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Sometimes I wonder if "banality of evil" is just a way to downplay regular evil. In other circumstances, if someone commits or aquiesques to evil deeds for the sake of personal success, that just gets called evil. If an armed robber murders a clerk, they don't get the privilege of having their evil called "banal" even if it was done seeking personal gain. Perhaps confronting the alternative, that some 90% of Germans simply were evil with no qualifiers during the height of Nazi rule, is too politically awkward?
There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns. Then again, maybe banality is still the wrong word for it, given that at every turn they wanted the government to go even further, lockdown harder and for longer, and be even more aggressive towards dissenters.
This is a fairly pointless comment. 'How come a newspaper is discussing the notion of evil when they disagree with my policy preferences?'. You could find someone to make such a comment whoever was discussing the issue; 'there's a certain sick irony to an article in the Mail discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the fuel duty price escalator', or something. You may well regard lockdowns as evil but I don't see the connection between your disagreeing with their position on that front and the discussion of the root of 'evil' generally.
Reducing the false home imprisonment of the entire population to a mere disagreement over policy preferences is like calling the subject of the film a mere policy disagreement. Maybe you do think such actions are just policy disagreements, but if so the entire point of the banality of evil as a concept starts to fall apart. They're not evil, not even banally evil, perpetrators and those who aquiesqued to the holocaust just had a civil, rational difference of opinion that by chance happens to involve imprisoning and then killing lots of Jews, with as much moral weight as preferring rye bread to bagels.
I think only in China were lockdowns severe enough to qualify as “home imprisonment”, as far I know in Western countries you were allowed to leave your house to go buy groceries, walk your dog, exercise (albeit sometimes in a reduced area), etc.
Lockdowns were a case of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency, which does not have the same quasi-universal moral consensus as committing genocide. What makes you be against them in particular? Are you against all government intervention that reduce freedom in the name of safety (making you a libertarian), does it violate some moral principle in particular, or do you think the response was mistaken/ineffective in the case of Covid-19? Are you against /all/ travel restrictions, or would you be fine with some level of social measures (see: closing down non-essential businesses, allowing limited scale gatherings, vs. China-level restrictions)?
You may have a different opinion on the matter, but most people will trade some level of freedom for safety. The motivation for lockdowns was slowing down the spread of the pandemic and potentially saving millions of lives; would you be against them even if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they worked?
Home imprisonment often comes with reasons you are allowed to leave your home. Even prisoners placed in prisons get home leave from prisons, for instance, and nobody would deny that they're not imprisoned. The reason the definition of imprisonment needs to be so broad is because otherwise it allows situations where pseudo-imprisonments can't be challenged by their victims.
To put it another way, I know a relative who was sectioned (is it called that in the US) for two weeks and then recovered and was released. During their sectioning, they actually had more liberties than they did under lockdowns, as they were permitted to go anywhere for two hours a day for any reason, every day. Not to mention access to legal protections if there was reason to believe that the sectioning was done fraudulently.
Nazi Germany justified genocide on the grounds of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency. (Edit: This is not the actual reason but it's the steelman they could make. Nazi Germany didn't recognise personal liberties as a thing at all. Similarly, lockdownist regimes don't actually believe they're "curtailing personal liberties in an emergency" because they don't recognise personal liberties as a thing either. You don't see relevant leaders regretfully apologising for their crimes against human rights just before they go on to commit them, they just go unacknowledged or denied. Further, those who criticize lockdowns for being breaches of human rights do not get the response that they are a regretful breach of human rights but something something utilitarian priorities. Rather, they get called far-right extremists or conspiracy theorists, suggesting lockdownist leaders at least publicly deny that any loss of personal liberties happened at all)
Prior to 2020 there was a quasi-universal moral consensus against false imprisonment. That's why it's in the universal declaration of human rights. It's why there's objections to concentration camps. Or at least there were, until places like Australia started opening them up. Countries have been condemned, sanctioned, isolated etc for far, far less than what many places did in 2020.
Lockdowns do not reduce freedom in the name of safety because they both don't increase safety from covid and also massively increase danger from the government. I am against false imprisonment in particular. The response was empirically ineffective given that countries that declined to do lockdowns saw no ill effect from doing so. I am against all covid-related travel restrictions because governments clearly cannot be trusted with an inch lest they take a mile.
Does this hypothetical serve a purpose? It's like asking if you'd be against the holocaust if Nazi ideology was proven to work. A world in which Nazi ideology was correct does not resemble our own in any way. For a start, there's no hypothetical way for a lockdown to pass a cost-benefit analysis because the maximum benefit is so small compared to the minimum cost. Even if our lockdowns as actually carried out worked and prevented, say... 0.6% of the population dying, the amount of time people were placed under lockdown itself undoes that through QALY losses.
Certainly not 'apologise for their crimes' because obviously an apology for a 'crime' would imply they are wrong anyway, but politicians absolutely constantly stressed that these decisions were not being taken lightly and were only demanded by truly extraordinary circumstances.
Perhaps the most important thing though is that they subjected themselves to the same measures (partygate etc. notwithstanding) - how many high-ranking Nazis subjected themselves to the concentration camps?
Pointing out that politicians obeyed lockdowns, except of course when they didn't, is the equivalent of damning with faint praise. "Disproving with faint proof"?
Partygate was mostly bad because Boris lied to the House not because the infringements were all that bad. He got the fine in the end for a very mild offence indeed, one that I suspect most people were guilty of at some point during the pandemic. It's still unacceptable, but it hardly undermines the point that, in general, they too were subject to the rules.
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Listing all the cases of high-profile politicians ignoring or carving out conveniently politician-shaped holes in restrictions would take a very, very long time. Via wealth, influence, the nature of their job etc, politicians could evade the worst effects of lockdowns. Taken at it's broadest, plenty of high-ranking Nazis did in fact subject themselves to the concentration camp. They just subjected themselves to it in a very different way than prisoners experienced.
Further, from information that has come out about decision-making over time, we know that many decisions were taken very lightly and for very frivolous reasons. For instance, it's a matter of public record at this point that the reason the UK government mandated face masks in secondary schools in England is because Nicola Sturgeon did it. This is not the behaviour of someone who is deeply concerned about violating personal liberties but believes via some utilitarian calculation that doing so is the least bad option.
That was pretty small fry all things considered, and not really a major imposition - after all, in the case of schools in particular they are a governmental institution, so imposing requirements there hardly seems like a grievous blow to personal liberty.
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