Milgram and Arendt turned the obedience plea into an indictment of everyone

Evidence

A kind of synergy developed between the symbol of Arendt’s Eichmann and the symbol of Milgram’s subjects, invoked in discussing everything from the Vietnam war to the tobacco industry, and, of course, reflecting back on discussions of the Holocaust. It was in large part as a result of the acceptance of Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann (with an assist from Milgram) that “just following orders” changed, in the American lexicon, from a plea in extenuation to a damning indictment. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 1992

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Focusing on obeying subordinates ignores genocidal initiators and degrees of evil — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 2007