The problem with evil, with villainy, is that the subject stretches toward the boundaries of infinity. Our planet may be short of many things but the supply of evil-doers is endless. They are everywhere: from office towers, to government, at the head of families, crowding jails, on the street and staffing the judiciary. It’s a dark subject. What entered God’s mind when he put that serpent into Eden is a great mystery, but the existence of evil in a world of divine surveillance is an issue which has long troubled humankind. To Hannah Arendt absolute evil are those contexts where the ability to make a conscientious decisions is negated.That is, the individual has no dichotomy between good and evil but between evil and more evil, much like the Milgram experiment where the shock giver could give more electric charge or even more once straightjacketed into the role. To Arendt, great evil cannot be understood within conventional categories of thought; the absence of humanly comprehensible motives is actually its radicality. Like suicide bombers or the cult of death that seems to have infected certain strains of Islam which conforms to Arendt’s thesis that evil is actually not radical but only extreme.
No matter how you slice it, suffering is involved, the result of the inability of thought to graft itself onto evil or establish some sort of dialogue with it that would prevent or at least mollify the destruction of free-will or tame the nihilistic instinct. This was what she meant by the banality of evil, though it is doubtful the victims would describe the experience as banal. But Arendt was on the bulls-eye in asserting her realization that the most extreme evil has no meaning that the human mind can reveal, that it is not only senseless in its own terms but meaningless in any terms; but how this could arise within liberal secularism and humanism, imploding under the weight of moral relativity remains unresolved if intermittently transcended…
(see link at end) …As the Damascus regime collapses, the Israel-Syria border will get hotter and hotter, an IDF intelligence officer told Israeli TV.
—Didier Drogba, a former Chelsea striker, says he never signed a petition calling for UEFA sanctions against Israel. Makes you wonder about the veracity of the other 61 signatures.—Image:http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/riverside/motorcycle-clubs-american-folk-art.html#.ULlN0WzF-aQ.facebook
…The main problem is not local rebels but those that come from outside of Syria. Fighters have begun to flow into Syria from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Libya. The source told Channel 2 “it’s important to say that we are talking about very dangerous people with experience fighting the U.S. Army” in Iraq or against the regime in Libya. Today, estimates have it that between 3,000 and 4,000 rebels are readying a fight with Israel, according to Channel 2.
—The BBC, with its halo of ‘impartiality,’ is the world leader in dissimulation. That the Jabari assassination was a response to an unprovoked barrage of more than 120 rockets was barely explained; the BBC aired dead Syrian children passed off as Palestinians; a ‘badly injured victim of Israeli bombing’ was filmed moments later walking around healthily. The BBC shrugged it off – “perhaps he just recovered quickly.” A glancing reference to “an incendiary device” going off is almost all the BBC tells you of the Tel Aviv bus bomb; a BBC documentary airing gruesome pictures of injured Palestinian children appears designed to incite racial hatred against Israelis.—Read More:http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4315343,00.html image:http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/riverside/motorcycle-clubs-american-folk-art.html#.ULlN0WzF-aQ.facebook
Said the Israeli official: “It really doesn’t matter who controls Syria the day after the regime falls. Every indication is that it is not heading in a positive direction for Israel.” Read More:http://honestreporting.com/israel-daily-news-stream-12052012/2/
—• Asharq al-Awsat‘s Tariq Almohayed says the chickens came home to roost on the Egyptian media:
I am in favor of the rigorous rules found in every respected media domain in the world, but I completely reject the intimidation of the media, and attempts to undermine it with blackmail, insults, and defamation, along the lines of what the Brotherhood is doing, and in the case of Egypt specifically.
The Egyptian media’s biggest mistake was to trust the Muslim Brotherhood’s project,—Read More:http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=2&id=32045 image:http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/the-wild-angels
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…In a letter to Karl Jaspers, dated March 4, 1951, Hannah Arendt wrote the following on “radical evil”:
What radical evil is I don’t know, but it seems to me it somehow has to do with the following phenomenon: making human beings as human beings superfluous (not using them as a means to an end, which leaves their essences as humans untouched and impinges only on their human dignity; rather making them superfluous as human beings). This happens as soon as all unpredictability- which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity- is eliminated. And all this in turn arises from- or, better, goes along with- the delusion of the omnipotence (not simply of the lus
r power) of an individual man. If an individual man qua man were omnipotent, then there is in fact no reason why men in the plural should exist at all – just as in monotheism it is only God’s omnipotence that makes him ONE. So, in this same way, the omnipotence of an individual man would make men superfluous (Kohler, Lotte and Hans Saner, Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926-1969, #109, 166.)
For Arendt, what makes human beings superfluous is the consolidation of power in a single omnipotent individual- or, better, an ideology articulated by an individual or group. This consolidation of power creates a “delusion of omnipotence” that prohibits the emergence of new beginnings precisely because nothing can emerge that is not already known by the omnipotent individual or accounted for by the ideology. Read More:http://therelativeabsolute.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/hannah-arendt-on-radical-evil/
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