Well late to the party. But as Far Side cards and the longest joke in the world assure me Better Nate than Lever. If you are curious about that you can google it.
Thats what it does for us; curiosity, it helps us find our way. Hannah Arendt did not lack curiosity. Nor did she lack the bravery that it required to take a simple singular stand. She used her voice, and the opportunity that the New Yorker gave her in 1961 when they sent her to Jerusalem to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, as an attempt to engage the human beings around her in a productive dialogue about what it was that she glimpsed when she took the light of her inquiring mind and shown it in the dark corners in one of the most empty souls the world had ever had the opportunity to observe and question. I was two years old in 1961. Too young to drive to New York and thank her. Too young to use my voice to cry out for anything other than food, water and perhaps an comforting hand. I think Hannah Arendt was thinking about me and others like me who would be born and grow up in the world that lay before us when she took a good long look at Eichmann. I think back in 1961 rather than thinking about what she could get for herself, she was thinking about me. Now I would like to return the favor.
By choosing to dissect and then publish what she believed to be the mentation of the mechanism of this man, she recognized the danger that he still represented. Her response by writing, and then the response of the editor of the New Yorker at that time by publishing what she observed, served to demonstrate what the actions of one, and then two people, can do. When they recognize something that is bad. Something that is wrong. Something that is growing in front of their eyes. When they chose to stand up for what is the right thing at the right time, rather than deciding to turn aside, or to modify, or to ignore the responsibility that they recognized we have to ourselves as human beings in favor of approval, protection, or economic security they gave us an example to help us find our way.
Hannah Arendt decided not to simply reiterate the horror Eichmann embodied and then join the crowd to throw stones of justice at him. When she listened to him, and watched him, she did not see the dangers that had been narrowly escaped. Rather, she observed in this man a clear insight into the perils that we faced in our future. She recognized, that if what is at the core of this type of evil was not brought to light, so that it could be identified and stopped, it would return.
She was the only reporter at the trial who dared to actually face the monster of the holocaust and then publicly speak about the fact that what that monster is, was not a man, or a group of men, or a political, or religious belief that got carried away. It was the expression of a new kind of inhumanity that was just beginning to find its way on the world stage.
I believe that she viewed what she saw in Eichmann, as if it was just the mother of a type of monster whose offspring, seeded amongst the bureaucracy of government, (whether it be capitalism, totalitarianism, or simply bankers and CEO's who control the housing, food, economic, and education opportunities of the world or religious leaders attempting to control and direct the force of human life) would grow into a new type of evil that is very much alive in our world today. I think that Eisenhower also recognized this monster. He called his monster The Military-Industrial Complex.
I think Hannah Arendt recognized that the mutation of this monster would bring about a different, perhaps, but just as deadly repeat of the Holocaust she had lived through. She was right actually. The monster of the Third Reich lived long enough to breed and its children are alive a well in todays world. Busily going about the dismemberment of society, and the degradation of human life. They just have different uniforms now and are much, much better at camouflage, distraction, and the dissemination of information than their procreators.
In using her glamorous opportunity to publish in the New Yorker in this way, Hannah Arendt did not take the easy road or the one that was immediately understood. She took the necessary road. The road that was in the best interests of Humanity. It was a unique action. Brave in a way that both demonstrated what could have been done to prevent, as well as a model for those of us, who years later, need a leader to turn to. Someone who is willing to teach us to think, to examine, to review and speak up. Someone who is willing to demand that the humanity of our lives not be divided from the mechanisms that run our neighborhoods, our banks, our schools, our houses of worship, our grocery stores, our civic and economic opportunities.
Hannah Arendt understood that the individual had to remain closely self identified as a human being, always. She also recognized that the definition of a human being had to include all the things that Eichmann and those like him sought to destroy, like so much waste being poured down a drain. I also believe that she recognized that we were slipping as a race. That some time in the future, people would need to be reminded that they are human beings.
Hannah Arendt dared to propose with her life's work, that each of us in the society that we live, has the capacity to create a unique perspective with which we train ourselves to see and respond to ourselves and each other as we observe and participate in the miasma of the social human construct that surrounds and governs our lives. More importantly, she also taught that our action and reaction as individuals within that society has an accumulated effect. It is the capacity of the human being to distance itself quite clearly, cleanly, and throughly from any kind of moral attachment or ownership or self recognition to amoral acts self perpetrated against other human beings that she found was so dangerous to our future and so subtle in its ability to perpetuate itself.
