Edward S Herman's landmark essay, The Banality of Evil, has neverseemed more apposite. "Doing terrible things in an organized and systematicway rests on 'normalization'," wrote Herman. "There is usually adivision of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the directbrutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals... others working onimproving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesiveNapalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It isthe function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize theunthinkable for the general public."