Over time, political community has attempted to contrive various ways to avert tyranny. These have met with varying levels of success. Perhaps the most recent innovation – the invalidity of appeals to “superior orders” – seems to have failed completely.
Society’s relationship with tyranny is a long and complicated one. Several hundred years ago, constitutionalism – the notion that government is and should be limited by law – emerged as a liberal development that quickly became the default mode of political governance that we still benefit from today.
More recently, after the Second World War, liberalism attempted to instil another notion to guard against tyranny: the baselessness of the doctrine of superior orders, also known as the Nuremberg defence, also known as “just following orders”, or “only doing their jobs”.
A short time later, when Adolf Eichmann was being prosecuted for his role in the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt also drew our collective attention to the related phenomenon of the “banality of evil”. Effectively, this amounts to doing evil without intending to do evil, in the ordinary course of what – to the actor – is normal and uncontentious business.
As with constitutionalism, humanity collectively appeared to embrace the rejection of the insidious idea that one could justify abhorrent conduct by appealing to superior orders. No, we as society (ostensibly) concluded, you have to know the difference between right and wrong, and if you are instructed to do wrong, you must refuse.
And yet, in 2024, “they’re only doing their jobs” remains as accepted an excuse as ever.
Two recent events highlight how society only pretends to take sentiments like “never again” seriously. We have not in fact internalised the notion that evil will not be allowed to become banal, or allow evildoers to escape accountability by appealing to superior orders.
Edward Kieswetter
The first was Edward Kieswetter, the Commissioner of the South African Revenue Service (SARS), who recently and euphemistically complained about the “losses” to the fiscus resulting from online retailers like Temu utilising loopholes to avoid paying taxes.
When I criticised him online for what I considered this unabashed evil – in the midst of widespread corruption and disastrous misallocation of scarce economic resources by the state – I was told that he was simply doing his job.
Kieswetter does not, after all, write tax law in South Africa. He is a bureaucrat implementing instructions received from Parliament. When he gets to the office, and his staff report that the institution he is sworn to serve is not meeting the targets associated with its most important performance indicator – ensuring taxpayers are paying the taxes they are liable for – there is nothing contentious or unordinary about him implementing measures to ensure SARS performs efficiently.
And yet, it is exclusively because Kieswetter is doing his job passably well that the abusive and harmful South African government is able to function and implement damaging policies that condemn millions to poverty. It is only because Kieswetter does his job passably well that businesses have to shutter due to a high tax burden that does not translate into service delivery.
Kieswetter, by uncritically “collecting revenue” and handing it over to a hopelessly corrupt civil service, is facilitating the grand buffet from which the comrades and cadres eat – when they are not actively destroying the economy with bad policy.
Remove Kieswetter, and this sorry situation comes to an end.
Of course, one might say that in the absence of Kieswetter there would just be a different, perhaps more morally dubious, taxman. There are only two certainties in life, and all that.
But this is a profoundly immoral way to approach the subject – even though it might, technically, be correct – since it would enable any perpetrator of the Holocaust to have invoked “if I didn’t do it, someone else would have” as a defence at their trial. It is correct, but it does not absolve them of the injustice they perpetrated.
Socialists on the ballot
The second, more recent, event, is the outcome of the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election.
Nicolás Maduro lost the election, but his electoral council (unsurprisingly) declared him the winner anyway. As I wrote previously, Venezuelans chose this. They might have wanted to get rid of Maduro in this election, but they had already invited socialism into their society and government with open, democratic arms in 1998.
As I observed on Twitter, Venezuela voted its way into socialism, and it will now likely have to shoot its way out.
What is relevant about this is that, at some point in July 1997, a presumably normal, morally balanced official in the Venezuelan electoral council – when that institution was still reasonably independent – approved and registered Hugo Chávez’s political party, the Fifth Republic Movement (United Socialist Party today), as a legitimate participant in the electoral process.
This has happened in South Africa as well.
Sometime in 2014, an official at the Electoral Commission was sitting at their desk checking boxes on the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)’s application, registering them as a party entitled to contest elections in South Africa. In 2023, it happened again, when an official did the same for uMkhonto weSizwe (MK).
These officials at the Venezuelan and South African electoral authorities were simply “doing their jobs”. They are told by their superiors, and their superiors by Parliament, that if a political party satisfies the stated requirements, it must be registered. It is a mechanical exercise. It is business as usual. It is ordinary. It is uncontentious.
And yet, this uncontentious, ordinary act by an electoral official doomed Venezuela to repression and a decades-long humanitarian crisis. In South Africa, we sit, constantly, on the razor’s edge of having the EFF or MK in government, which will spawn a situation here similar to what occurred in Venezuela.
Remove the electoral official, and this devastating situation would not have come to pass in Venezuela and will not come to pass in South Africa. Yes, other, actually evil officials might do the job if the objectors refused to, but that does not absolve those who do not refuse. Refusal is required.
Only culture
To Arendt – what she meant in part by referring to the banality of evil – “the consequence of non-thinking is genocidal, or certainly can be”. Not thinking, and simply doing, is disastrous.
And, ultimately, Edward Kieswetter and electoral officials in Venezuela and South Africa (and elsewhere) are unthinking. Their inability to think past the “job” and understand the broader implications of their conduct spells doom for society.
That a criminally and ideologically corrupt government should not receive tax revenue, and that socialism is a crime against humane society that ought never be regarded as a valid participant in the democratic process, are phenomena that require thought.
And yet, society is okay with unthinking. We even find ways to rationalise it to ourselves, calling our unthinking the “independence” of tax and electoral institutions.
The promise we made to ourselves in the ruinous aftermath of the Second World War is only rhetoric, not the deep cultural realisation it was meant to be.
If it was a deep cultural phenomenon that “taxmen do not collect money for the corrupt” or “authoritarians do not get registered as parties”, much of the strife people experience around the world today would be gone.
After all, we do have such deep cultural phenomena, and it works.
If a known rapist and paedophile moves into a neighbourhood, the community’s behaviour changes. The fact that that person served their time is only passingly relevant. There is a substantive cultural resistance against acknowledging this person as a valid participant in society. If they manage to remain in the neighbourhood, they do not get invited to neighbourhood braais, and they do not receive a welcoming apple pie from the housewife across the street. They only get to do menial jobs – certainly nothing white-collar if employers know their history.
This is all to say that society can, and does, internalise certain principles and practices deep in its fabric.
Pretence
After the 1940s we pretended, as society, that we would not accept the excuses of “they’re only doing their jobs” or “they’re just following orders” again. We pretended to be outraged that anyone would have regarded these to be valid excuses in the first place.
But, in fact, we do still regard these as valid excuses. Our social fabric has not yet come close to absorbing the principle that “following orders” is not a valid excuse.
In coining the term “banality of evil”, Arendt was communicating the idea that existing legal systems at the state and international levels were not, truly, prepared to address crimes and injustices that had been rendered – primarily through law – to be a banal, ordinary, and normal part of everyday life. She was correct back then, and though we act as if we took it to heart, her concern remains valid today.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pingnews/1857858274]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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