339. Gerald and Patricia Posner on Evil

<p>Shermer and the Posners discuss: the nature and banality of evil • Are we all potential Nazis? • Mengele, Eichmann, Himmler, Hitler • <em>The Pharmacist of Auschwitz</em> • the Holocaust • the Stanford Prison Experiment • Milgram’s shock experiments on obedience to authority • Abu Ghraib and other war crimes • restorative justice • the opioid crisis • the Vatican and the future of Catholicism.</p> <p>Gerald Posner is an award-winning journalist who has written twelve books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist <em>Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK</em>. His 2015 book, <em>God’s Bankers</em>, a two-hundred-year history of the finances of the Vatican, was an acclaimed <em>New York Time</em>s bestseller. Posner has written for many national magazines and papers, including the <em>New York Times</em>, <em>The New Yorker</em>, <em>Newsweek</em>, and <em>Time</em>, and he has been a regular contributor to NBC, the History Channel, CNN, CBS, MSNBC, and FOX News. His other books include <em>Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.</em>, <em>Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi-U.S. Connection</em>, <em>Mengele: The Complete Story, Hitler’s Children: Sons and Daughters of leaders of the Third Reich Talk About Themselves and Their Fathers</em>, <em>Warlords of Crime: Chinese Secret Societies — the New Mafia, and Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11</em>. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, author Trisha Posner.</p> <p>Patricia Posner is a British-born writer who has collaborated with her husband, the author Gerald Posner, on twelve non-fiction books, including <em>Mengele: The Complete Story</em> — a biography of Dr. Josef Mengele; <em>Hitler’s Children</em> — a 1991 collection of interviews with the children of Nazi perpetrators; and most recently, <em>God’s Bankers</em> — a financial history of the Roman Catholic Church. Her work has appeared, among other places, in the <em>Miami Herald</em>, <em>The Daily Beast</em>and