We are unique in that as human beings, our response to the bureaucratic mechanisms we see affecting the lives of our neighbors; be they the same or different color, race, religion, economic status, sexual preference, language, hair color, age and social circumstance, our response to how we allow or permit or condone the authorities to treat any human being, has the potential to have an tremendous accumulative effect on the humanity in which we all reside as fellow members.
The small, innocuous, purposeful ignorance, is the sleight of hand that is used perhaps as an act of self preservation or, to garner advancement, to profit in a momentary or eventually sustainable way, that is the beginning that separates us within ourselves from the hands that commit the acts that are unspeakably inappropriate or inhumane. When we witness these activities in the flow around us and yet find that within our selves we lack the capacity to speak up, or out, against the perversion of authoritative opportunity and how it moves amongst ours lives, we are failing humanity in a way that is perhaps not as grand or as gross as Eichmann did, but we are failing it nonetheless.
Our own self preserving separation rather than cleaving us from the action of the perpetrator, immediately binds us, irrevocably, to the pattern of silence and non thinking that contributes to the slippery slope of the habit of dehumanization that surely as a train headed for Auschwitz will result in the loss of innocent life. It is important to make sure that in your own minds eye, your neighbor is not oppressed, or exploited, or relegated to an identity that is less than someone you would die for. It is important that we exercise our right to speak, to think, to challenge each other non violently. To try again, and again, and again. Even if it seems we have failed in the moment, history tells us that we have not failed. Even if we die in the attempt, we have not lost our life, but invested it. Like Hannah Arendt did with hers for me. It is our human responsibility, to try and get it, if not right, or left, then perhaps to a good middle way. It is better to have a purposeful and radical good life, rather than a banal one. To have the desire to do good, and to feed it, rather than to turn off in ourselves the little thing that might be even just a tiny bit adding to the tide of evil that lives amongst us today.
by the way I discovered the google doodles today today's is to honor the volt-master I'll let you take it from there although I would like to say thanx to Google for this one thing the doodles they are imaginative and interesting prompts to explore even if the rest of your machine has its suspect aspects for the doodles I say way to go
now as far as throwing the baby out with the bathwater I want to use todays blog to write an editorial letter or response to an article that appeared in the New Yorker magazine June 4th 2013 in the Page Turner section written by Michelle Dean titled "The Formidable Friendship of Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt.
Right up front I want to say Michelle you have missed the point and badly and in so many ways.
As to the New Yorker I'm not sure if they will print my letter to the editor as it is, as I said up front, late to the party. But it is, of course because it is mine, important to me no matter when it arrives. Like I said, better Nate than Lever as the Far Side reminds us that timeliness may be more and also less important than the content that eventually gets aired.
Hannah Arendt
I recently signed up for netflix and watched the movie "Hannah Arendt" a movie directed by Margarethe von Trotta released in the US in May of 2013. The movie is an interesting and dispassionate recreation of a purposefully directed point of view aimed I believe by the movie's writers to give the viewer a visual/visceral experience of what it may have been like to be this extraordinary woman at a time in her life that few people it seems, including Michelle Dean 54 years later, were capable of understanding.
The movie, on the surface, is impersonal; just like Hannah's writings and her public persona were. However, that does not imply that either are not of great value. Quite the opposite in fact. The movie creates a perpetual surface assault on the sensibilities and opinions of the viewer that are in direct and judgmental conflict with the value of the message that it is trying to deliver. The movie simultaneously distracts as it delivers the underlying message. Enduring the onslaught of the debris while keeping the eye on the prize is a skill that todays world is lacking. It is however the skill Hannah Arendt had.
In a time when Humanity was still reeling from having barely survived a type of world encompassing horror that not many thought at the time about tracking down and killing, she could think of little else. Hannah used her opportunity to track the monster to it's lair, wait for it's offspring to rear their heads and then she proceeded to go at them with the best weapon she had at hand; her writings, her ability to think and report on what she thought was a very current, rather than defeated or past affair. It is an example of a modern day quest where most of the bodies lost on the thorny patch or in the desert of impossible practicality are piling up and beginning to stink on a grand scale while the heroine is attacked from all sides not by the enemy, but by those she is desperately trying to save. It seems that today, we are lacking a heroine that can find her way off of the beaten path and lead humanity into a less dangerous world. I miss Hannah Arendt and I never even got to meet her.
