It was always playing around the fringes of the “dark times.” Like carrying matches in a coal mine waiting for the canary to sing. Arendt walked into a Jerusalem courtroom disappointed that the mental case in the glass box was not a visible horned monster but an insignificant, an aggressively indifferent, a stereotype himself of the timid, feeble,conniving, dehumanized Jew that he had bought into. Evidently, the strange “normality”, at least clinically of this clown could not be easily juxtaposed with the actions, the puzzle that intrigued Arendt so deeply, the flip side of the coin of nihilism or even what Veblen termed invidious comparison and social capital wrapped in what Slavoj Zizek would term “surplus enjoyment,” a different type of capital based on brutality and sadism.
This evil was hardly banal, in fact the oppressors saw it as enjoyment in their twisted way, obscene, excessive and guilty pleasures that explodes into insanity, blinding blood in the eyes that is obscurely enjoyable, cannibalistic as opposed to anything remotely approaching the word “fullfillment” , the completion of ideological responsibilities shorn of any spirituality where it is “the idea that is important” as a kind of nomad with a duty to destabilize and shatter, all held together not by the glue of phlegmatic and inertia ridden conformity but by demonic enjoyment.
—Their arguments were heavily influenced by Heidegger and his prime influence, Nietzsche. Heidegger had been Arendt’s guru and lover. Arendt, who repudiated his anti-Semitism while never really disavowing the Nietzschean roots of the philosophy that had made collaboration with Hitler possible, was the towering figure in early 1960s liberal anticommunist consensus. Yale deconstructionist guru Paul De Man, who comes out of this same intellectual milieu, provoked a major scandal in the 1980s when it was revealed that he wrote for Nazi publications in occupied Belgium during WWII, a fact that legions of his deconstructionist and postmodernist acolytes worked overtime to rationalize.
In essence, 1950s existentialism and 1980s postmodernism can be explained as a rear guard action by Western intellectuals in imperialist nations to discredit the sole political force capable of eliminating the material basis for their privileges. As such, it is a reactionary ideology. The terms of the debate are very similar, but the terminology is different. Instead of “grand narratives” being the enemy, the 1950s thinkers railed against what they described as absolutist and essentialist tendencies in Western thought. Plato was identified as the father of this illegitimate child, but Hegel was really the arch-enemy. Hegel was blamed for Marx, who inspired Stalin to create a runaway, monstrous system. —Read More:https://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/05/23/heinrich-blucher-and-hannah-arendt/ image:http://bombsite.com/issues/71/articles/2310
(see link at end)…Perhaps the most provocative aspect of Eichmann in Jerusalem is its study of human conscience. The court’s refusal to consider seriously the question of Eichmann’s conscience resulted in its failure to confront what Arendt called “the central moral, legal, and political phenomena of our century.” The Israeli judges understood conscience traditionally as the voice of God or lumen naturale, speaking or shining in every human soul, telling or illuminating the difference between right and wrong, and this simply did not apply in the case of Eichmann. Eichmann had a conscience, and it seems to have “functioned in the expected way” for a few weeks after he became engaged in the transport of Jews, and then, when he heard no voice saying Thou shalt not kill but on the contrary every voice saying Thou shalt kill, “it began to function the other way around.” And this was by no means true only for Eichmann. Arendt was convinced by testimony presented at the trial that a general “moral collapse” had been experienced throughout Europe, from which even respected members of the Jewish leadership were not exempt.
—When Varian Fry, an American journalist, went to Europe in 1941 on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee, he went with a mission: to save a group of European artists and intellectuals from the Nazis. His endeavor succeeded. With the help of a small team, he rescued Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and more than 2,200 others. But at a time when Oskar Schindler and Raul Wallenberg are familiar names, Fry has been largely forgotten.—Read More:feed://www.tabletmag.com/tag/hannah-arendt/feed
..And so the controversy raged. Arendt may have exaggerated the extent to which the attacks against her were prompted by a “conspiracy” of the Jewish establishment and leveled against a book that was “never written.” Certainly not everyone who disagreed with her, sometimes vehemently, was malevolent or ill-informed . Much that was said was indeed preposterous, for example, that she attempted to exonerate Eichmann when she had done exactly the opposite; or that she was morally insensitive in asking why Jews had not fought back, a question raised by the prosecutor but never by Arendt, who understood that the processes of dehumanization precluded rebellion. Yet many were deeply disturbed by her depiction of an Eichmann who was not an ideological anti-Semite nor even criminally motivated–he wanted to rise in rank not by murdering anyone but by “conscientiously” doing his job. “Intent to do wrong” was not, in Arendt’s opinion, proved against him. He was not “morally insane” for in his own “muddled” way he distinguished between right and wrong, and the results of psychological tests showed that he was not a “monster” but frighteningly normal.Read More:http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayc7.html
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…Hannah Arendt: [O]nly folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbors. What then, one is prompted to ask, will be the future policy of Zionism with respect to big powers, and what program will Zionists have to offer for a solution of the Arab-Jewish conflict?…
If a Jewish commonwealth is obtained in the near future–with or without partition–it will be due to the political influence of American Jews…. But if the Jewish commonwealth is proclaimed against the wil
To Save the Jewish Homeland, 1948 …
And even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and the unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed. The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist. The ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded into ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and acitvities. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy…. And all this would be the fate of a nation that — no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries –would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.
Under such circumstances… the Palestinian Jews would degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta. Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large number of Jews lived. Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland…Read More:http://mondoweiss.net/2012/01/arendt-born-in-conflict-israel-will-degenerate-into-sparta-and-american-jews-will-need-to-back-away.html
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