One of the most famous phrases of contemporary times is the "banality of evil". It was coined by the Jewish-German philosopher Hannah Arendt in her book on the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Like all great aphorisms, the phrase captures a contending swathe of contested meanings. For example, can evil ever be banal, that is, normal and ordinary to the point of being unremarkable? Can the perpetrators of a great evil like the Holocaust ever be reduced to the level of banality? If so, can an evil human be absolved of his criminality at least somewhat because he indulged in something that had become customary after all, so to speak? Would absolving him not mean rationalising the evil itself? If so, what was incriminating about Eichmann, who had gone about his genocidal work not out of an innate belief in the Nazi project of racial purity but as an ambitious bureaucrat intent on advancing his career in the system?

Arendt's work answers such questions with a searing critique of totalitarian rule. "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds," she says. Eichmann was an example.

Why does the distinction no longer hold? The American philosopher Judith Butler explains the point in her mapping of moral responsibility. In an article for The Guardian, she recalls Arendt and the Eichmann trial: "There were at least two challenges to legal judgment that she (Arendt) underscored, and then another to moral philosophy more generally. The first problem is that of legal intention. Did the courts have to prove that Eichmann intended to commit genocide in order to be convicted of the crime? Her argument was that Eichmann may well have lacked 'intentions' insofar as he failed to think about the crime he was committing. She did not think he acted without conscious activity, but she insisted that the term 'thinking' had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality."

Butler continues: "Arendt wondered whether a new kind of historical subject had become possible with national socialism, one in which humans implemented policy, but no longer had 'intentions' in any usual sense. To have 'intentions' in her view was to think reflectively about one's own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others. So, in this first instance, she feared that what had become 'banal' was non-thinking itself. This fact was not banal at all, but unprecedented, shocking, and wrong."

Butler concludes this part of her agument in this way: "By writing about Eichmann, Arendt was trying to understand what was unprecedented in the Nazi genocide - not in order to establish the exceptional case for Israel, but in order to understand a crime against humanity, one that would acknowledge the destruction of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, communists, the disabled and the ill. Just as the failure to think was a failure to take into account the necessity and value that makes thinking possible, so the destruction and displacement of whole populations was an attack not only on those specific groups, but on humanity itself."

Hence, Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil" is connected intrinsically with Butler's definition of thinking itself as a "reflective mode of rationality", with the idea of a "historical subject", and with the notion of a "political being". The failure to think is the failure of belong to a nurturing collectivity that creates the very premises of thought and the possibilities of action. These terms come back to haunt everyone down the generations.

Consider Bangladesh. No one would term the misdeeds of the previous regime as amounting to genocide. However, what has come to the fore since the overthrow of that regime is a concerted statist effort to preserve the power of a ruling elite against the people by eliminating dissidents physically or ideationally. Those dissidents ranged from secular intellectuals to religious activists and more, whose liquidation involved the wholesale use of the state apparatus against those deemed to be against a single individual who was equated with governance which was elevated to statehood in turn. There were people in the bureaucratic structure of Bangladesh who did not buy into those illogical equations but who worked for that nefarious enterprise nevertheless. Like Eichmann, all that they wanted was to progress in their careers or keep their jobs safe at least. But like him, they were complicit in the overall banality of evil. They were complicit because they had reneged on the terms of the human contract that demands that you, I and everyone else behave like political beings, like historical subjects who are capable of a reflective mode of rationality.

Bangladesh is changing rapidly. The outlines of a new order are shaping up already. Someone fresh will be in charge after the next general election. That someone will create new ways of belonging to Bangladesh and of working for it. But that someone might also be tempted to fall back on old ways of achieving and preserving power.

Beware then - because, for every Eichmann, there will be a greater Arendt. The banality of evil shall not prevail.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com