It is unfortunate that the review of the movie in the New Yorker by Michelle Dean 54 years after Hannah Arendt also wrote for the New Yorker, that we rather than finding our reporter to be someone who is capable of being our heroine, realize that she is just one more body piled up on the pyre of the same monster that drove Eichmann in 1961.
It does not take very much digging to see, or perhaps understand, that Hannah Arendt, perhaps like her movie crew, did not concern herself with public image, ratings or box office return. To her the point is the point, and the movie makes it nicely even if it is presented in a form that is not designed as fodder for the masses.
Hannah like her movie making cohorts dared to present to the world something that had depth and essence to it on a level that was and is critical to what type of humanity we aspire to become. It is, frankly, a compliment that she would think that we still have the chance to aspire to choose a humanity that is purposeful and radical because it is good, rather than allow our humanity to become banal, evil, predictable and destructive.
As far as the audience is concerned, I think that when Hannah wrote her articles for the New Yorker in 1961, she expected that somewhere out there was someone who would get the message in the bottle that was presented to the world in the media form that was so very effective in her time. We can thank her later when we run into her down the road, for her stalwart, unwavering commitment to humanity.
In the interim, if we want to use her gift for that which it is intended rather than as a springboard to show our own shallowness, ahem. We can take the time, spend the effort, to dig a little deeper into the movie, the current state of affairs, and the new totalitarianism that frankly appears to have our world by the short hairs. We as human beings who cannot all pay attention in the moment the way that Hannah did, at least can stand up and contribute a small voice to, or if need be against, the louder one. Rather than simply allow those who are not thinking, and who have demonstrated that they are not capable of thinking, to decide for us what and how our world should look and operate.
Hannah Arendt made her difference Michelle. Now, what are you going to do about the difference that you have the opportunity to make? For me as a human being, reading the New Yorker, and as a person of my time who has to live in the holocaust of the economic and cultural failure of democracy in the United States, I would say that it appears to me that you didn't do your homework. You didn't think. You didn't even try. It appears to me that you didn't use the opportunity you were given by the New Yorker to perpetrate anything that even comes close to what Hannah Arendt did with her opportunity. Instead like the Jewish leadership that Hannah reported on in her review of the Eichmann assignment you went for the banal. You went for what would not ruffle the feathers of the proletariat. You went for the laugh or the smirk or the ratings. Good for you for the moment. Not so good for all of us in the long run.
Like those who designed and followed through on this movie, Hannah Arendt went after the unseen as if her life depended on it. Or perhaps as if my life did. She recognized then cornered and identified for all the world to see, the not to be missed but easily mislaid, mistaken, misappropriated missing link that held together the mentalities of the men and women (or at least the one who she was able to personally observe and listen to), who perpetrated the unthinkable horror that she was willing to stand up and say human beings are capable of. This kind of failure of humanity was not just an occasional isolated thing that happened at a death camp. It started and was perpetrated in hearts, homes and neighborhoods. Lives were destroyed, not only once in a while, as if Hitler and his group were some sort of serial killer aberration, but for years in a horrible sustainable wave of casual inattention that begs to be gutted and rooted out of our species. I think she saw the choices that Eichmann made were choices that many people made in their own way, amplified on a massive scale that when accumulated and given time redirected human behavior in a way that should be understood and addressed so that that type of accumulated disfunction would never be repeated.
Hannah Arendt took a long and dark look at the mentality that enabled a man, a human, to not only facilitate but also to personally profit from the mass destruction of human life because he, in his mind and from his mind made his effort, his own humanity, his own work, he made himself into something that is void of humanity so that he was capable of sustaining the active mentality that other human beings are a void in which he could act with no compunction. Eichmann believed that humans were not only worthless, but useless in a deep and terrible lasting way.
