This is the parable of the depersonalization of a human being who blindly and unconditionally followed a doctrine, becoming the walking stick of the bureaucracy that led him. His fable is about manufacturing the most obedient Soviet individual of all, and his understanding, which in the terms of Hannah Arendt, does in no way symbolize the justification for his criminal acts.
For Arendt, the phrase “understand what happened” only means “rationalize what happened,” since the work of the intellectual is to think as objectively as possible, moving away from reproducing discourses that deny the reality of the facts and that process the ideas of forgiveness or forgetfulness
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