The reports on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction decided that the US invasion of Iraq could start. Today, we know that these weapons were fiction, an image produced to justify the war. Discussing Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war, Cathy Caruth shows that this type of political imagery has a long tradition in the… Read More Lying and history: Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war (2009)
“If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam” – M. L. King “Civil disobedience arises when a significant number of citizens have become convinced either that the normal channels of change no longer function, and grievances will not be heard or acted upon, or that, on the contrary the government… Read More Seyla Benhabib: Breaking Silence, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Luther King
Hannah Arendt’s confrontation with totalitarianism The “total domination of man” was radically evil, in Arendt’s eyes, not only because it was unprecedented but because it did not make sense. She asked: Why should lust for power, which from the beginning of recorded history has been considered the political and social sin par excellence, suddenly transcend… Read More Evil: The Crime against Humanity. Hannah Arendt’s confrontation with totalitarianism
Historians on both sides of the Atlantic are currently engaged in a controversy about the allegedly genocidal nature of western colonialism and its connections with the mass violence unleashed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The debate touches upon some of the most “sensitive” issues of twentieth-century history: the violent “dark side” of modern… Read More Hannah Arendt’s ghosts: Reflections on the disputable path from Windhoek to Auschwitz
Peg Birmingham: A Lying World Order: Political deception and the threat of totalitarianism (Arendt) argues that while the ancient sophists were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, modern sophists want a great deal more, namely, modern sophists want “a lasting victory at the expense of reality itself.” From… Read More A Lying World Order
How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today By Masha Gessen Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several museums examine totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe takes up an entire city block. In a sense, though, these larger structures… Read More In the Shadow of the Holocaust
First posted July 11, 2015 “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is… Read More Hannah Arendt: pariah and 21st-century cosmopolitan
A tribute to Richard Bernstein, 1932-2022 “All academic thinking, whether right, left or middle, is conservative in the extreme,” Arendt had written to him. “Nobody wants to hear what he hasn’t heard before.” Recalling these words, Bernstein leaned toward his laptop camera, growing bigger on our screens. We must all fight off this tendency to… Read More A philosophy professor’s final class
Arendt shows us “how to think the world anew […] how to hold ourselves accountable for our actions, how to think critically without succumbing to ideology,” Hill writes. “Only when we do this, she says, will we be able to love the world.” The peak of her pariahdom came when she covered Adolf Eichmann’s… Read More Book review – The Philosopher’s Trail: On Samantha Rose Hill’s “Hannah Arendt”
After the truth-shower 