Hiding Behind Banality

I've never thought much of Hannah Arendt, so it was nice to see Ron Rosenbaum in Slate taking her to task for the shallow concept of "the banality of evil:"

Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically.

However, I think Rosenbaum takes the argument too far.

Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on.

This isn't about banality, it's about belief. It's fairly common for people to do horrible things but not believe they're doing evil. People are very good, in fact, at justifying their actions. (This doesn't mean they can't be held responsible--in fact, this is a good argument for why they should be held responsible.)