I know he had unusual eyes
Whose powers no orders could determine
Not to mistake the men he saw
As others did, for gods or vermin
(Thomas Gunn, on a German soldier who risked his life to save Jews from deportation to the camps. Cited by Terry Eagleton, in Ideology, Verso, 1991, 2007; p xxii).
What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons – reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for – Terry Eagleton, in Ideology
Emmanuel Levinas: Totality and Infinity: Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to
know whether we are not duped by morality. Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives.
In advance its shadow falls over the actions of men. War is not only one of the ordeals – the greatest – of which morality lives; it renders morality derisory. The art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means – politics – is henceforth enjoined as the very exercise of reason. Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naivete….
The trial by force is the test of the real. But violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action. Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same. The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy. Individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves. The meaning of individuals (invisible outside of this totality) is derived
from the totality. The unicity of each present is incessantly sacrificed to a future appealed to to bring forth its objective meaning. Totality and Infinity; Preface. (Highlight added)
Bruno Latour on Michel Serres: The mob in a state of crisis cannot agree on anything but on a victim, a scapegoat, a sacrifice. Beneath any boundary is buried a sacrificial victim.. (Serres) slowly realized that the sciences were not a way to limit violence but to fuel it. He decided to hear and to feel this terrible earth-shaking tremor travelling from Hiroshima, the only date in history that he takes as a real turning-point; the earth has been shaking ever since. Thanatocraty: Serres’ word for the black triad made by scientists, politicians and industrialists: A Word on Michel Serres’ Philosophy (1987)
Erich Fromm: As long as one believes that the evil man wears horns, one will not discover an evil man: Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of human destructiveness; p 574
Emmanuel Levinas: With the appearance of the human – and this is my entire philosophy – there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other. That is unreasonable. Man is an unreasonable animal. Emmanuel Levinas; The Paradox of Morality
Captain G. M. Gilbert, US Army psychologist, Nuremberg trials, 1945-49: Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy
Victor Klemperer: No one can take my German-ness away from me, but my nationalism and patriotism are gone forever. I will bear witness: I am German, and still waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere
Waller R. Newell: Contrary to Heidegger’s absorption of all political motivations into “technology,” the Nazis did not carry out the Holocaust because they had developed the technology – they developed the technology because they wanted to carry out the Holocaust. One has to think through why… At bottom, it is hard to imagine a more fundamental lack of moderation than Heidegger’s equation – shared by Kojève – of democracy and totalitarianism on the grounds that the technological dynamo of modernization has swallowed up all such distinctions between better and worse regimes and rendered them naive.. Kojève’s Hegel, Hegel’s Hegel, and Strauss’s Hegel; in Timothy Burns (ed); Philosophy, History, and Tyranny; p 244-249
Munich, The Edge of War: We don’t choose the times we live in; the only choice we have is how we respond
Mobarak Haider: ‘War is a tragedy but a society at war with itself and everything around, with no objective and no remorse is more than a tragedy; it is a total disaster.’
Hannah Arendt: The problem of evil will be the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life in Europe — as death became the fundamental problem after the last war (1945): Nightmare and Flight, Essays in Understanding; p. 134.
Preface to the first edition of ‘Origins of Totalitarianism’: And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil. Antisemitism (not merely the hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship) – one after the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.
We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape, from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.
Hannah Arendt; Summer 1950
Stanley Rosen: when philosophy is transformed into nationalism, wisdom itself becomes an ideology, and instead of a homogenous world state, we arrive at a perpetual state of global war. Review of Alexandre Kojeve, Les Presocratiques; Essays in Philosophy, Modern, p 112
Mukul Kesavan: Photobombing death and the banality of evil / Evil, framed. By SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
Dilip Simeon: In one of the first reflections upon Nazism’s death factories, Hannah Arendt wrote: ‘In their effort to prove that everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered… crimes which man can neither punish nor forgive.’ … (She) noted the irrevocable rupture that the discovery of these ‘holes of oblivion’ had wrought in history: ‘Modern politics revolves around a question which, strictly speaking, should never enter into politics, the question of all or nothing: of all, that is a human society rich with infinite possibilities; or exactly nothing, that is, the end of mankind.’ When Karl Jaspers rejected the idea of casting Hitlerism in the light of some satanic greatness, she agreed with him, but insisted that what had happened in the camps was not a case of humans killing other humans for human reasons, howsoever horrible. What had occurred said Arendt, was ‘the organized attempt to eradicate the concept of the human being.’ This is the closest we will ever come towards understanding modern exterminism – the whole world was enveloped in it, and we live in its shadow.. The Edge of Oblivion
Nation-worship is right-wing atheism. Party-absolutism is communist deism. In the first case God is replaced by the Nation, in the second the Communist Party attains God-like status. In both cases ideology functions as a substitute theology. Nationalism a dishonest form of atheism. That many believe in the new deity is not surprising: the success of the new enterprise depends upon the capacity of puppeteers to have puppets. Dilip
Harry V. Jaffa: Macbeth and the Moral Universe
Leszek Kolakowski: ‘anthropologically, there is an immense difference between a society in which traditional criteria of good and evil remain valid, no matter how often they have been violated, and one in which these criteria have been abrogated and have fallen into oblivion.’ (Modernity on Endless Trial, p 47)
Rabbi J.S. Bloch on Karl Lueger: ‘The criterion which makes the difference between a great man and a popular one consists in the great man’s searching for what is nobly human in the masses, to raise them by its means, whereas a merely popular man looks for what is low and brutal so as to raise himself’ (My Reminiscences, Vienna-Berlin 1923. Cited in Zeev Sternhell; The Intellectual Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, 1875-1945; p 84
Dharamvir Bharati: That day the world descended into the age of darkness which has no end, and repeats itself over and over again. Every moment the Lord dies somewhere or the other every moment the darkness grows deeper and deeper. The age of darkness has seeped into our very souls. There is darkness, and there is Ashwatthama, and there is Sanjaya and there are the two old guards with the mentality of slaves and there is blind doubt, and a shameful sense of defeat.
And yet it is also true that like a small seed buried somewhere in the mind of man there is courage and a longing for freedom and the imagination to create something new. That seed is buried without exception in each of us and it grows from day to day in our lives as duty as an honor as freedom as virtuous conduct. It is this small seed that makes us fear half-truths and great wars and always saves the future of mankind from blind doubt slavery and defeat. Andha Yug (1953); Translated by Alok Bhalla (2005)
Vassily Grossman (1905-1964): Whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good… whenever we see this dawn, the blood of children and old people is always shed… Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer: Life and Fate, (1960) 2011, p 390-394
Friedrich Nietzsche: The will cannot will backwards… That time does not run backward, that is his wrath; ‘that which was’ is the name of the stone he cannot move. And so he moves stones out of wrath and displeasure, and he wreaks revenge on whatever does not feel wrath and displeasure as he does. Thus the will, the liberator, took to hurting; and on all who can suffer he wreaks revenge for his inability to go backwards. This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will’s ill will against time and its ‘it was.’ “Verily, a great folly dwells in our will; and it has become a curse for everything human that this folly has acquired spirit: Thus Spake Zarathustra; p 139-140
Ten Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats (1977)
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Avay Shukla on the Bilkis Bano case: How much further can we sink as a Nation?
Dilip Simeon – The law of killing: A brief history of Indian fascism
Psychologists of Evil: Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on the Darkness of the Soul
After the truth-shower 