Articles By

Margaret Randall

Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil

I wish I had gotten it together to write this while “Hannah Arendt” was still playing at The Guild, our city’s only remaining and consistently heroic arts theater. Then I could have urged anyone who hadn’t yet seen it to do so. Unfortunately, this brilliant film is no longer being shown. Perhaps popular demand might bring it back. “Hannah Arendt,” even for those who missed its Albuquerque showing, has a profoundly important lesson for us all: heinous crime is not only the province of the Hitler’s, Pinochet’s, and Bashad al-Assad’s of this world. The banality of evil is one of human nature’s least understood components…

What’s in a picture

The photo that appears at the beginning of this piece was taken in the rubble left after the April 24th 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza, an eight-story building in Savar, Bangladesh where a number of sweatshops housed clothing workers in abysmally unsafe working conditions. The day before that tragedy, the building had briefly been evacuated when cracks were noticed in its walls. But people were forced back to work; the unceasing fever of profit had to be maintained.

Industrial disasters are all too common in a world greedy for profit…

Inform yourself

Inform yourself. The responsibility of every good citizen.

But how?

Way back in a time before the Rabbit Hole opened up and we all passed into that other world where up is down and in is out, it seemed simple. You bought a morning newspaper or listened to the evening news. You thought you were getting the information you needed because you believed your government, church, even the corporations urging you to buy, wanted you to be informed.

It’s been a complex and highly sophisticated road from there to here…