From Auschwitz to Academia: The Banality of Evil in the Propaganda Complex of Systemic Ecocide and Genocide

TMS PEACE JOURNALISM, 10 Aug 2026

Koenraad Priels – TRANSCEND Media Service

3 Aug 2026 – When Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, she did not see a monster. She saw an ordinary man, used to executing orders, who had defined himself in a social situation that rendered him open to regulation by a person of higher status. Eichmann was not driven by exceptional malice. He was driven by thoughtless obedience to bureaucratic systems and uncritical conformity to institutional authority. Arendt called this the “banality of evil” — and it remains one of the most unsettling insights of the twentieth century.

Today, that same banality is not confined to the death camps of Auschwitz. It has migrated. It lives in our universities, our economics departments, our law schools, our policy institutes. It wears suits, publishes papers, teaches courses, and claims neutrality. And it is legitimizing a system that is committing systemic ecocide and genocide on a planetary scale.

This is not a metaphor. It is a structural analysis.

The Banality of Academic Evil

Arendt’s insight was that evil does not require exceptional people. It requires ordinary people following ordinary procedures in extraordinary circumstances. The same is true today. Scholars are not monsters. They are ordinary people, used to executing procedures — publishing, teaching, grant-writing, attending conferences — who define themselves in a social situation that renders them open to regulation by the wealth pump.

The result is what one recent article calls “scholasticide”: not just the physical destruction of schools and universities, as we see in Gaza, but the silence, refusal, and normalization that allow genocide to persist. Universities retreat into claims of neutrality, claim complexity, or frame genocide as a matter of debate. In doing so, they abdicate their ethical responsibilities and depoliticize the cause. Academic routines, professional incentives, and bureaucratic procedures turn complicity into an ordinary practice. Genocide becomes intellectually ordinary.

This is not only a failure of individual scholars. It is a failure of the system that selects for and rewards certain behaviors while punishing others. The system rewards those who can prioritize growth over life, shift blame onto the vulnerable, refuse to accept responsibility, and enforce discipline without remorse. It punishes those who name the system for what it is.

Neoclassical Economics as the Propaganda Complex Foundation

At the heart of this academic complicity lies neoclassical economics — the official worldview of the hegemonic capitalist system. Neoclassical economics is not science. It is a cargo-cult science: it mimics the form of science but fails to meet the norms of scientific research. It relies on implausible assumptions, deterministic equilibrium models, and utilitarian ethics. It failed to predict the crisis, failed to explain it, and failed to predict the outcome. Yet it retains its dominance because it legitimizes the existing order.

Neoclassical economics serves as the propaganda complex of the capitalist legalized criminal complex. It fuels mainstream business practices, academe, think tanks, and media. It mobilizes power to distinguish “the true from the false.” It normalizes infinite growth, methodological individualism, and utility maximization — all of which are incompatible with human rights and planetary boundaries. It legitimizes pro-growth and pro-profits policies, but does not go well with efforts toward sustainability, human rights, or ecological limits.

This is not a “market failure.” It is a system success — for the people it is designed to serve.

Rentier Capitalism as a Structurally Criminal System

The global financial architecture is not just ecocidal. It is extractive. Approximately fifteen trillion euros in annual interest payments flows from borrowers — often low-income populations and nations — to financial institutions and wealth holders. Developing countries paid twenty-five billion dollars more to their external creditors in debt servicing than they received in new financing in 2023 — a negative net resource transfer that limits their ability to invest in development. Seventy-one percent of sustainable development finance arrives as debt obligations, while only twenty-nine percent arrives as grants — a debt-sustainable finance trap.

This is not development. It is systemic violence. And it is being legitimized by universities that claim to serve the public good.

Rentier capitalist capture is a structurally criminal and diabolical system. It drives the global polycrisis and systemic violence by incentivizing profit over wellbeing and human rights, and normalizing ecocide, genocide, and mass poverty. It rewards and institutionalizes an antisocial mentality — greed, indifference, rationalized harm — while suppressing the normative prosocial mentality foundational to human rights: empathy, solidarity, care.

This is not a bug. It is a feature of pathocracy.

From Auschwitz to Academia: A Direct Line

The line from Auschwitz to academia is not a metaphor. It is a direct structural line. At Auschwitz, ordinary people followed orders and procedures, committing atrocities on a mass scale. Today, ordinary scholars follow procedures and claim neutrality, legitimizing a system that is committing systemic ecocide and genocide on a planetary scale.

The mentality is the same. Greed, indifference, and rationalized harm — while suppressing the normative prosocial mentality foundational to human rights. The difference is scale. Auschwitz killed millions. The current system is killing billions — and the planet itself.

This is not hyperbole. It is the logical conclusion of a system that prioritizes profit over life, growth over limits, and wealth over wellbeing.

Demanding Radical Accountability

Beyond the banality of evil lies the Nuremberg Now Project: demanding radical accountability for resolving the global polycrisis. Human rights and planetary boundaries must be non-negotiable foundations for social science — not “one perspective among many,” but the baseline for all legitimate social science. When human rights are violated at scale — ecocide, genocide, systemic violence — multi-paradigmatic relativism becomes a form of moral insanity. It allows scholars to say, “Well, there are many ways to look at this,” when in fact the system is killing people and the planet.

Universities must be held accountable. Autonomy without accountability is not a right. It is a privilege that must be earned. Institutions receiving public funds must report how and how well money has been spent, and must demonstrate how they have met national policy goals and priorities. There is no moral basis for using autonomy as a pretext for resisting democratic change or defending mismanagement.

Scholars must be held accountable. When they claim “multi-paradigmatic” openness while ignoring the most serious crimes of the system, they are not protecting academic freedom. They are protecting the wealth pump. They are participating in systemic ecocide and genocide for profit. They have money in their hearts and blood on their hands.

A Call to Witness

This essay is not just scholarship. It is witnessing. And witnessing matters — even when the court says “unassessable,” even when institutions refuse to act, even when the system tries to silence the truth.

_____________________________________________

Koenraad Priels is a Belgian independent researcher developing Doughnut Criminology and Prosocial Orthosociology, and investigating corporate-state crimes against humanity. He is a social-ecological activist whose work focuses on the systemic links between financial architecture, systemic violence, ecocide, and global inequality.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 10 Aug 2026.

Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: From Auschwitz to Academia: The Banality of Evil in the Propaganda Complex of Systemic Ecocide and Genocide, is included. Thank you.

If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.

Share this article: email mastodon facebook 🔗 copy link

This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.

There are no comments so far.