Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

motohagiography

Arendt is a vice of mine, where if I could be considered ideological, it would be the logic of her ideas that I have iterated as a framework for interpreting political experiences. When you challenge at the level she did, you make very powerful enemies. What people really go after her for was not Origins but her assessment of Eichmann at his trial, where by recognizing him as merely contemptible, she simultaneously deprived Israel of a super anti-human monster as an easy foil (edit: to have overcome something huge and evil) for their founding story, and made us each individually responsible for moral complicity in evil, and I think many people (mainly secular, I suspect) treated it as an unforgivable betrayal. They found allies among the marxists in academia she had burned pretty hard with Origins, and her work has been pushed into the backwaters of contrarianism since.

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.

My God yes, we have been warned. But have we listened? And have we told everyone? Is Arendt, specifically Origins, required reading at a majority of public and private universities in the US and Europe? Let alone government high schools, and community colleges? I didn't discover her until recently. Solzhenitsyn also. I still think it's not too late to popularize their work, and explain it's high degree of relevance to contemporary life.

In Europe, as far as I know Arendt is well-known and always popular, particularly on the left.

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.)

> In Europe, as far as I know Arendt is well-known and always popular, particularly on the left.

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.

It's worth looking at who Arendt is not depressing for, but rather, enlightening, and who she provides a pragmatic set of analytical tools for.

For a great (if that's a word for it) documentary about the banality of evil, The Act of Killing features actual government-sanctioned mass murderers feeling proud about what they did. A review: http://archive.pov.org/theactofkilling/film-description/

Great documentary. I can't remember if this was made clear in the film, but everything makes infinitely more sense if you s/Communist/Chinese/. Like with the Holocaust, it wasn't only Chinese who were targeted[1], but fundamentally that was the principle social dynamic that ungirded the unfathomable dehumanization of the victims.

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.

I think the killers used anything they could grasp, or invent, to justify the murders, at one point they said communists were atheists, so surely they (the killers) were helping the communists to heaven, because... logic.

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.

The "communists" were "atheists" is another way of saying the "Chinese" weren't "Muslim". Except it's all far more banal than that because most people aren't religious zealots; religion is just one of the principle stand-ins for social and ethnic affiliation that also gives their animus a moralistic color.

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.

I was thinking about Arendt and Eichmann recently, in the context of personal responsibility. I think we place less emphasis on personal responsibility as before (and may be wrong), and I wondered if it was partially a consequence of the Eichmann trial.

In German law, the Eichmann lesson was the opposite: it created (or, more accurately : recognized) a moral duty to refuse to follow unlawful orders. They didn’t let Eichmann get away with his just-following-orders excuse. And subsequently, this principle was explicitly added to the law. German soldiers, for example, are specifically instructed by law, and swear to it as part of their oath, that they will refuse to participate in genocide etc.

Unfortunately, this doesn't apply to German police.

Because the german police was recently involved in genocide?

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.

There are warnings everywhere but maybe these works are somehow too dense or abstract or inaccessible for people to spend the time on and map to patterns around them in real life. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is after all, a long read in its unabridged form. But warnings can also be found in more accessible places. For example various TV shows or movies or books (like The Three Body Problem). I wonder if those are a more effective historical education.

Solzhenitsyn also wrote “An Incident at Krechetovka Station”, “Matryona's Home”, and “Live Not by Lies”.

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