Not Belonging to the World: Hannah Arendt Holds Firm
laphamsquarterly.org
laphamsquarterly.org
Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism in 2020: A Short Guide to Mass Movements and Ideology - Daniel Grasso
https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Origins-Totalitarianism-2020-...
From an Amazon review, which I agree with: "Grasso has clearly and effectively translated the twentieth-century’s totalitarian crisis into the modern day.
As someone who struggles to grasp Arendt’s philosophy, I appreciate Grasso’s synthesis of her thoughts and how he relates them to our modern political climate. He does this in a very objective/unbiased way—exposing growth areas in both conservative and liberal thought. Overall, this is a fair, helpful, thoughtful, and necessary work."
Over the last couple of decades, there have been a few posthumous hit pieces on her, mainly by post-marxists who are among the architects of our current wave of the totalitarian strategy, and whenever I read attacks on Arendt I always ask, "why, what are you planning?"
Perfect? No. But between Arendt and Solzhenitsyn, however this wave today plays out, we can't say we weren't warned.
The "problem" I have with her writings is that, in their precise rationality, they feel utterly bleak. Yes, there are all these terrible dynamics at play, generating totalitarianism from loneliness and monsters from banal people - so what should we do? Is there hope? That doesn't seem to come up. So the reader is left somewhat depressed. (Or at least this is what I remember feeling when I read them, 10-15 years ago.)
It's the same in the U.S. Google "banality of evil" to see how well-known her Eichmann article is. I've heard Chomsky refer to it in a significant percentage of the talks he's given.
My mom is a senior care provider and one of her clients is an elderly Indonesian immigrant. He immigrated to the U.S. either during or shortly after the genocide. She was telling me stories about how he's always railing against the "communists" in the city, the city being San Francisco. She couldn't quite make sense of his complaints and opinions until I "translated" things for her.
Later, when I learned about that film, I sat down with her to watch it. Countless times through the film she was like, "OMG, that sounds exactly like what [her client] says".
[1] Ethnic Chinese were victimized in Indonesia long before those events, which is why Indonesia has never had as distinct an ethnic Chinese community as most other SE Asian countries--conversion to Islam and assimilation into the local culture was much more common. I suspect that many non-ethnic Chinese victims during the "Communist purge" were believed to have had Chinese ancestry, and perhaps did indeed. Again, similar to the Holocaust.
It lead to this scene they shot for the movie-in-a-movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-ta9To14yw, during it an actor gives Anwar (the killer) a medal and thanks him for executing him, because that sent him to heaven.
It helps to understand something about the Chinese diaspora elsewhere in SE Asia. They generally didn't assimilate culturally and didn't adopt native religions like Christianity or Islam. Adoption of Buddhism (e.g. Thailand and Myanmar) was more common, but Buddhism doesn't preclude ancestor worship or other common quasi-religious practices and thus doesn't require rejecting Chinese culture. Similarly, Straits Chinese (Peranakan), from a much older wave of immigration, did adopt Islam but nonetheless fashioned an entirely distinct culture of their own. Such partial assimilation made it easier to cast doubt on the sincerity of their faith. Again, proving the rule, in Vietnam most Catholic conversions were ethnic Chinese, thus much about French Indochina and the Vietnam War doesn't make sense without understanding the ethnic components. Over 80% of post-war Vietnamese refugees were actually ethnic Han Chinese. This also goes a long way toward explaining why both Malaysia and Indonesia refused to give refugees safe harbor, often towing their boats back out to sea where they were pillaged and sunk by pirates.
Come on, surely there are some dark (right wing extremism) patterns in german police too, especially eastern germany - but I really doubt you would find many police men, who would murder on order. Eager to shoot certain population in case of doubt maybe, but not plain murder. That is unnecessary exageration.
If you're interested in reading Arendt, I reccommend Between Past and Future. The chapter called "What is Authority?" is where my political views come from when I'm thinking clearly.
More recently, I read what is supposed to be Arendt's magnus opus and one of the greatest works of political philosophy of the last century, The Human Condition. I was surprised to find, given the reputation, that it was a conceptual mess. Arendt builds much of the book around a distinction between 'work' and 'labour', but they are neither mutually exclusive nor clearly specified. Her attempt to argue otherwise just leads to compounding error.
That aside, I do like Arendt's short book 'On Violence', which is simple but powerful.
The stories of the dozens of children locked up (parents already killed) and starving and how the authorities had to tell the guards how this is upsetting the population and to not let it happen again - that is, let the population see the conditions the children are in.
Or the mass shootings of groups of kids all the way down to toddlers.
That's why she's still relevant. It's not just that a thing happened and what the author thinks about the prevailing opinion of why that thing happened, but what was the historical, social, cultural context that led to it? That sort of thing she had a talent for explaining, without worrying about who she offended the ideology of in the process, as the article states.