Evil as essentially charismatic and cosmic

Norman Mailer's Portrait of a Monster as a Young Artist (Hitler) by JM Coetzee (NYRB) by Rich on Thu 01 Feb 2007 07:55 PM PST Permanent Link

George Van Vrekhem from Auroville recently published a book about Hitler in which he follows a line of thought which argues for the causal factor of cosmic evil to explain Adolph Hitler. It is the second book which I am aware of which explains Hitler's evil as occult in origin, the other book was published in the 70s or early 80s and is called Hitler the Occult Messiah. These books treat evil as essentially charismatic and cosmic. This is a contrasting point of view than the routinization or the banality of evil which resulted from a study of one of the Third Reich's top death camp administers Adolph Eichman made by Hannah Arendt The latter perspective is much more in vogue among academics to explain the phenomena of evil in human beings. Among these reasons for this I believe is that it does not invoke a metaphysical explanations to account for the phenomena evil; evil is just as much a matter of the everyday lifeworld of technocrats as it is the work of Mephisto. Well now Norman Mailer weighs in on the subject on the side of cosmic evil to explain the phenomena of Hitler, here is a review by Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee: