Comment by Der_Einzige | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Der_Einzige | Hacker News Reader

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My issue with Arendt is that she's almost uncritically a defender of American-republicanism as opposed to European attempts at it. I'm not sure that the American Revolution was as uniquely awesome as she claims it was. I think that it's just as possible that it could have ended up with extreme totalitarianism much as the french one did, had things gone only slightly differently.

Beyond being an overzealous fan of the USA (ironically on the grounds that it forces plurality as opposed to radicalism even though recent politics is slowly eroding this arguments). She also was pretty fking Racist, and while this may be hard for her fans to imagine, the quotes were pretty obvious when I was reading her works.

‘The right to free association, and therefore to discrimination, has greater validity than the principle of equality,” the context is for arguing in support of segregation in the US South - https://www.normfriesen.info/forgotten/little_rock1.pdf

"To force parents to send their children to an integrated school ) against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies-the private right over their children and the social right to free association. " - end of that same article!

Honestly, I like a lot of her writings but she was very flawed.

Yeah, I pretty much agree. I thought it was interesting to read that essay, and the others published in Crises of the Republic, alongside Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. Both texts have a lot to say that's useful. "Lying in Politics" seemed even more useful, especially when thinking about social media.

There are a lot of well thought out, interesting takes on the world in her writing, but there are also a lot of unstated assumptions about the world. Those assumptions seem fair-enough for the when and where of her writing, but they are not the same assumptions that a lot of us might hold today.

> Beyond being an overzealous fan of the USA (ironically on the grounds that it forces plurality as opposed to radicalism even though recent politics is slowly eroding this arguments).

I think her approval of the US had more to do with our substantial zionist political base/control. She was a major zionist player after all. If china or russia had a major zionist political base, she would have been raving about them.

> She also was pretty fking Racist

As I mentioned, she was a zionist. People who think they are part of a special chosen group better than everyone else, whether it is zionists, nazis, kkk, etc tend to be racists.

She wrote a lot about racism and certaintly wasn't racist by her own standards or the standards of the day. If you want to retroactively apply modern notions of racism to someone who lived last century...that's your perogative, but is it really a game worth playing?

I agree with you that she was wrong about integration though it's more complicated than you're letting on. She raises interesting points in the essay you linked. There is an inevitable conflict between freedom (of association) and equality -- she's just on the wrong side of that conflict in this specific case.

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