Banality of Evil - Why Naming Names of Bureaucrats is Important

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_Evil

The Banality of Evil is a phrase coined in 1963 by Hannah Arendt in her
work Eichmann in Jerusalem. It describes the thesis that the great
evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not
executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who
accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with
the view that their actions were normal.

Government officials may be well meaning folks who view their actions as routine and First Nation demands as extreme.I found the following passage helpful in making sense of the "we know what First Nations need" thinking that is endemic in the mining industry. Enjoy.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/BanalityEvil_Herman.html



Slavery and Racism as Routine
When I was a boy, and an ardent baseball fan, I never questioned, or even noticed, that there were no Black baseball players in the big leagues. That was the way it was; racism was so routine that it took years of incidents, movement actions, reading, and real-world traumas to overturn my own deeply imbedded bias. Historically, this was a country in which human slavery was firmly institutionalized and routinized, with abolitionists in the pre-civil war years looked upon as violent extremists by the dominant elites and masses alike in the North.
The rationalizations for slavery were remarkable. A set of intellectuals arose in the South before 1860 that not only defended slavery, but argued its moral superiority on the grounds of its service to the slaves, to the disadvantage of the enslaving Whites! Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, ... is a superb account of how U.S. science at the highest levels constructed and maintained a "scientific" case for racism over many decades by mainly innocent and not consciously contrived scientific charlataury. The ability to put aside cultural blinders is rare. And it appears that what money and power demand, science and technology will provide, however outrageous the end.
Mainstream history has also successfully put Black slavery and oppression in a tolerable light. A powerful article by the late Nathan I. Huggins, "The Deforming Mirror of Truth: Slavery and the Master Narrative of American History, " in the Winter 1991 issue of the Radical History Review, shows well how the "master narrative" in historiography has normalized Black slavery and post-1865 racism. Slavery was a "tragic error" (like the Vietnam War), rather than a rational and institutional choice; it has been marginalized as an aside or tangent, rather than recognized as a central and integral feature of U.S. history; and it has been portrayed as an error in process of rectification in a progressive evolution, rather than a terrible permanent scar that helps explain the Southern Strategy, the current attack on affirmative action, and the enlarging Black ghetto disaster of today.