pattern, one where Western powers, especially the United States, have been responsible for some of the worst violence committed globally in the last quarter century. The “War on Terror” did not merely fight terrorism, it built a global war machine. Invasions, occupations, drone assassination campaigns, proxy wars, and sanctions regimes devastated entire societies. The stated rationales were variations of the same idea—catastrophic harm to innocent people is justified when done in the name of security, stability, and self‑defence.
The Brown University Costs of War project estimates that post‑9/11 wars have killed more than 4.5 million people, directly and indirectly—more than 90% of them Muslim. This is not an accident of geography. It is the outcome of deliberate decisions, where bombers and fighter jets are dispatched, where troops occupy civilian populations, where sanctions choke societies, where proxies are funded, and where legal constraints on government are treated as obstacles rather than safeguards.
The war in Afghanistan, launched under the justification of hunting Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, evolved into a two-decade-long occupation that ultimately killed up to 360,000 civilians. The war in Iraq—sold to the world through the lie of weapons of mass destruction—became a destabilizing catastrophe where an estimated 600,000 people were killed according to the British medical journal The Lancet. Libya, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, and other countries were pulled into the orbit of Western coercion through the language of counterterrorism and national security. American drone strikes killed thousands of innocent civilians with bureaucratic impunity, and US torture sites proliferated across the globe. International law was not shattered in one dramatic moment, but eroded through a steady stream of exceptions, reinterpretations, and executive decisions—the proverbial death by a thousand cuts.
What stands out is not only the brutality but the moral gymnastics utilized to rationalize what can only be called acts of depravity. The violence was framed as defensive rather than predatory—an effort to protect the innocent rather than an attempt to impose geopolitical order through devastation. But if the West can call mass destruction, the destruction of entire societies, and mass murder “self‑defence” often enough, then self‑defence becomes a loophole with no ethical limits.
Arendt’s insight into the banality of evil has become disturbingly relevant in our time. What stands out in the post-9/11 era is not only the scale of violence, but the way Western governments, institutions and leaders normalized it through bureaucratic language, administrative habit, and moral disengagement. Evil did not announce itself with grand declarations. It seeped into policy recommendations, security memos, public speeches, and the quiet decisions of officials who believed they were simply doing their jobs in trying to defend “Western values.”
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American drone assassination campaigns across the Middle East and Africa, and the network of torture sites that spread across the globe were all justified through technical vocabulary—“precision strikes,” “enhanced interrogation,” “collateral damage,” “security imperatives.” These terms sanitized brutality, turning mass death into a matter of procedure. The machinery of state violence became so routine that killing innocent civilians, destroying entire societies, and shredding international law were treated as administrative necessities rather than the moral catastrophes they were.
This is precisely what Arendt warned about. Evil poses the greatest danger when it is rendered ordinary, when acts of evil are carried out not by fanatics or monsters, but by professionals, government functionaries, and ordinary people who see themselves as moral individuals just doing the job they were given. In this situation cruelty becomes a normal part of day to day tasks. Atrocity becomes a line item, and moral responsibility dissolves into the anonymity of institutional process where people are “just following orders.”
This is the
true horror of the banality of evil. Not that monstrous acts are committed by
monstrous people, but that they are committed calmly, without guilt and with
little afterthought by people who see themselves as having a moral compass—the way
an Israeli sniper shoots a Palestinian child in the head and then celebrates
with his comrades over a meal afterwards at a job well done. And unless we confront that fact directly—the
normalization of evil—we risk living in a world where atrocity is not the
exception, but the norm.
© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
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