Yeah, you asked the same question and the answer has not changed. What do you expect? There's no bad take in saying that death camps are relevant to any discussion of Eichmann and the most notable feature of the Nazi regime. I genuinely don't understand what your issue is, your entire behavior here is inscrutable.

It's extremely pedantic to suggest disabled people can't be responsible for what they say and need to be handled with kid gloves. The fucking ironic thing is I'm also disabled. Does that mean you need to delete your comment and agree with everything I say? Or am I owed the dignity of being treated like anyone else arguing a position?

Present day Germany is not fascist. Words have meaning and if you don't know what fascism is there are books that could help you. Calling present day Germany fascist misconstrues history and the present and makes us less informed than we would be by having a proper analysis of what is going on.

Because death camps are the most notable feature of the Nazi regime.

I said "most notable," and you thought that meant "there's no right to discuss its [other] qualities." So you misinterpreted the phrase quite seriously.

I have read the book. The person I'm replying to very specifically said Nazism is banal, which is what I took issue with.

"When we look at society today, people didn't change. It is exactly as it was at the time of Nazist regime."

They are saying Nazism's qualities are humdrum, quotidian, unsurprising, and perpetual rather than specific and historically circumscribed.

I'm always shocked when people with poor reading comprehension so confidently accuse others of misunderstanding.

I specifically said you can compare, but the comparison made obfuscated both points of reference rather than illuminating anything. I became a historian because I'm convinced it's methodology is the correct one for precisely these kinds of questions.

I explained that history as a profession emphasizes uniqueness due to it being an empirical discipline, and generational permutations of typical trends isn't a thing they do. That's not the same as incommensurability. It's fortunate that history has contingency and particularity, if we like the idea that things could be different than they are. But we don't focus on particularity because it's comforting, but because it's informative.

I said the exact opposite of "set apart from history." I offered some of the particular historical conditions that allow us to understand the events. By generalizing between situations as diverse as Nazi Germany and 21st Century Europe or America you misunderstand both -- and misunderstanding the present is quite serious because we might want to do something to change it.

Historians tend to historicize. That means first treating particular events using an empirical method and understanding them on their own merits. Then synthesizing explanations, comparative studies, and so on. They do this because it's the best way to do history. Generally they would avoid the morally loaded and aggrieved tone you're taking. Saying something is peculiar and particular doesn't preclude comparison, and it is not anjudgment of gravity, seriousness, or worthiness of study.

Imagine not understanding what "most notable" means.

Well, historians get to decide these things and having been one, they would all disagree.

Eichmann literally organized transportation to death camps. I am not ad libbing death camps, it is the context of the discussion and the most notable feature of Nazi Germany.

The immediate context of the end of WWI, longstanding German and European traditions of antisemitism, the rise of an attempt to explain individual human prospects through genetics (and control populations through eugenics), Romanticism, the invention of nationalism through folkloric identification with an imagined past, pro-natalism for a select population (directly related to eugenics) and a corresponding ideology of Lebensraum, a dissatisfaction with Weimar democracy and a willingness to put faith in an outsider dictator... there are a lot of things going on with Nazism.

I don't think the Nazis were "normal stuff but more" or even an extreme version of stable "human nature" or something. They were a particular and brutal regime born out of peculiar historical circumstances.

I don't feel that at all... then again I have degrees in history so I have had occasion to think about this a little more maybe.

Your comment is actually still public, so it's bold to contradict what you just wrote.

Nothing you are going through is at all similar to Nazi death camps, it's extremely insensitive to suggest it is. Have some perspective.

Edit: just saw your edit. Yeah. I've read Eichmann in Jerusalem. That's the whole premise of this discussion.

It's also important that Eichmann was a lying sack of shit mounting a desperate legal defense and certainly participated willingly in everything he did and shared the Nazi ideology.

Taking a surface reading of Arendt's idea of the banality evil (which isn't clearly the best description of all behavior we can call evil) and extrapolating the idea that Nazism was banal and equivalent to your trouble getting recognition and all the services you might want as a disabled person in a rich country is actually kind of insane.