I encourage anyone who reads this blog to watch the movie and in doing so to watch and listen to Hannah. Her mind and her action and her words are not reactive, they are steps, stones that are not thrown at the enemy, but rocks that are carefully laid down so that we can depend on them to help us escape our own lack of purpose and training.
Eichmann's banality was deadly. He and others like him did not just transition into the monsters under the bed. They took over the whole house, the neighborhood, the town, the country. The difficulty with what Hannah reported on back in 1961, was that everyone had skeletons in their closets, and she was willing to see the pedantry that people who could have stopped what happened hid behind. She was correct in understanding if not addressing or overstating that when the holocaust happened the Jewish people did not yet have the mentality and resources that the State of Israel gave them in the 60's. Just like the Homosexuals who were not yet Free to Be You and Me as we are in the present day, it is not a radical thought to understand that people who were family and friends of those who died in the death camps did not prevent those people from being taken there.
this is an excerpt from a paper written by
Karen Silverstrim, MA CandidateUniversity of Central Arkansas
Overlooked Millions: Non-Jewish Victims of the Holocaust
Records kept by the Germans prove they exterminated millions of Communists, Czechs, Greeks, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, mentally and physically handicapped, Poles, resistance fighters, Russians, Serbs, Socialists, Spanish Republicans, trade unionists, Ukrainians, Yugoslavians, prisoners of war of many nations, and still others whose identity may never be recognized.(1) Their victims, according to one survivor of four different concentration camps, "were of some thirty nationalities, from Nepalese to Andorrans, and of a variety of racial and linguistic stocks ranging from Basques to Buriats and from Ladinos to Lapps".(2)
Hannah Arendt wasn't playing the race card when she addressed the complicity of the Jewish leaders in the deaths of their neighbors and countrymen, women and children. She was commenting as carefully as possible what the proper response was when people banded together played it, as if they are separate from their neighbors. Israel played such a card when they made the move to capture and keep Eichmann to themselves rather than bring him to justice in a world court. There is no doubt that the formation of their own nation allowed the Jewish race the opportunity to stand unified on the world stage and speak of their pain. However, one could argue that their selfishness robbed millions of other peoples from having their own moment to face their perpetrator.
Rather than delve into what was possible or probable, Hannah Arendt stuck to the facts of the trial. I believe Hannah simply reflected back to the Jewish leadership what they themselves were asking the world to ignore so that they could have their day in court, or in monstrosity as it were. She was brave enough to be fair. To demonstrate and take the hit that clearly would show that she was not playing sides or valuing one race or religion or people over another when it came to taking care of the future of her species.
It is unfortunate when human beings allow themselves to be taken over by an authority that they mistakenly believe has their best interests at heart. When in fact that authority has already demonstrated that they are willing to use banal pedantic bureaucratic fabrications to ignore their dehumanization and persecution of their neighbors, fellow countrymen and women, and peoples of any other nation as well. What Hannah was trying to get everyone to see was that even our neighbor, our cultural representative, our people who we think of as family, have the capacity to some extent to see us off to the gas chamber; if we/they allow ourselves to profit from looking the other way. This subtle choice to detach from the consequence of one's capacity to relocate, redefine the status of a person inside of our hearts and minds exists in not just one of us, but millions of us. As was demonstrated over and over again and again by a bureaucrat who could have chosen to resist, to say no, to refuse, to do anything other than continue to do his job, the job of making sure that human beings were loaded on trains that took them to their deaths; simply because someone signed a paper that authorized that action.
This sustainable, hollow, non-thinking mentation that results in the type of crime that Eichmann committed, is as Hannah might say, easier said than done. We are not talking about one body, or one moment, or one event or one life. We are talking about the mechanism that became within a human being, and as the facts of history displayed for all of us in multiple human beings, created the ability to sustainably disregard and destroy with creativity, purpose, and a businesslike efficiency the lives of those who were available to use to perfect this mental mechanism within himself and his peers. A mechanism that made the voices and lives of those who in his moral compass have no presence. Lives that were at best irrelevant to the future that this man and others like him were marching towards. At worst, lives that were simply debris that needed to be swept away.
