Amor Mundi 12/14/14

12-15-2014

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Comparisons Abound

Adam Gopnick sees a nationalistic error in the way that some are defending the crimes revealed by the CIA torture report: "The North Vietnamese were under far more direct threat from American bombers than Americans have ever been from mostly remote Arab terrorists, yet no one would ever suggest that the Vietnamese were justified in torturing American pilots, even if they could have found out about, say, the targeting and timing of bombing raids, which might conceivably have saved Vietnamese lives. That was, we said, and would say again, no excuse. We have none, either. This is a good place to make it clear that, in this case, comparisons to Nazi and Communist tortures, far from being some kind of wild violation of decorum, are exactly what's essential--essential because without the belief that, even in wartime, there are acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence, the post-Second World War war-crimes trials, in which we place great pride, would indeed be no more than what the ex-Nazis always said they were: pure victor's justice. If we believe, as we do, that those trials were truly just, then that is because the acts that they sanctioned, including the torture of prisoners, were evil inherently, not just evil when done by other folks." The idea that we must be making those kinds of comparisons is compelling, but we must also remember that the fact that torture on the scale described in the report was committed in the name of a nominally liberal democracy. The comparisons are important so that we keep our heads in the right place, but we must not forget that these crimes were committed and also repudiated in our name and for our benefit. 

Reading Along

On the day the Senate's torture report was released, Andrew Sullivan and his team at The Dish read through the document and responded to both it and reactions in real time. The transcript is fascinating because it follows Sullivan's commentary as the report unfolds right there in his hands. The magnitude of unredacted things that were revealed, the nature and kind of the torture perpetrated by the US under the auspices of national interest, seems even larger when consumed in this way. Here's one of Sullivan's comments on the text: "Here's a real bombshell: Bush was first briefed on waterboarding in 2006! And he didn't like it: '[D]espite agency efforts to keep the Bush administration informed about the program, top White House officials repeatedly resisted having the CIA brief cabinet-level figures about the details, and CIA officials were not permitted to brief Bush directly until mid-2006, more than four years after the president signed a broad executive order authorizing the program, according to Senate Democratic aides who briefed reporters ahead of Tuesday's release. When Bush finally heard the details of the harsh interrogation techniques that were used against CIA detainees, he was "uncomfortable" with some of them and expressed dismay that some detainees were required to remain in stress positions for long amounts of time, to the point that they had no choice but to soil themselves, the aides said.' What does it say about our democracy in the last decade that the one person ultimately designated to run the war was utterly oblivious to what was actually going on in such an extraordinarily vital area such as torture? That others were really running the country? That he was a disastrously disengaged and incompetent figure-head? Well, I guess what we suspected is now out there. But who was ultimately responsible for torturing suspects in a manner far far worse than stress positions if the president wasn't?"

But Certainly Not Me

In an interview, poet and National Book Award Finalist Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric, discusses the way that seeing oneself as a progressive liberal, defining oneself as not-racist, can be a kind of trap for those who want to see a better world: "That's one of the fallacies that are out there, that we're above it, that these kinds of things belong to a supremacist world and not the world that the ordinary citizen lives in, that the ordinary educated middle-class person would never do these things, would never say these things. Not many people in writing about Citizen note that the book really lives in that space, in a kind of liberal American space. I'm sure the prosecutor in Wilson's case felt he was a liberal-minded person and his own liberal subjectivity was going to allow him to then move forward in a fair way."

Remember, But Please Don't Tell

Ian Johnson takes a peek at a Chinese history newsletter that, at least officially, doesn't exist: "E-mailed to subscribers as a seventy- to ninety-page PDF every other week, Remembrance's articles and first-person accounts are helping to recover memories that the Communist Party would prefer remained lost. Remembrance has no listed address, let alone bustling editorial offices. But if it has a home, it is here, in one of Tiantongyuan's concrete apartments, a dark, ground-floor unit lined with bookcases and stacked with boxes of banned books--a fittingly anonymous home for a publication that officially doesn't exist. Remembrance is part of the rise of unofficial memory in China, a trend that resembles the appearance in the Soviet Union during the 1980s of groups like Memorial, a historical research society that helped undermine the regime by uncovering its troubled past. Today's China is more robust than the Gorbachev-era Soviet Union, but memory is still escaping the censor's grasp, posing challenges to a regime for which history represents legitimacy. The government still controls official history through textbooks, museums, movies, and the media. But memory is more private, and setting it down on paper can be presented as a personal enterprise, even when the outcome is highly political."

Foucault In Praise Of Neoliberalism

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