That was Hannah Arendt’s phrase for the Nazis who (for example) could condemn thousands of Jews to the gas chamber without finding anything to object to except the amount of paperwork they had to fill out. People for whom running a death camp was as much a dull bureaucratic exercise as running a warehouse.

I was reminded of this by a story in The Nation about Dawn Leamon, a KBR employee in Iraq who alleges that in January she was sodomized and gang raped by coworkers and soldiers. She reported the incident to her supervisor (who told her to keep quiet about it–she didn’t go public until she was at another, larger base where she felt safer), then was told by an Army investigator that her supervisor had been in the room a couple of times during the night she was raped. And like the rest of the company, is insisting that nothing happened, there shouldn’t be any stories written about this, perhaps she’s making it up

Assuming her story is true, did Leamon’s boss know what was going down? If so, how did he walk away without stopping it? How do the corporate spokespeople writing to the Nation and telling them they shouldn’t be printing the story sleep knowing they’re covering up for rapists? Why is that a better solution than rooting out and punishing the guys who did this?

Even if her story isn’t true, there are countless identical, proven-true stories that are: People who saw a rape in progress and turned a blind eye. People who covered up for the boss, or the company or the community. And I suspect didn’t have any trouble sleeping soundly afterwards.

Sometimes our capacity for rottenness horrifies me.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 5:43 am and is filed under Injustice, Sexism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.