Hannah Arendt’s lessons are for our times, in fact, for all times.
If you spend time on the net, you’ll no doubt be aware of Hannah Arendt’s famous image, that young, sad woman, cigarette in her hand, staring into the mid distance. You’ll no doubt be aware of her quotation that seems to drop into social media every time there is another political outrage in the USA. “There are no dangerous thoughts,” Hannah Arendt says, ” thinking itself is dangerous.” ” the ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” she also says, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds.”
If you remember the ’60s, you’ll also remember her for her famous phrase: “the banality of evil.” But who was this woman who had the ability to drop the perfect words into the right political context at any given time? She claimed in a missive to Mary McCarthy, that the writing of this book gave her the delayed cure of pain that weighed upon her as a Jew, a former Zionist and a former German. The main thesis of ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ was summed up in its subtitle. Its odd, and sometimes mind-boggling the heated debates of six decades ago that this polemic caused in America was partly due to feelings of guilt, pervasive and unmanageable, yet seldom until then, emerging into daylight.
Arendt faced accusations against the style and tone of the book, published in the New Yorker, were well founded, such as her description of Leo Baeck as the Jewish “Fuhrer.” It was claimed that Arendt had “exonerated” Eichmann but “condemned the Jews.” She had done nothing of the sort. Nor had she assaulted the entire court proceedings; she only attacked the melodramatic rhetoric of the state prosecutor. She never questioned the legitimacy of the trial in Israel by Israeli judges. Nor did she make the victims responsible for their slaughter “by their failure to resist”.
The book undoubtedly seems less controversial now than sixty years ago as a new generation of scholars take a fresh, less artisan look at her writings on Jewish history, Israel and Zionism. She also despaired and bleakly foresaw decades of war and bloody Palestinian and Israeli clashes. Her criticism ran strong on the Ghetto Judenrate by opposing the Transfer of Goods Agreement between the Zionists and the Nazis, an agreement that enabled German Jews to transfer some of their frozen assets to Palestine at highly punitive exchange rate but ran counter to an attempted worldwide boycott of German goods. The Zionists, for whom emigration to Palestine was the overwhelming important priority, justified this violation as a “dialectical necessity.”
She also foresaw the spread of religious and nationalistic fundamentalism among Israelis because official zionist policy in Palestine failed to achieve a peaceful modus vivendi with the Arab population. Her warnings, at the time seemed as provocative as her book on the Eichmann trial, displaying considerable foresight in her moral and pragmatic grounds, that Israel must share power and/or territory with Palestinian Arabs. The reaction in America, long before Israeli diplomats convinced the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai Brith that criticism of Zionism and Israel was a form of Anti-Semitism. Some of the published attacks on Arendt’s book are astonishing in their unbridled vehemence. Interestingly, in Israel the reaction was more complicated and the criticism muted compared with America.
Arendt subscribed to no isms and mistrusted sweeping theories. Evil, as she saw it, needed not only be committed by demonic monsters but by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority. Her article in the New Yorker and later expanded in her book was largely the report of a trial in Jerusalem, an attempt to examine the extent to which the court confronted with a crime it could not find in the law books, succeeded in fulfilling the demands of justice. She concluded that Eichmann’s inability to speak coherently in court was connected with his incapability to think or to think from another person’s point of view. He personified neither hatred or madness, nor an insatiable thirst for blood, but something worst, the faceless nature of Nazi evil itself, within a closed system run by pathological gangsters aimed at dismantling the human personality of its victims. If the state laws don’t protect you or your rights you cease to exist.
The Nazis had succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and malevolent the foundation of a new “righteousness.” In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognised it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm. Conventional goodness became a mere temptation which most Germans were fast learning to resist. If this isn’t prescient about what’s happening in the USA, i don’t know what would illuminate the situation more! Arendt warned, what had been thought of as decent instincts were no longer to be taken for granted. She insisted that only good had any depth. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet—- and this is the horror– it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
It was Eichmann’s “banality” that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of his time, Arendt claimed. His brainlessness was never brought up or discussed in the trial because it was so hard to grasp. But it was also unmentioned because Eichmann’s trial was a show trial, staged by Ben-Gurian for political reasons to prove conclusively that the Holocaust was the largest anti-semitic pogrom in history. Eichmann’s banality was the main reason the book provoked such a storm. But perhaps what causes more incendiary criticism upon Arendt was her brief comment on the Nazi- appointed “Jewish Councils “(Judenrate) who acted in the vain hope they were acting in the interests of local Jews, became inadvertently instruments of Nazi determination to eliminate a maximum number of Jews, with a minimum of administrative effort and cost. What was especially provocative her answers derived from the function of truth in politics. Should the Judenrate have told the Jews the truth, when they knew it, about where they were being transported to? How many might have been able to save themselves had they known the truth? Why didn’t the leaders of the Jewish councils refuse to accept the responsibilities assigned them by the Nazis?
So, what can Hannah Arendt teach us about today?
One: Once you’ve decided that some people’s lives are not important or as valuable as others, you are already walking into trouble which is a feature of totalitarian thinking.
Two: The importance of free thought, of thinking for yourself by means of creating spaces in educational, cultural and institutional, that protect free thought
Three: Hannah Arendt never stopped loving her world. She was a fierce friend, a fierce lover, she strove not to make the world a better place but to teach us to love it for what it is.
Hannah Arendt is still a thinker for our times, and for that reason her writings are more relevant in today’s world where nationalism, populism and identity politics of the left and of the right are putting pressures on the rule of law and the juridical persons.
Its a slim 228 pages that contain a tome of relevance and importance
