Dengl 17 Evil is not, was not, nor ever will be banal

Yet another article or deployment of this deficient term (in the Monthly The Psychologist - January 2008) perhaps adds to the damage the phrase may already have done. The frisson evoked by the formula may emerge from the contradiction in our minds and experience between two notions: one is that evil - the word and the 'thing' itself is bad and potent - loaded highly on two of the three great dimensions of meaning; banal on the other hand is neither evaluatively nor potently extreme. So how, people think, can evil be banal? And if evil is somehow indeed banal - maybe it is not all that evil (in the old sense) as, some investigators seem to say, anybody can, in conducive situations, accomplish evil. Maybe we should learn to live with it.
The solution to the conundrum would have been with us had Hannah Arendt written a phrase to convey that the source or perpetrator of evil may be banal - rather than the evil itself being so. There are some engaging features of prejudice in her perception - for example, that a small, soft spoken man might not contain or inflict evil - but not all perpetrators must be large (ugly) bellowing ogres.
Haslam and Reicher (Psychologist January 2008
http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=21&editionID=155&ArticleID=1291) do, however, in the substance of their article effectively dismiss the apparent paradox - "the true horror of Eichmann and his like is not that their actions were blind ... they saw clearly what they did, and believed it to be the right thing to do". They may have been "blind to" evil itself, or unable to realise and then avoid its essence in their actions. Evil never was, is or will be banal; Hannah Arendt was very misleading in coining such a term; and the evidence by which we can empirically (as well as semeiologically) reject the notion has very helpfully been shown to us.