Anti-Semitism
07-22-2018Anti-Semitism
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ARCHIV - 28.02.2018, Russland, Moskau: Wladimir Putin (r), Präsident von Russland, begrüßt Sebastian Kurz, Bundeskanzler von Österreich, bei einem Treffen im Kreml. (zu dpa "Putin zum Arbeitsbesuch in Wien: Heikle Themen und alte Meisterwerke " vom 04.06.2018) Foto: Grigory Dukor/POOL REUTERS/AP/dpa +++ dpa-Bildfunk +++[/caption] Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which was published in 1951, reversed the then conventional wisdom about the emergence of fascist and totalitarian regimes. While many saw fascism and totalitarianism as the historical apotheosis of the nation, Arendt argued that fascism and totalitarianism emerged in the middle of the 20th century as the nation-state system began to collapse. Put simply, totalitarianism is not the triumph of the nation-state, totalitarianism is what emerges when the nation-state system falls apart. In the first part of Origins, which offers a historical analysis of anti-Semitism, Arendt writes that anti-Semitism too is an outgrowth of the decline of the nation-state: “modern anti-Semitism grew in proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of powers crashed.” Nationalism is not the same thing as the nation-state, and while nationalism in certain authoritarian leaning countries has fed the ideology of anti-Semitism across Europe, the liberal notion of the nation-state since the postwar period has been understood to serve as a guarantor of rights and freedoms, to ward against calamitous ideologies. I was thinking about these passages this week as I followed the news, which seemed littered with accounts of anti-Semitism across the world. Arendt’s account of anti-Semitism has always been contentious, but it is also reflective and perspicuous. It is not surprising that at this moment in time, as the world falls to illiberalism, we are witnessing a rise in hatred. Read the rest of this piece on Medium.
Kill List
Matt Taibbi writing for Rolling Stone shares the harrowing story of Bilal Abdul Kareem who found himself on America’s infamous “Kill List,” technically titled the “Disposition Matrix.” Conceived during President Obama’s administration, the list appears to sort people into targeting from capture, interrogation, or assignation by drone. Officials come together on what have been deemed “Terror Tuesdays” to discusses who is on the list. When Donald Trump was running for office he promised to increase the number of bombings in the Middle East, saying: “You have to take out their families.” He is fulfilling his promise. Taibbi writes:
We kill suspects whose names we know, and whose names we don’t; we kill the guilty and the not guilty; we kill men, but also women and children; we kill by day and by night; we fire missiles at confirmed visual targets, but also at cellphone numbers we hope belong to targets. When he first heard he was on this list, Kareem was aghast. This was no situation like the siege of Aleppo, where a quick joke might turn the crowd. How could anyone reverse the decision of a deadly bureaucracy so secret and inaccessible that even if it had an off switch, few in the civilian world would know where to find it? How could he talk his way out of this one? Kareem appealed for help to Clive Stafford Smith, an Anglo-American attorney he’d met in his travels, who’d founded a London-based human rights organization called Reprieve.Kareem has filed a complaint asking the U.S. government to take him off their Kill List, and to challenge the evidence against him. His case has serious implication for the integrity of American democracy:
It’s not a stretch to say that it’s one of the most important lawsuits to ever cross the desk of a federal judge. The core of the Bill of Rights is in play, and a wrong result could formalize a slide into authoritarianism that began long ago, but accelerated after 9/11. Since that day, we have given presidents enormous power – to make war, to torture, to detain indefinitely – and our entire legal system has been transformed on a variety of fronts, placing huge questions about illegal searches, warrantless arrest, indefinite detention, torture and other matters behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy, outside the reach of courts. And yet, nobody is paying attention. While America obsesses over Russia, Stormy Daniels and Kim Jong-Un, almost no one is covering Kareem’s trial. His race-against-time effort to escape the American killing machine is too surreal, even in the Trump era. But it’s also a potentially devastating last-straw moment in the history of America’s recent dystopian slide, with the executive branch asking for the ultimate in dictatorial powers: the right to kill even its own citizens without having to explain itself.Form more information visit: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/
Black or White?
Thomas Chatterton Williams reviews a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London on Michael Jackson, which culls together the work of 48 artists. At the center of the exhibit is Jackson’s ever-transforming appearance in the world. Williams writes:
“In this post-post-racial, post-Obama era of resurgent populism and Balkanized identity politics, it really does feel as though it matters — and matters more than anything else — whether you’re black or white. It does make for a particularly fascinating moment to re-evaluate Jackson’s image as a fundamentally “black” but simultaneously racially transcendent figure, or a monstrous desecration, depending on your perspective. Indeed, there is a push and pull between these running through the exhibition and the catalog that accompanies it. In the catalog, the critic Margo Jefferson calls Jackson “a postmodern trickster god,” noting “what visceral emotion he stirred (and continues to stir) in us!” She anticipates, in the next pages, the novelist and essayist Zadie Smith’s castigating contribution. Ms. Smith writes of her mother’s initial preoccupation with the singer: “I think the Jacksons represented the possibility that black might be beautiful, that you might be adored in your blackness — worshiped, even.” But, she adds, “By the time I became aware of Michael — around 1980 or so — my mother was finished with him, for reasons she never articulated, but which became clear soon enough. For me, he very soon became a traumatic figure, shrouded in shame.”Chatterton Williams will be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center Fall Conference “Citizenship and Civil Disobedience.” Form more information visit: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/arts/design/michael-jackson-london-national-portrait-gallery.html