September 18th, 2016
09-18-2016How To Kill Innocent People
“The entire book owes a lot to Hannah Arendt. Everyone who works on these subjects engages with Arendt in a way or another. I do it by taking her ideas further. The type of speculative history she writes is bound to get certain things wrong; what I try to do is to see where she was right in the light of things that we have learnt since the 1950s. There are four ways in which I find her very important for my studies. The first is the way she treats ideology. People tend to prefer coherence over factuality. If Hitler tells a story according to which human beings are basically in nature and Jews have disrupted nature, and if we eliminate the Jews, nature will return – that is a story which is not true, but it's coherent. Anything that happens can be made to fit into that story. This understanding of ideology as a machine that can absorb the facts is very important. The second way is the way in which she understands totalitarianism. What Arendt means by totalitarianism is not the overpowering state: it's the complete breakdown between the public and the private. This doesn't necessarily involve administration and bureaucracy: it is primarily about the overwhelming pressure on the individual. As I pointed out in Bloodlands, this overwhelming pressure is most acute where the two systems encounter each other. It happens in places like Vilnius or Riga in the summer of 1941 more than anywhere else. The third thing is her discussion of imperialism. I think she was right that at the end of the nineteenth century something very important happens with the notion of empire. This was basically an intuition of hers – her main sources were the novels of Joseph Conrad – but I think she was right in her guess that the racialization of empire has a crucial role in the genesis of totalitarianism. Hitler, and not only him, looks at what is happening in Africa, and to some extent in America, and applies to Europe, in a very crude and simplified way, the notion of racial empire. She is right in stressing that this could not have happened without the colonial experience in Africa. The fourth, and maybe the most important point is her argument about how the Holocaust could have happened. In order to kill a person, you have to kill the juridical person first – you need to remove the law from the person you are killing. I think she is fundamentally right about that. She saw how the juridical person was being killed, step by step. The entire historiography of the holocaust, from Raul Hilberg onward, has followed this insight. Hitler comes to power in 1933, the Nuremberg laws are promulgated in 1935, followed by the Aryanization of Jewish property, which peaks in 1938. It's presented as a sort of gradual, step-by-step process within Germany itself. What I'm trying to show is that this is not the real prehistory of the Holocaust: this was not the main way in which the Holocaust took place. The main way to kill the law in the person... ...is to kill the state. Exactly. Hannah Arendt doesn't see that, because she's German. She's a West European Jew, and so are her friends. What the Nazis learnt in the East, however, is that if you take the law away entirely, then things are possible that would not have been possible otherwise. So I'm taking Arendt's insight, which I find correct, and radicalizing it.”One of the core insights of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism is that totalitarian rule is not nationalist but imperialist and opposed to the limits of nation-states. She saw both Germany and the Soviet Union as overrun by trans-nationalist movements in which bureaucracy and racism combined to eliminate the limits of law, morality, and borders. This is true also of an organization like the Islamic State. For Snyder, Arendt is right to see the connection between totalitarianism and the breakdown of the states; but her focus on the two main totalitarian states, Germany and the Soviet Union, occludes the way that totalitarianism could only be fulfilled in the ruins of states outside of Germany, those states that comprise the killing fields of Eastern Europe. —RBForm more information visit: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2016-09-09-snyder-en.html
Statelessness and the Pariahs
Jeremy Adelman considers the enormous tragedy of the refugee crisis and asks, “Can Hannah Arendt, the avatar of public philosophy, help us formulate an enlightened response?”
“The answer is steeped in her years as a pariah and her insights into dehumanization. Arendt’s own stateless experience helped forge the elements of the book that would make her famous in America and worldwide. The Origins of Totalitarianism was finished in the summer of 1950. In it, she noted that “a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow man.” Without a political community, man was a pariah. Months later, Arendt closed a long, agonizing chapter of her life and became a naturalized citizen of the United States, a pariah no more. And yet, her statelessness is often forgotten…. “I am still a stateless person,” Hannah Arendt wrote to Jaspers months after the war ended, “I haven’t become respectable in any way.” The Origins of Totalitarianism is a book about despots and dehumanizers. But it is also a book about the unrespectable and the unwanted, as well as the rest of us — the shocked onlookers at the horrible things that horrible governments do to people. Arendt’s voice is one we can turn to as we grapple with the spread of statelessness in our day. Camps and pariahs are still with us. They have never been more numerous. They are products of our world of interconnected nation states. We have a role in creating rights to have rights. It includes our ability to offer sanctuary for those that have none. That, Arendt would argue, is a starting point for saying no to the nativists at home and taking a stand against the tyrants abroad.”As Adelman argues, Arendt offers important warnings about how not to react to crises of refugees and genocide. The first is that all-too-often when refugees and pariahs are attacked, those attacks are met by silence by those who are fearful of losing their own privileges. The second is to recognize that the true danger of totalitarianism is the creation of superfluous people. These two warnings, of course, go together. It is the silence in the face of persecution that makes genocidal violence possible.
