Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

councils set up by the Nazis), she showed how the argument for the “lesser evil” has
become one of the most important “mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and
crimes”. She explained that “acceptance of lesser evils [has been] consciously used in
conditioning government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance
of evil as such”, to the degree that “those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly
that they chose evil”. 3 Against all those who stayed in Germany to make things better
from within, against all acts of collaboration, especially those undertaken for the sake of
the moderation of harm, against the argument that the “lesser evil” of collaboration with
brutal regimes is acceptable if it might prevent or divert greater evils, she called for individual
disobedience and collective disorder. Participation, she insisted, communicated
consent; moreover, it handed support to the oppressor. When nothing else was possible,
to do nothing was the last effective form of resistance, and the practical consequences of
refusal were nearly always better if enough people refused. In her essay “The Eggs Speak
Up”, a sarcastic reference to Stalin’s dictum that “you can’t make an omelet without
breaking a few eggs”, Arendt pleaded for “a radical negation of the whole concept of
lesser evil in politics”. 4
In Arendt’s writings the principle of the “lesser evil” is presented as a pragmatic compromise
and frequent exception to ‘common ethics’, to the degree that it has become the
most common justification for the very notion of exception. It is in this seemingly pragmatic
approach that the principle of the lesser evil naturalizes crimes and other forms
of injustice, acting as a main argument in the state’s regime of justification – people
and regimes tend to invent retroactive explanations for atrocious actions. Furthermore,
Arendt saw the calculation and measurement of goods and evils, like statistical trends
in the social sciences, as diminishing the value of personal responsibility. Once ethics is
seen in the form of an economy, when issues are put into numbers, they can be changed
and turned around endlessly. And lastly, the terms of the “lesser evil” are most often
posed by and from the point of view of power. Using a formulation she conceived with
Mary McCarthy, Arendt explained: “If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your
friend or I will kill you’, he is tempting you, that is all”. 5
It is important to note that when speaking about the political options available to people
living in the postwar western states, Arendt was much less damning about the principle
of the “lesser evil”. She implied that these options did include various forms of compromise
and measure. 6 In other words, she described the “lesser evil” as a false dilemma
when faced with a totalitarian regime that itself has no concept of the “lesser evil” (totalitarians
simply camouflage their acts as lesser evils), but as a part of the very structure
of politics in the context of Cold War western democracies. Whether we accept them or
not, the distinctions she implied point to a possible difference within the term, and could
lead us to open up the concept further. The various historical and philosophical uses of
the “lesser evil” idiom demonstrate that it meant different things to different people at
different periods in different situations. There is a difference between masking an act of
perpetration as a “lesser evil”, choosing the lesser of two evils and trying to make the
world a little less evil while still pursuing a cause.
***
I would like to divide the use of the idiom “lesser evil” into two – particular and general.
The particular case is presented to a person or to a group of people as a dilemma
GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN