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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.
Calling some sorts evil "banal" is not an attempt to downplay it. It's an attempt to remind people that not all evil comes in obvious forms, like your armed robber or Amon Goth (who would likely be considered a caricature if he weren't real). That e.g. the people duly recording the shipments of prisoners and Zyklon B and bodies burned, and then going out and having an office party, are evil as well. These people in other words.
I don't think that's the point of banality of evil as given in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions. This would also apply to an armed robber unthinkingly killing a clerk because they happened to be in the way of their actual goal of committing a robbery. Now, maybe because the goal is still a robbery they have an evil intent, so this isn't the best example. However, in most cases, unthinkingly committing evil acts because not doing so is an obstacle to your goals tends to get called evil without the banal qualifier.
Eichmann's actions were not ordinary or boring. He was not some random low-level bureaucrat unthinkingly crunching numbers or a labourer loading Zyklon B. His position was fairly high-up, including his involvement in the Wannsee Conference.
From Eichmann in Jerusalem:
Arendt's hypothesis was not about intent in the conventional sense, especially since Eichmann's behavior even during the trial pretty clearly demonstrated that he a) new what was happening and b) contributed knowing that his actions furthered those purposes. He went to extremes in the pursuit of his orders, and even squabbled with other sections of the Nazi power structure to play a larger role in killings at points. He wanted what was happening; he just didn't have a 'good' or even a bad reason for it, or recognized (or, more likely, cared about) the line from what he did to what was happening around the corner.
((Which makes it an awkward comparison for COVID stuff, beyond the vastly different scales. I don't think you're complaining solely about the desk jockeys intimately involved in vaccine passport design as separate from the police arresting 'trespassers' or people filling skate parks with sand.))
It's just that for Eichmann, it was a day job: he rode a desk and signed papers, talked with foreigners, and tipped his hat. What did it matter if the vast majority of them died months, weeks, or days later? He struggled at length against the accusation during the trial that he'd beaten a Jewish child to death with his own hands (and before the fall of Nazi Germany, ), described at length how he was shocked at a few carloads of carbon monoxide victims or even the simple description of the methodology... but he nodded and shrugged that he signed papers sending thousands and tens of thousands to camps he knew they would die in.
((This is part of the reason Ward Churchill's "Little Eichmann" comment raised so many hackles. Churchill spoke only in the sense that the victims of 9/11 profited from America's "global financial empire", rather than actually finding any connection to the actual military interventions he had blamed them for. Eichmann claimed to be a cog in the murder machine, Churchill turned the term to cover anyone who was in the same room. Of course, no one has since tried to cancel the man for dropping the hard-g in the same essay: who whom.))
The failure for Eichmann was not inability to achieve superhuman heroic ends, like Schindler or de Besange (or John Rabe, for a more awkward example). Nor was he the perfect sociopath who would accept any inhumanity when done against undesirables. He just seldom cared. There were a few times he was shocked into doing the right thing, when he barely noticed it and then returned to form a few weeks later. He "worked in transportation", rather than pulled the trigger on a gun or picked out 'workers' from 'undesirables', nor did he originate orders; he just did it knowing that every optimization or every indifferent decision sent men and women and children to death. In Arendt's theory, Eichmann had a zeal, but it was the zeal of a social or business climber. He'd slap a man for unprofessionalism, but get queasy at the sight of blood.
((I'll caveat that this is somewhat controversial: it's possible and maybe even likely that Eichmann was at least trying to play the fool by the time of his capture and trial, as some alleged recorded interviews from when he was in hiding in Argentina give a different aspect than a lot of his trial testimony, and suggest a more actively malicious role.))
That's not, notably, a good description for Hoss. Hoss did pull the triggers, sometimes literally in some early executions, and as commandant he ordered deaths, and ordered his men to experiment with more optimal methods of mass gassing. Even before WWII, Hoss lead a group of men to kill a school teacher. If Eichmann was the sort of villain whose unwillingness to get his hands dirty made him a little too pathetic to play center stage, Hoss very much wasn't. The 'best' you could say for the man was that he was not a monster every hour of every day of the week, and to some extent this is important to remember.
There are people who are close to the sort of 24-7-365 evil that seeks to prove themselves a villain, a la Beria (the 'buried his rape victims in his wife's rose garden' seems almost too on the nose, but I wouldn't be surprised, and it's pretty well-supported that he did take his work home with him). And there's a certain temptation to think of these sort of people like movie villains, who come with hissing red blisters or at least erudite snakes. But in reality, you get a lot of monsters that revel in inflicting the worst they can to innocents, and then wash their hands and plan a charming lakeside resort.
But I'd push back against suggesting any of them are less than monsters.
Ward Churchill was eventually cancelled for falsely claiming to be a Native American. The question of "What are the who and whom which explain why was Ward Churchill treated differently from Elizabeth Warren?" is interesting and I don't know the answer.
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