The death last week of the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal gave media commentators yet another opportunity to race around the rat-run of the morally trite. If I have to read one more sententious utterance about Eichmann and the "banality of evil", the witless cliché every posey pseudo-intellectual unfailingly reaches for when discussing the Third Reich, I will not be held accountable for my actions, writes Kevin Myers.
There was nothing banal about Eichmann, and only Hanna Ardendt's cursory appearance at his trial allowed her to coin a phrase that has since entered the banality of academe. Eichmann was a sophisticated, dedicated and brilliant man; he was proof that evil at its apex is often complex - indeed, needs to be complex if it is to be successful. But Arendt reduced him to a two-dimensional, tiresome little universalised caricature, which lives on wherever people wish to sound profound. (The banality of evil: Ah yes, heads nodding gravely, how very true.)
What is truly banal is the way Western liberal society has turned Simon Wiesenthal into a secular saint and the lightning conductor for all our guilt about political mass murder in the 20th century. His tireless investigations into Nazi war crimes are held as proof that Western democracies care: genocide will never go unpunished again! Murderers may never sleep safely in their beds, for fear of the international policeman's hand on the slumbering shoulder, the gun-barrel in the ear, the whispered words: "You're under arrest".
In fact, Simon Wiesenthal's career proved the converse is true. In part, this was because he was a remorseless self-publicist whose claims were often fantastic: indeed, the former head of Mossad Isser Harel complained that Wiesenthal had no role whatever in the capture of Eichmann. Whether he had or not, his single-minded pursuit of Nazi war criminals has created the fiction that war criminals can know no safe sanctuary, thereby blinding the world to the greater truth that the majority of genocidal operations of the 20th century were not by "fascist" regimes, but by communist ones; and communist murderers for the most part were - and still are - able to spend the rest of their lives sleeping soundly in their beds.
For the extermination of entire species of inconvenient human beings was not the invention of Hitler and the Third Reich. The first person in the 20th century publicly to enunciate mass murder as policy was the Jewish Bolshevik Gregory Zinoviev, who in September 1918 declared: "To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must win over to our side 90 million out of the 100 millions of the inhabitants of Russia under the Soviets. As for the rest of them, we have nothing to say to them: they must be annihilated."
The model-genocidalist of the 20th century, the true proto-Eichmann, was the communist Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich. Just as, on the one hand, Eichmann cannot alone be held responsible for the death of a single Jew - for that, after all is the nature of bureaucracy - on the other, it is impossible to say just how many people Kaganovich was complicit in murdering by execution, working to death and by deliberate famine. Some figures go as high as 20 million, with maybe 1 million of them his fellow Jews - but who can say?
What is certain is that Kaganovich was uniquely central to the horrors of Soviet communism from 1917 to 1957. By the 1950s, he was the only Jew still in high office in the USSR, the rest having been murdered: and though his career ended with Stalin's death, his life did not. He died in his bed in 1991, nearly 30 years after his more notorious emulator, Adolf Eichmannn, had been executed by the Israelis.
So Kaganovich represents all the other communist apparatchiks of the 20th century who - provided they survived the purges of their fellow-communists - had nothing to fear from anyone else. For what fate befell the industrial scale murderers of Mao's China, or Pol Pot's Kampuchea, or Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam or Kim Il Sung's North Korea? How many went to their end with their toes nicely curled up beneath starched and ironed sheets? Almost all of them.
The qualifications for being tried as a war criminal are as follows. You must come from a small, unimportant nation which has been defeated politically or militarily - such as Serbia or Rwanda - or from a large nation which has been defeated unconditionally in world war, which can only mean Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. As for the executioners and murderers of the other totalitarian regimes of the 20th century - just about all of them communist - they can be sure they have escaped or will escape punishment.
Yet there no international outcry over this tolerance for socialist murderers, perhaps for the same reason that it was so chic for so long to be a communist fellow-traveller in Irish life. A sizeable section of what is now the Labour Party were once members of Official Sinn Féin, the "Stickies" who took their party line directly from the Communist Party of the USSR, and no doubt would have vigorously opposed any attempt to bring Kaganovich to justice.
Yet people who had aligned themselves with Franco's Spain or Allende's Chile would never be allowed to enter the political life of Ireland without being mauled by the ex-Stickie left. So how is it that former Stalinists have unfailingly been allowed to airbrush from history their own sleazy, slavish adherence to Moscow, and to the Gulag which was the model for the Final Solution?