“Consider how Arendt responded to Kristallnacht, the night of November 9, 1938, when Nazi gangs tore through Jewish shops and homes: Arendt was as horrified as others at the Nazi zeal to destroy. But she was also dismayed that French Jewish leaders distanced themselves from Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew whose murder of a Nazi diplomat in Paris in November 1938 became the pretext for thugs to go rampaging in Germany. As she tore through the newspapers, taking notes and collecting clippings, Arendt treated Grynszpan’s trial as a test of Jewish leaders’ commitment to their own. Instead of making sure the pariah got a fair trial, however, they sacrificed Grynszpan with silence.”*** While the world is rightly focused on the Syrian civil war and the horrific refugee crisis it has unleashed, we must not overlook the genocide being committed by the Islamic State against the Yezidi people. According to an article in Time last December, “ISIS has targeted the Yezidi population of approximately 230,000 people in the area, considered “kafir” or “nonbelievers” because they do not practice Islam, in what is widely considered to be a genocide.” The Islamic State has killed, raped and enslaved Yezidi’s in what the U.S. and the E.U. recognize to be a genocide. Nadia Murad Basee Taha is one woman is speaking out loudly about the Yezidi genocide. She is 23 years old. She is Yezidi and she witnessed the murder of her brothers and fellow Yezidis near Mosul. She was enslaved, raped, and brutalized. She finally escaped and made it as a refugee to Germany, one of the few countries that has boldly and fearlessly accepted refugees in spite of the political pressures not to do so. Nadia Murad has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and is a UN Goodwill Ambassador. She will be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College on Friday, September 23 at 10:00 am at Bard Hall. For more information email [email protected].Form more information visit: http://wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/looking-back-moving-forward/pariah-can-hannah-arendt-help-us-rethink-our-global-refugee-crisis/
Taking Calvin Seriously
[caption id="attachment_18368" align="alignright" width="219"]
XIR80411 Portrait of John Calvin (1509-64) (oil on canvas) by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (c.1488-1576); 66.5x57.5 cm; The Reformed Church of France, Paris, France; Giraudon; Italian, out of copyright[/caption] Jonathan Sheehan marvels at the way teaching John Calvin can provoke and inspire modern students.
“In my history of Christianity course, we read a number of challenging writers. Each one I ask students to read with as much sympathy, charity and critical perspective as they can muster. But nothing outrages them — not the writings of Augustine or Erasmus or Luther — more than two or three pages of John Calvin. Calvin was the most influential religious reformer of the 16th century. His theological imagination and organizational genius prepared the way for almost all forms of American Protestantism, from the Presbyterians to the Methodists to the Baptists. He was also a severe and uncompromising thinker. The Ayatollah of Geneva, some have called him. Late in the third book of his 1559 “Institutes of the Christian Religion” — when he seeks to describe the utter power of God over man, and our utter dependence on Him — is usually where my students revolt. These young people come from all walks of life. They are atheists, agnostics, Christians, Jews, Muslims and more besides. They are the face of California diversity, young people with wildly different social, religious, ethnic and racial experiences. Diverse as they may be, their reaction is the same when they read a sentence like this: “Some are born destined for certain death from the womb, who glorify God’s name by their own destruction.” This is the heart of Calvin’s teaching of predestination, his insistence that God determined each human destiny before the creation of the world. The elect are bound for heaven, the reprobate to hell, and there is absolutely nothing to be done about it, ever. “Jacob is chosen and distinguished from the rejected Esau, by God’s predestination, while not differing from him in merits,” is how Calvin put it. Your merits, your good will, your moral action: None of these make a difference. The chosen Jacob is no better than the rejected Esau. The damned glorify God’s name. And God is pleased by the whole business. The classroom erupts in protest. Nothing has prepared my students for an idea like this. Secular students object: How can so much arrogant misanthropy pass itself off as piety? Non-Christian students are agitated, too. What kind of God is this, they ask, that took pleasure in creating man so that he might be condemned to everlasting damnation? And the various types of Christian students are no less outraged. “Follow me,” Christ said, and doesn’t that mean that we are asked to choose, that the choice between death and salvation is a free one? All different concerns, but the outcome is the same: rejection, usually disgust. I ask the students to read on.”Form more information visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/opinion/teaching-calvin-in-california.html