In her own words, works, critically reviewed and publicly reviled, emotionless examination of the effect of the mechanism of the thoughtlessness of the men who were behind and responsible for not only the war crimes against the human beings who died at their hands, but also and perhaps more importantly responsible for creating a model of dehumanization that was dangerous in that no one at the time (except Hannah apparently) observed; Hannah Arendt was willing to pull back the curtain and not only try and understand but also to publicly make the world aware of what it was that motivated this man. Hannah recognized that the mechanism that was driving the man and men and women who were behind the curtain of what drove the wizard that made Hitler's emerald city so attractive to so many people, was something that was not dangerous because it would haunt us after it was defeated, but because it was something that obviously could reproduce itself amongst humanity.
I believe that Hannah understood that what happened inside the mind of Eichmann was something that was obviously critical, but more importantly, she recognized that it was possible to reproduce his banality in other human beings. I think she didn't see Eichmann as an anomaly but as a sign of an outbreak. It was almost like she saw him as contagious, and because of that she knew that we were still at risk. That meant, that the mechanism that existed within Eichmann could and most likely would come back. When it returned once again under a different guise, mutated as monsters do, it would rise again through the subtle permission of those who decide not to look, those who turn their head, those who want their own profitable moment and take it, when they contribute to, or give permission for, or facilitate, crimes against humanity. It can after all only be human beings that destroy other human beings one at a time, or en-masse.
Personally, I think the film is extraordinary. We are exposed to rivers of cigarette smoke, seemingly hours of banal conversation, purposefully social misdirection in the form of cheating husbands, silent support staff, vapish female friends, ignorant bureaucrats, administrators worried about their reputations, faint hearted friends, Israeli goon squads, and brooding intellectuals who seem to only talk around the point rather than get to it. Hannha is un moved by all of this. Steadfastly our heroine encourages us to march like Nazi's through the debris around us so that we arrive at out destination no matter what it costs us.
The difference however, in the Nazi's and in Hannah Arendt, was simply that she did not seek to destroy anyone in an her attempt to comment and effect the outcome of the lives of the humanity in which she lived. Although she ultimately destroyed herself in the minds eye of the unthinking easily manipulated social mentality of those who were around her or who came in contact with her simple exercise of taking a good look at what she was interested in and making an intelligent and educated concise effort to give back to humanity the things that she believed would protect it from itself; it appears that unlike the nihilist culture that almost destroyed the humanity of Europe, Hannah Arendt didn't grouse about how humanity treated her.
She simply thought that it was interesting that no-one commented on the fact that she herself had made a small mistake in her analysis. Good on ya, Hannah. Good on ya.
The nihilism that lay behind and in the hearts and minds of Eichmann and others like him, was and is alive and well in todays world. It is apparent even in the subtle simplistic efforts of reporters like Michelle Dean when they excuse and deflect what is the deeper movement of the forces that are going on behind the scenes.
There are human beings in countries in our world who believe and perpetrate that it is acceptable to risk family homes for the profits gained in mortgage manipulation. There are human beings in countries in our world who believe and perpetrate that the lives of their citizens are expendable as political statements and life destroying acts that annihilate the opportunity of the bomb wearers as if their life could never, would never have any meaning except as a mule used to carry death to those who are different in some unradical, seemingly intolerable existence. There are human beings who use television as an opportunity to profit from the systematic public dehumanization, abuse, and perpetration of self harm of "contestants" in "reality" programs as if they are not human beings with desires, dreams, frailties, and real lives they have to return to once the producers have wrung all the profit they can from them. There are human beings who use the opportunity for technological advancement, for profit margins, and for returns on investments to prevent education, conversation, sexual awareness that results in self aware care and thoughtfulness. There are human beings in countries who use education not to teach us to educate ourselves in the skills of awareness, effective singular value that makes a whole invaluable, communication that allows for differences that lead not to one thought or one design but to a better, richer, more diverse and peaceful purposefully perpetrated whole humanity that recognizes and trades not on the dehumanization of humanity, but on its incredible beauty. There are human beings that use religion as a weapon against humanity.
And in all the above circumstances, there are millions of people who are making the same small, self profiting choices inside themselves that Eichmann did as they help perpetrate these atrocities against humanity because they are entertained, or they don't want to be involved, or they don't see the harm, or they just needed the job, or what ever. That's it really isn't it? Thats the point that Hannah was trying to make.
Whatever.
So Michelle, I hope the New Yorker asks more from you in the future. I do
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